First, "thanks a lot!" to David Brahms for finally tackling this important problem, and keeping the R language "major league" ! ;-) :-) {but the "thanks!" is meant seriously!}
>>>>> "Detlef" == Detlef Steuer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> >>>>> on Sun, 8 Jan 2006 12:21:52 +0100 writes: Detlef> Hey, you spoiled my course! :-) Detlef> I planned using this as an excersise. Alternative Detlef> ideas anyone ... Well, you could *add* to it: 1) When I have been thinking about doing this myself (occasionally in the past weeks), I had always thought that finding *ALL* solutions was a very important property of the algorithm I would want to design. (since this is slightly more general and useful than proofing uniqueness which the current algorithm does not yet do anyway). 2) The current sudoku() prints the result itself and returns a matrix; improved, it should return an object of class "sudoku", with a print() and a plot() method; 3) The plot() method should of course also work for unfinished "sudoku" objects, and in fact, the *input* to sudoku() should also be allowed to be a (typically unfinished) "sudoku" object. 4) Then you could have your students use "grid" and grid.locator() for GUI *input* of a sudoku; i.e. you'd have another function which returns a (typically unfinished) "sudoku" object. 5) You could start looking at *solving* the more general sudokus where the blocks are not 3x3 squares anymore, but more general rectangular polygons of 9 squares each. 6) Now you need to refine the GUI from "4)" because your users need to be able to *draw* the block shapes for the generalized sudokus. 7) Given "1)" is solved, the problem of *generating* sudokus, that David already mentioned in his announcement, becomes more relevant: You want to be sure that the sudokus you generate have exactly one solution. And your generating algorithm could start with a very full sudoku (that has exactly 1 solution) and "erases" squares as much as possible, always checking that no other solution becomes possible. You see, there's lot of interesting exercises left for your course. (;-) Martin Detlef> On Fri, 6 Jan 2006 11:43:44 -0500 "Brahm, David" Detlef> <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> Any doubts about R's big-league status should be put to >> rest, now that we have a Sudoku Puzzle Solver. Take >> that, SAS! See package "sudoku" on CRAN. >> >> The package could really use a puzzle generator -- >> contributors are welcome! >> >> -- David Brahm ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) ______________________________________________ R-help@stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide! http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html