Building a Basic, Understandable Sudoku Solver Using Excel Iterative Calculation - Part 2/2

Building a Basic, Understandable Sudoku Solver Using Excel Iterative Calculation - Part 2/2 : EasyCoded

Thu, 02 Oct 2008 09:41:38 GMT

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re: Building a Basic, Understandable Sudoku Solver Using Excel Iterative Calculation - Part 2/2

Phylyp — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 13:55:12 GMT

This is a very nice post - Excel is quite geared towards Sudoku due to its row-column nature (unlike chess where diagonals can get Excel rather tangled!)

re: Building a Basic, Understandable Sudoku Solver Using Excel Iterative Calculation - Part 2/2

Huan — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 12:55:02 GMT

Hi,excel is great..but i wonder how many spreadsheet i can create in one excel file..thx

re: Building a Basic, Understandable Sudoku Solver Using Excel Iterative Calculation - Part 2/2

Charlie Ellis — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 05:02:19 GMT

@ Phylyp - Good point. Checking diagonals would be a pain since nearly all of the functions don't work on discontiguous ranges (which is the only way to do non-rectangular ranges, such as all the cells on a diagonal). I think you'd either be reduced to checking against each cell on a diagonal separately or creating a copy of the entire board that eliminates things not on a diagonal and then doing tests based on that. Both of these approaches has promise, though I think the latter is more workable.

For example, I think you could reasonably easily model the positions on a board in check by a queen at any spot on the board as an array of 1s and 0s. Then you could use this array to see which pieces are in check by multiplying it by the array representing the board.

I think the bigger trick would be representing all of the eventualities and consequences of each move to any depth. That's a problem that doesn't reduce itself to representation as a series of cell-based representations of various aspects of the board (e.g. what pieces are where, what's in check how many times, what is or can check the king, etc.) nearly as well as Sudoku. Sudoku is much more like a state machine, whereas you need basically a stack of machines similar to what we built for Sudoku to represent chess.

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