Sudoku

While browsing through the newspaper some time ago I found myself staring at a sudoku puzzle. This was obviously not the first time I saw it.

I've seen young minds wasting their valuable time solving this. I've seen old minds spending their anyway worthless time trying to solve this. Several lectures have suffered a cold death of ignorance and it has all been its fault. Countless office hours and tea breaks have been consumed mercilessly at its expense.

(No offense to old people but this is how it is)

(Many people redraw it on a large paper to ease the solution)

Anyway, I was never impressed with what seems to be the ultimate king of fads.

But today, at home on a weekend far from exams, I WAS the ultimate king of idle people. So I decided to do what I had once decided I'd never do. I attempted my first ever Sudoku.

HT City gave that Sudoku 5 stars. I think that's the toughest one.

So I started.
I realised it wasn't bad at killing time, and I was making fair progress so wasn't even boring, when about 30 minutes into it I landed on a contradiction. Freakin GAME OVER.

That was it for my Sudoku adventures.

Disgusted, I threw away the newspaper and went to the television where the ever exciting Boogie Woogie version 2, now with added attractions like Prabhudeva and thankfully a new set was on. (I forgot the name of the new show, but both Behl and Naved are still there. No Kadambari though.)

I couldn't get my mind off that game and soon it started getting on my nerves so bad I decided to find out what my mistake had been. Of course I was never gonna try to solve it again so I decided to program its solution.

A couple of hours hence I had with me a sudoku solver - a deterministic program that repeatedly eliminated possibilities and looked for possibilities and all that shit to solve a sudoku problem.

I quickly fed in a sample problem from the net and within a second it was done. Bliss.

I fed in the newspaper problem and my program COULD NOT solve it and stopped at an incomplete setting. As it turned out, the tough problems require you to make choices at several stages which may or may not be right. Fortunately the program allowed setting of values within its solving process so I made the choices for it.

So I finally ended up with the solution and located my mistake. I feel satisfied and my belief has now been confirmed: Sudoku is such a waste of time.

Good night.