For a about three weeks, although only about 7 days work, I’ve been writing a small ncurses based sudoku solver. The aim being rather obvious but the reasons more detailed. I’ve not written anything in C with any true aim in mind for almost 7 years and not on a commercial basis for a decade (although this is not commercial). The last program I wrote that worked as a Tsunami puzzle solver. It populated 100 or so solutions randomly, scored them for efficiency against the criteria and bred (crossover, random mutation) the highest scorers to make another 100 until one scored 100%. The code is now lost somewhere on a random server. The main file was matrix.c++ which shows how long ago it was.
Anyway, back on topic, things are coming along nicely. I have one algorithm almost working which is a very human approach. The next to implement is a recursive backtracking algorithm and more fanciful things from there such as the sort of genetic approach mentioned above. However to test the code I’ve been typing in the puzzles so now I am implementing a simple save and load feature. It had to be in there anyway according to the System Requirements document I wrote for it.