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The Sudoku Affair
In 2006, Ron Jeffries wrote a series of posts describing his attempts to build a Sudoku solver. He began by wrapping a class around a simple datatype for the...
What I experience is that I am never doing anything directed to macro design or architecture: just making small changes, removing duplication, improving the expressiveness of little patches of code. The bookkeeping for constraint propagation might push him towards Norvig's relational approach to the rules of Sudoku; rather than continually recomputing the rows, columns, and boxes, he could simply have a map of each cell onto its peers. He disables the slow test, and begins to look at search heuristics, under the theory that "moving towards more human approaches" might offset the performance loss.
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