Mark Byers created a wonderful Shortest Sudoku Solver page, showing shortest Sudoku solvers in many different languages, but the old link seems to be broken now. I remember being amused at the time to notice that several different folks whittled the Perl solution from 188 to 187 to 185 to 184 ... and then along came Ton Hospel and chopped it straight down to around 120! It's sort of deflating when thospel does that to you. :-)

Update: original link courtesy of the Wayback Machine (Aug 2007). The original shortest was based on a version by "Eccles & Toad":

use integer;@A=split//,<>;sub R{for$i(0..80){next if$A[$i];my%t=map{$_
+/9==$i/9||$_%9==$i%9||$_/27==$i/27&&$_%9/3==$i%9/3?$A[$_]:0=>1}0..80;
+R($A[$i]=$_)for grep{!$t{$_}}1..9;return$A[$i]=0}die@A}R
[download]

 * Original Eccles & Toad solution (slightly modified)
 * Mark Byers reduced it to 187 bytes
 * Gordon McCreight reduced it to 186 bytes
 * Pablo Carbonell reduced it to 181 bytes
 * Simon Stroh changed @A=split//,<> to $/=\1;@A=<> to reduce the prog
+ram to 179 bytes
 * Mitsuru Kariya changed @A[map{ ... }]  to map@A[ ... ] to reduce th
+e program to 178 bytes
 * Ton Hospel shortened the program to 121 bytes
[download]

$_=$`.$_.$'.<>;split//;${/[@_[map{$i-($i="@-")%9+$_,9*$_+$i%9,9*$_%26+
+$i-$i%27+$i%9-$i%3}0..8]]/o||do$0}for/0/||print..9
[download]

$_=$`.$_.$'.<>;split//;map{/[@_[map{$i-($i="@-")%9+$_,9*$_+$i%9,9*$_%2
+6+$i-$i%27+$i%9-$i%3}0..8]]/o||do$0}/0/||print..9
[download]

$_=$`.$_.$'.<>;split//;${/[@_[map{$i-($i="@-")%9+$_,9*$_+$i%9,9*$_%26+
+$i-$i%27+$i%9-$i%3}0..8]]/o||do$0}for/0/||print..9
[download]

Dear Monks, I need your help

I don't understand the "split" statement: no return value, apparently no side effect. Reading split was not helpful... :-/

Another thing: this solver works fine on debian but loop on win xp (strawberryperl 5.14.2.1)

UPDATE (solved):Thanks to BrowserUk, tobyink and eyepopslikeamosquito. Very clear and fast answers. FYI, in my case, difference between debian and winxp was in fact, between perl 5.8.8 and 5.14.2.1.

English is not my mother tongue.
Les tongues de ma mère sont "made in France".

Perhaps this explains it:

C:\test>\perl32\bin\perl -wnle"print $]; split; print join '|', @_"
Use of implicit split to @_ is deprecated at -e line 1.
evry good boy deserves food
5.008009
evry|good|boy|deserves|food

C:\test>\perl64\bin\perl -wnle"print $]; split; print join '|', @_"
Use of implicit split to @_ is deprecated at -e line 1.
the quick brown foox
5.010001
the|quick|brown|foox
Terminating on signal SIGINT(2)
Terminating on signal SIGINT(2)

C:\test>perl -wnle"print $]; split; print join '|', @_"
Useless use of split in void context at -e line 1.
evry good boy deserves food
5.016001
[download]

As you can see, in 5.8 and 5.10, split in a void context was deprecated, but it put its results into @_;

Somewhere between 5.10 and 5.16, the deprecation was enforced and that facility was removed. Which mean your golf script no longer works.

---

With the rise and rise of 'Social' network sites: 'Computers are making people easier to use everyday'

Examine what is said, not who speaks -- Silence betokens consent -- Love the truth but pardon error.

"Science is about questioning the status quo. Questioning authority".

In the absence of evidence, opinion is indistinguishable from prejudice.

For Perl up to and including 5.10, calling split in scalar or void context had the side-effect of setting @_. This mis-feature was removed in Perl 5.12. That was great news for most Perl programmers because this side-effect "feature" was unnecessary, an ugly wart. It was sad news for golfers though because side-effects are frequently useful in golf. In fact, I recently experienced a similar split annoyance in Compression in Golf: Part III, as described in the "Fun with split" section in that node.

Simply changing @_ to @z say should fix thospel's original solution at the cost of three strokes:

$_=$`.$_.$'.<>;@z=split//;${/[@z[map{$i-($i="@-")%9+$_,9*$_+$i%9,9*$_%
+26+$i-$i%27+$i%9-$i%3}0..8]]/o||do$0}for/0/||print..9
[download]

I expect you could do better than that, though I haven't tried.

I am pretty sure a sudoku is only considered to be correct if it has one and only one solution.

I'm pretty sure you're mistaken.

Sudoku is a simple constraint resolution problem. The static constraints describe the rules of the game. The dynamic constraints are specified by the initial state of the board.

You seem to be implying that for some initial state (a partially filled board), there'll be only one correct solution (filled board).I'm quite sure that's not the case.

It's surely the case that for some problems where the board is mostly filled, that there is only one correct solution; I'd need to see a damn nifty proof to believe that is the case for all conceivable (and valid) starting states.

-David

If you are given a Sudoku grid to solve (such as in a newspaper or a puzzle book) and there is more than one solution to it, then you've gotten a decidedly inferior offering, some would say an invalid one (as would I).

I'm at a loss as to how you got from "only considered to be correct" to "all possible starting states". And proving that, for example, a standard grid with only a single digit filled in can be "solved" in more than one way is trivial.

But I would disagree with lidden if that was an implied assertion that a program for solving a Sudoku need not be able to deal with such flawed offerings. Indeed, it should probably be able to produce at least two solutions so that you can include them when you write to the source of the puzzle to complain. :)

- tye        

Golf is a game in which players try to put a little ball in a little hole with the fewest attempts to do so (called "strokes").

Perl golf attempts to write a program that achieves some goal in the fewest strokes also—keystrokes. Programmers compete to write the shortest code possible to do the same thing.

Personally, I dislike Perl golf because it perpetuates the notion that Perl is a line noise write-only language.

How about tgolf (or pgolf) for shortest time (t in tgolf for time, silent p in pgolf for performance)?