Sudoku tips: How to solve Sudoku: The mathematics of Su Doku http://theory.tifr.res.in/~sgupta/sudoku/algo.

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Su Doku Su Doku Navigation

Su Doku is usually played on a Home Meanings of all phrases Tips: how to solve a Su Doku Sub Dokus: Two Doku, Shi Doku, Roku
Doku Super Doku Prime Su Doku includes Go Doku. Related puzzles Challenges Known results
9 by 9 board, divided into 3 by
3 cells. You can generalize this See also
into playing on an M×M square
board broken into Angus Johnson's Tips SuDokuHints.com Depth-first search Constraint programming and its Su Doku
application. P versus NP problems Backdoors in NP problems
non-overlapping rectangular
cells, each containing M IN THIS PAGE: GUIDES, TIPS AND TRICKS, METHODS AND MADNESS.
squares (an obvious question
is to how define a puzzle
where M is a prime number).
How to solve Su Doku: tips
The solution of the puzzle is to
place M symbols on the board The mathematics of Su Doku
such that each row, column or
cell contains each symbol
exactly once, without moving
the initial clues. Puzzles with Guides
M<9 are called Sub Dokus,
those for M>9 are called Super 1. Roger Walker's tips were the first set I ever found. They take you from
Dokus. nothing into formal reasoning methods with colourful names like "three in a
bed" at your own pace. What I liked best about this site are the animated
Technorati tag: Su Doku tutorials.
2. Michael Mepham's article from the Daily Telegraph is by now somewhat of
Related topic: Kakuro a classic. It is a very well-written systematic explanation of the basic
techniques for solving Su Doku. It introduced the nomenclature "Ariadne's
Digg this thread".
3. Angus Johnson's Simple Sudoku web site has a very fine page of Su Doku
Add to del.icio.us tips, starting with the most basic element: find the singletons, and
progressing to complicated and bizarrely named rules of Su Doku logic like
Thanks to the following people
the "Swordfish".
who pointed out errors and
4. Dan Rice's Sudoku Blog also does a good job of explaining the rules of
generally helped me keep this
inference, one per blog. Since it is a blog, it takes each rule by itself and
page of tips in tip-top shape:
spends time explaining it. It contains some of the best explanations I have
Larry (LA, CA, USA), Justin
seen of the more complex rules.
Pearson, Tom Schoenemann
5. SuDokuHints has a nice tool: it can give hints on a puzzle, solve one step
(Michigan, USA), Mike Fleming
while telling you how it was done, or solve the full puzzle and explain each
(New Ipswich, New Hampshire,
step. You can play games that it generates, or type your own puzzle into it.
USA), Mike Godfrey
(Manchester, UK), G B (whose
name I wish I knew). My own two bits: a fiendish tutorial

Whyneedanother tutorial? Because you don't really

to know many tricks. I show this using a
relatively hard puzzle by Wayne Gould, who creates
puzzles for "The Times" of London. These are rated
in difficulty from mild (the simplest) to fiendish (the
one on the left). Gould claims that none of his
puzzles ever need trial and error solutions. If you
follow this example through you will find that you
never really need very complicated tricks either.
Another way of solving this very puzzle is given by
Roger Walker in one of his tutorials. Our methods
differ: I try to illustrate some often-used tricks in this example.

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"When you have eliminated the impossible

whatever remains, however improbable, is the
truth", said Sherlock Holmes. This is the principle by
which we put the 3 in the top row. 1, 2 and 7 are
eliminated by the clues in the row; 4, 5, 6 and 9 by
those in the column, and 8 by the cell. This leaves
the truth. I don't see it as very improbable; but one
must give the master some poetic license. This rule
may or may not be useful to begin things off, but it is
indispensible in the end game (especially when it is
coupled with the hidden loner rule of Step 8).

Step 2: Basic "slice and dice"

Let's see how to place a 4 in the bottom right cell.

The blue lines show that it must go right into the
bottom-most row, because the other two rows
already have a 4 in them. These are the slices. Now
one of the three squares in the bottom row of the cell
already has a clue in it. The other square is
eliminated by dicing. The green line shows that the
middle column is ruled out, because it already
contains a 4 in another cell. So we have finished the
second move in a fiendish puzzle and found out what
slicing and dicing is.

Step 3: Applied "slice and dice"

Wemore
can place two
4s, shown
in black in the picture
on the left. This
requires slice and dice
exactly as before.
Another example: we
can place a 1 by slice
and dice as shown in
the picture on the
right.

