As I mentioned earlier, FD.distinct does such an efficient job with Sudoku that it seems like a waste of time to program special-purpose Sudoku deduction rules. By deduction rules, I mean rules like the one that tells you that the cell between the 7 and 6 on the third row must contain a 2. (This is from
http://www.paulspages.co.uk/sudoku/howtosolve/index.htm.)
But let's assume one wanted to program such rules anyway. It seems to me that it would be much more tedious a task than it should be.
Oz is supposed to provide the best of logic programming and functional programming. With all that power, it should be easy to express simple rules like this. But it seems to me that it would take an awful lot of infrastructure work to build up enough mechanism to make expressing such rules straightforward. Does anyone know of an easy way to write such rules?
One problem is that the board itself is expressed as a list of lists, which is inconvenient. One could write accessor methods that allowed one to address it as an array. But we don't have a library of array accessors, especially accessors that talk about particular array rows, columns, and 3x3 sub-blocks. One could write those also--as we did for the basic Sudoku solution. But even then, writing rules would be tedious.
Does anyone see a simple way of writing the easy deduction (propagator) rule above, even if one expressed such a rule in terms of references to rows, columns, and sub-blocks?
-- Russ
P.S. By the way, I generalized my version of the Sudoku solver (http://cs.calstatela.edu/~wiki/index.php/Courses/CS_460/Fall_2005/Simplified_Sudoku_Solver
) so that it uses (at the user's option) FD, thread bombs, or *very* naive search within the same basic structure. When I ran it on the example, FD took < 1 ms; thread bombs took 1.2 minutes; and I didn't have the nerve to run the very naive search.
_________________________________________________________________________________ mozart-users mailing list [email protected] http://www.mozart-oz.org/mailman/listinfo/mozart-users
