web app which solves any sudoku problem in ms
My coding bootcamp class was issued a challenge after we had been programming in JavaScript for a few months. "Can any of you design and program a web application which can solve a sudoku puzzle?" We were told that MIT students are given 72 hours to accomplish this task. I completed mine in 3 days - we were given about 6 hours of computer time a day in my coding bootcamp, and we had no internet access to look anything up. By the middle of my 3rd class I had it completed and was doing tests using puzzles that I had collected from the newspaper. It is really a fairly simple backtracking algorithm that uses brute force process of elimination to find the correct answer to the puzzle. I'm sure it's far from the most efficient sudoku solver, but I had been programming for only a few months, and I turned it in within the 3 days and got excellent feedback. My teacher looked up the hardest sudoku puzzle out there for a brute force algorithm to solve, and brought it to me to see how long it took my program to solve it. I have included several easily clickable puzzles to test the app - including the most difficult brute force puzzle out there gathered from the wiki page on sudoku solvers. You can also manually input any sudoku puzzle, hit solve, and it will solve it. I also programmed it to let the user know how long it took, and exactly how many function calls it took to solve that particular puzzle - interesting data to see. Enjoy!