Step 4: Simple "hidden pairs"

Angus Johnson has this to say about hidden pairs:

"If two squares in a group contain an identical pair
of candidates and no other squares in that group
contain those two candidates, then other candidates
in those two squares can be excluded safely." In the
example on the right, a 2 and a 3 cannot appear in
the last column. So, in the middle rightmost cell these
two numbers can only appear in the two positions
where they are "pencilled in" in small blue font. Since
these two numbers have to be in these two squares,
no other numbers can appear there.

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Step 5: "Locked candidates"

A ngus Johnson again: "Sometimes a candidate within a cell is restricted to one

row or column. Since one of these squares must contain that specific candidate, the
candidate can safely be excluded from the remaining squares in that row or column
outside of the cell." Since the hidden pair 2 and 3 prevent anything else from
apearing in the first two columns of the middle rightmost cell, an 8 can only appear
in the last column. Now we apply the locked candidates rule.

We8 want to place an

in the bottom
right cell. The last
column can be sliced
out by the locked
candidate rule. Other
slicing and dicing is
normal, leading to the
placement of the 8 as
shown.

Step 6: Bootstrap by extending the logic of "locked candidates"

T o get to the first step of the bootstrap from the last picture shown above, we
need to slice and dice to place an 8 in the center bottom cell. You must be an expert
at this method by now, so I leave that in your capable hands.

Thethefirst element of
bootstrap is to
place 8s in the middle
row of cells. The
picture on the left
shows where the 8s
must be placed in the
middle left cell. The
picture on the right
shows the placement
in the central cell.

Next we extend the logic of the locked candidates.

The 5th and 6th rows must each have an 8: one
of them has it in the middle left cell, and the other in
the central cell. Therefore the 8 in the middle right
cell cannot be in either of these rows. From what we
knew before, the 8 must be in the top right corner
square of the cell, as shown in the picture on the
right. This is almost magical. Putting together
imprecise information in three different cells, we have
reached precise information in one of the cells.

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Andthenow the final step of the bootstrap is shown in

picture on the left. The placement of the 8
dictates that the 6 must be just below it, and therefore
the 7 in the remaining square. The diabolical magic is
complete: reason enough for this to be classified as a
fiendish puzzle. One of Roger Walker's tutorials is a
solution of precisely this puzzle, by a different route.
But before going there, I invite you to try your hand at
completing the solution which we have started upon
here.

Step 7: The beginning of the end

Thegame.
worst is over. We are now truly into the end
First complete cell C entirely by the "loner"
trick: filling 6, 5, 3 and 7 in that order. Next complete
the cell F. Then finish the 7th column, place the 5 in
the cell D, and complete that row, in order to get the
picture on the left. We are more than half done. From
now on common sense prevails: fill things in one by
one. Don't panic, there are no sharks circling the
boat. No swordfish either.

Step 8: "Hidden loner": almost not worth naming

Thealthough
last rule, I promise. And it is hardly one,
you could call it the "hidden loner" rule.
The only reason one should give it a name is that it
fixes this very useful method in one's mind. So here
is the example: In the 6th row there's more than one
choice in each square. However there is only one
place where the 5 can go (it is excluded from the
squares with X's in them). So there is a loner hidden
in this row: hence the name. I stop here, but you can
go on to solve a fiendish puzzle by the simplest tricks
exclusively.

Not so fiendish?

Mike Godfrey wrote to me to point out a much

simpler way of solving this particular puzzle. After
step 3, as before, one can fill in the 6 shown in blue
in the figure here, by noting that all other numbers
can be eliminated by requiring that they do not
appear in the same row, column or block. After this
the remaining puzzle can be solved by spotting
singles.

Mike writes that this puzzle "is not too fiendish

perhaps". Perhaps. But that opens up the
question of how to rate puzzles. I haven't found much
discussion of this aspect of the mathematics of Su Doku: partly because
commercial Su Doku generators (by that I mean the humans behind the programs)
are not exactly forthcoming about their methods, but also because the problem is

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not terribly well-defined. This is a wide open field of investigation.

From tricks to methods: the roots of mathematics

Constraint programming

Theclues)
minimum Su Doku shown alongside (only 17
requires only two tricks to solve: identifying
hidden loners and simple instances of locked
candidates. The key is to apply them over and over
again: to each cell, row and column. The application
of constraints repeatedly in order to reduce the space
of possibilities is called constraint programming in
computer science. "Pencilling in" all possible values
allowed in a square, and then keeping the pencil
marks updated is part of constraint programming.
This point has been made by many people, and
explored systematically by Helmut Simonis.

