Dial "S" for Sudoku

[greg-kennedy]

Dial "S" for Sudoku

Read the novel here.

View the code here.

This is a novel about Alice solving Sudoku puzzles. Alice sits at the kitchen table, methodically working her way through a series of puzzles of increasing difficulty. She takes frequent breaks to daydream and reminisce. In between puzzles, there are excerpts from her dream diary - because 50,000 words of Sudoku solving is just plain monotonous.

Preview

[greg-kennedy]

If you're interested in the details of the Sudoku solving, I encourage you to check out the code repo. README.md gives a brief overview of the solution process, as well as a couple of links to websites that go into much more (and better) detail than I did. There's also a standalone version of the solver without any of the text or image generation.

Amazingly, on modern hardware, it's actually possible to brute-force solve a Sudoku puzzle in "reasonable" time. But that would have made for a very boring novel.

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This was a fun diversion from my other entry for this year, but I ran into trouble because the word count ended up being agonizingly low. Hence, the templated Corpora dreams (and still not enough). The last puzzle was added to basically double the novel size when I ran out of ideas and motivation. Since I don't expect anyone to actually read the whole thing, the puzzles and dreams are ordered by increasing length / complexity. That way, readers can get the basic idea before skipping to the surprise ending.

Admittedly, the other reason I wanted to do this one is that I feel after five years we need some mascots / recurring characters. So, Alice gets her own book : )

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While the "annoyingly verbose CompSci 101 Algorithm" genre is entertaining, I feel I've done enough damage with my two novels this year, and probably won't revisit it in the future. I do look forward to others making attempts in this field, and eagerly await the rest of the series:

• Alice Inefficiently Sorts a Series of Random Numbers
• Hannah and the Halting Problem, and of course
• Death of a Travelling Salesman.

[superMDguy]

This is great! I love the graphics.