Solving Sudoku With dpkg

Reader Otter points out in his journal a very neat use for the logic contained in Debian's package dependency resolver: solving sudoku puzzles. To me at least, this is much more interesting than the sudoku puzzles themselves. Update: 08/24 02:51 GMT by T : Hackaday just ran a story that might tickle the same parts of your brain on a game played entirely with MySQL database queries.

Uh-oh

[Yvan256]

1. Computers can generate Sudokus
2. Computers can solve Sudokus
3. Skynet determines that humans are useless. It then creates what is called "virtual worlds" in a campaign to exterminate the global human population birth rate.

Re:Cheat code for even Sudoku??

[pizzach]

Because cheats impress babes. left-right-left-right-a-b-start! left-right-left-right-a-b-start! I think I feel tingley.

Re:Cheat code for even Sudoku??

[Anonymous Coward]

Because cheats impress babes. left-right-left-right-a-b-start! left-right-left-right-a-b-start! I think I feel tingley.

Please hand in your geek card immediately.

Re:Cheat code for even Sudoku??

[Anonymous Coward]

I just feel sorry for geeks living in Soviet Russia. I've heard horror stories that suggest that over there, the geek cards hand in the geeks. Can you imagine the betrayal of your geek card giving you up like that?

Re:Cheat code for even Sudoku??

[Anonymous Coward]

Bah, thats only for two player... Most /.ers play with themselves!

Proof Positive

[fabs64]

Let's seem yum do THAT!

I kid I kid.

Re:Cheat code for even Sudoku??

[hedwards]

Hey now, there's a reason why they're called "joysticks."

Make

[michaelmalak]

Probably also could be done using Make, which is really an expert system in disguise. Ant-heads won't know what I'm talking about. (Mod to +5 Flamebait.)

Re:Proof Positive

[mabinogi]

It probably could, but you'd have to wait ten times longer than it took to solve the problem for it to download all the headers first.

Re:Dpkg in NP hard?!

[Anonymous Coward]

Well.. yeah, but luckily it appears that aptitude can solve NP-hard problems in reasonble time. The downside is that all our crypto will be useless once NSA finds this out.

Re:Cheat code for even Sudoku??

[Bozzio]

WRONG!

You inverted the A and B.

Yes! That's another geek card today. Only 2 more until my geek upgrade.

Re:Cheat code for even Sudoku??

[Anonymous Coward]

Damn PKers.