Non-polynomial state space

This is where much of the counting appears. Before clues are entered into a M×M
M2
Su Doku puzzle, and the constraints are applied, there are M states of the
grid. This is larger than any fixed power of M (this is said to be faster than any
polynomial in M). If depth-first enumeration were the only way of counting the
number of possible Su Dokus, then this would imply that counting Su Doku is a hard
problem. Application of constraints without clues is the counting problem of Su
Doku. As clues are put in, and the constraints applied, the number of possible
states reduces. The minimum problem is to find the minimum number of clues
which reduces the allowed states to one. The maximum problem is analogous.

M any known hard problems are of a type called nondeterministic-polynomial. In

this class, called NP, generating a solution of a problem of size M takes longer than
any fixed power of M, but given a solution, it takes only time of order some fixed
power of M to check it (ie, a polynomial in M). If enumeration were the only way of
counting the number of Su Doku solutions, then this would be harder than NP. If
someone tells me that the number of Su Doku solutions is
6670903752021072936960, I have no way to check this other than by counting,
which I know to takes time larger than polynomial in M. At present there is no
indication that the counting problem of Su Doku is as easy as NP.

Trial-and-error: is Su Doku an NP complete problem?

T he Su Doku problem is to check whether there is an unique solution to a given

puzzle: the yes/no answer would usually, but not necessarily, produce the filling of
the grid which we call a solution. It would be in NP if the time an algorithm takes to
solve the M×M Su Doku problem grows faster than any fixed power of M. It is not
known whether the Su Doku problem is in NP.

Onejustsure fire way of solving any Su Doku puzzle is to forget all these tricks and
blindly do a trial-and-error search, called a depth-first search in computer
science. When programmed, even pretty sloppily, this can give a solution in a
couple of seconds. If we use this method on M×M Super Doku, then the expected

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r
un time of this program on the trickiest puzzles (called worst-case in computer
science) would grow faster than any fixed power of M, but (of course) it is
guaranteed to solve the puzzle. If trial-and-error were the only algorithm to solve
any Su Doku puzzle whatsoever, and one were able to show that the state space of
a puzzle grows faster than a fixed power of M, then this would prove that Su Doku is
an NP problem.

H elmut Simonis has results which might indicate that trial-and-error is never
needed, and a small bag of tricks with hyper arc consistency always answers the
Su Doku question. However, one needs to ask how many times the consistency
check has to be applied to solve the worst-case problem, and how fast this grows
with M, in order to decide whether constraint programming simplifies the solution.

The controversy over trial-and-error

From this formal point of view, one can see the debate raging currently on Michael
Mepham's web site and other discussion boards on Su Doku as an argument
between the search enthusiasts and the constraint programming wallahs: with
Mepham slowly giving ground in his defence of search. But does the debate just
boil down to choosing which algorithm to use? Yes, if the Su Doku problem is easy
(ie, in P) and constraint programming solves it faster. However, if Su Doku is hard,
then there is a little more to it.

Backdoors: defining "satisfactory puzzles"

Inbemany instances of NP complete problems, the average run time of programs can
substantially less than the worst-case. Gomes and Selman conjecture that this
is due to the existence of "backdoors", ie, small sets of tricks which solve these
average problems. Here human intuition (called heuristics in computer science) can
help to identify the backdoors and often crack the nut faster than the sledge
hammer of systematic algorithms. These I call "satisfactory puzzles". One of the
open problems for Su Doku is to define precisely the nature of such backdoors, and
the classes of problems which contain them.

Zen and the art of gardening

W e have introduced elsewhere a method of counting Su Dokus by a depth first

enumeration of trees (called the garden of forking paths). It is clear that some of the
branches of these trees are much longer than the average. As M grows, this
imbalance also grows (polynomially, or faster?). This is one way of visualizing the
difference between the average case (satisfactory puzzles) and the worst case
(diabolical puzzles). My challenge is a gardening problem: how do you make the
trees come out balanced and symmetric? It is like a Zen puzzle: if you solve it, then
you reduce human intuition (heuristics) to an algorithm; even if it is impossible you
gain insight by contemplating the problem.

© Sourendu Gupta. Mail me if you want to reproduce any part of this page. My
mailing address is a simple (satisfactory) puzzle for you to solve. Created on 13
October, 2005. Last modified on 19 June, 2006.

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