SYNTOLOGY HomeExplorerAtlasCodeMethodologyAboutDevelopersFeedPricing
Paper · 1201.0749 · 2012

There is no 16-Clue Sudoku: Solving the Sudoku Minimum Number of Clues Problem

arXiv · PDF · Open in the Atlas

Code that ran

We have not lifted any functions out of this paper's repositories yet, so there is nothing we have run. If it links a repository, it is listed below.

Repositories linked to this paper

Some links come from the archived Papers with Code dataset (CC BY-SA 4.0): attribution and licence.

Abstract

The sudoku minimum number of clues problem is the following question: what is the smallest number of clues that a sudoku puzzle can have? For several years it had been conjectured that the answer is 17. We have performed an exhaustive computer search for 16-clue sudoku puzzles, and did not find any, thus proving that the answer is indeed 17. In this article we describe our method and the actual search. As a part of this project we developed a novel way for enumerating hitting sets. The hitting set problem is computationally hard; it is one of Karp's 21 classic NP-complete problems. A standard backtracking algorithm for finding hitting sets would not be fast enough to search for a 16-clue sudoku puzzle exhaustively, even at today's supercomputer speeds. To make an exhaustive search possible, we designed an algorithm that allowed us to efficiently enumerate hitting sets of a suitable size.

For agents

The same record, over MCP at https://syntology.ai/mcp:

get_harvested_code_for_paper("1201.0749")
get_code_for_paper("1201.0749")
have("1201.0749")

Connect an agent — have() is free.