Computational nanoscientist Surendra Jain has written solvers for Sudoku,
Killer Sudoku, Samurai Sudoku, Calcudoku, Kakuro and many other
logic problems.
All are elegantly coded and very fast: for example,
the "World's Hardest Sudoku" is solved in 0.05 seconds (on a 5 year
old PC) and his Knight's Tour solver is an order of magnitude faster
than this one.
The page (called "Classical Geek") has all source (in Fortran 90,
one of the most popular languages in high-performance computing)
as well as compilation and running instructions.
(Score: 2) by mrider on Wednesday July 02 2014, @09:22PM
After reading your post, it seems we are agreeing even though we appear to disagree. True "brute force" is dumb. What I called "there's always a certain amount of brute force involved", you called "what if". Same basic point. The point being that there are times where it's not possible to find a cell that has precisely one answer. However, it's always possible to find a cell that has a reduced number of answers (unless the puzzle is totally blank and you on the first cell...). It would be dumb to ignore those cells, and it would also be dumb to try numbers that can't possibly work in those cells.
Doctor: "Do you hear voices?"
Me: "Only when my bluetooth is charged."