What is Sudoku:

Sudoku is a Japanese logic puzzle.  Translated directly it means "every digit must only appear once. Sudoku usually uses a 9 by 9 grid but it can vary in size. The nine by nine grid is divided into nine 3 by 3 grids. The goal of sudoku is to fill the grid with the numbers 1 through 9, however the a number can not be repeated in the same row, column, or three by three grids. Sudoku puzzles come in varying difficulties ranging from easy to evil. Although numbers are usually used they can be substituted with any set of nine things. Fore example ESPN created a sudoku in which they used the nine positions in baseball instead of the numbers.

How to play

  In a sudoku puzzles some of the numbers are given to you and your job is to figure out the rest. The usual method is a system of finding the only place a number can go in a particular 3x3 region, column, or row.  For example if you look at the middle-Right  3x3 region. It can be deduced that the 8 goes into the bottom-left square of this 3x3 region because the top rows of this 3x3 region already have an 8 in them and the middle column Also has an eight in it.

What I am doing on this website

 I, personally am very bad at sudoku but am good programming. So I decided to write a program that could solve sudoku.  This one uses pure logic and is based on the way humans solve sudoku. However, when I used this on some of the harder sudoku puzzles I found that many of the sudoku problems simply cannot be solved by pure logic. This made me mad so I decided to write a sudoku solver that worked on brute force. I can go into greater detail on the algorithms of these programs in there pages. If someone else feels like me and decides to cheat on the sudoku he can just use these websites. Please realize that anyone who is using these programs is not addicted to sudoku because using these applets sucks the fun out of solving a sudoku puzzle.

    Also I am a beginner java programmer so neither of the two applets are designed to handle the affects of a malicious user who decides he will not put numbers in the applets. So if you decide to put garbage into the applets you will not get a simple error message but rather garbage output.

Put you mouse over the sudoku example to see its solution.

Click here to go to a good sudoku generator.