Sudoku Solver

The Mrs. is a Sudoku solving machine.  Me, not so much.  I don’t think I’ve ever gotten one right.  I aways screw up something with fatal results.  Out of desperation, I wrote a tcl/tk program to help.

This little toy program was really just a learning exercise.  I’d never done anything with a GUI before, so this was a good opportunity to give it a try.  Tcl/tk was an obvious choice, and the nice folks over at the comp.lang.tcl newsgroup were very helpful.

The solving algorithms were just ones pulled out of my … head.  There are probably more that could be added.  Just for fun, it will display in either arabic numerals (1,2,3) or kanji (四,五,六).  It isn’t a puzzle generator, just a solving tool.

For the curious/brave, here are the links to a windows executable, tcl text, ascii text, and a (rather ugly) OS x version.

NOTE: Christian Werner, the author of Androwish, helped me get this running on Android machines.  He also spotted a typo: in the source linked above I use a font I called “courrier” – which doesn’t exist 🙁  It doesn’t throw an error but causes things to look pretty strange on some platforms.  The font is – of course – courier.  I haven’t corrected the code in the links above.

It will look something like this (except on OS X where the native buttons are fugly):