Sudoku

[Doctor Q]

So, Doctor Q, are you still batting 1.000 on the Los Angeles Times puzzles?

No, I decided to switch to Sudoku puzzle books and electronic versions because our sprinklers kept ruining the printed newspaper! I get the feeling printed newspapers are going the way of the dinosaur anyway.

Have you read the paper yet? I can't find it on ams.org

It does not seem to be online, but a better article was this one from 2007: Sudoku Squares and Chromatic Polynomials. It discusses the number of possible Sudoku puzzles and relates Sudoku-solving to graph-coloring, while reporting what's known about the necessary and sufficient conditions for unique solutions.

Despite the interesting mathematics behind Sudoku analysis, it can also be argued that they are logic puzzles, not math puzzles, since you can use colored marbles or alphabet letters or any other 9 unique symbols instead of the digits 1 through 9.

 

[WildCowboy]

Have you read the paper yet? I can't find it on ams.org

Here's the PDF.

 

[IJ Reilly]

No, I decided to switch to Sudoku puzzle books and electronic versions because our sprinklers kept ruining the printed newspaper! I get the feeling printed newspapers are going the way of the dinosaur anyway.

Those numbskulls who deliver the newspapers certainly ought to go the way of the dinosaur. I'm constantly fishing our copies of the Times out of the shrubbery, and the other day the paper was delivered, unencumbered by a plastic bag of any sort, in an actual rainstorm which was taking place at the actual time of actual delivery. I suppose the delivery people don't read newspapers, so they think it shouldn't matter to us either if the newspaper is a mass of pulpy mush that has to be scraped off the driveway.