IT Milk: entry

I have been ailing over the Round 2 programming problem for the past week. You have to program a sudoku solving program for this round. You can read more about it here, but this sudoku puzzle is a 4 x 4 grid with characters {A, B, C, D} that must have unique characters in each row, column, and subsquare (2 x 2).

I wish that I was a programmer by heart like some naturally talented individuals like Steve. I can’t pull a complex algorithm out of my ass in a matter of a few minutes like he can, unfortunately. I know that I am wasting time by brooding because talent can be achieved by hours and hours of practice. And this is not an overnight matter like I’m trying to make it to be.

Programmatically solving a sudoku puzzle “is not trivial,” a phrase that my Bulgarian CS professor, Dr. Pavel Azalov, likes to use all the time. Your program has to deduce the solution for each square (by process of elimination) based on the other squares in the corresponding row, column and subsquare. That’s a lot of arrays and loops for you, which I have only a slight idea how to handle.

In an act of defeat, I created a 4 x 4 sudoku solution checker instead, created in Flash using Actionscript. This will not be submitted to the competition, of course, but I just wanted to do something for my own edification. The complexity of my program is nothing compared to the desired result.