A Comprehensive Sudoku Instance Generator

Abstract

Sudoku puzzles have become popular worldwide among many players of different intellectual levels. In this paper, we develop algorithms for creating numerous Sudoku instances of varying levels of difficulty. There are several ways to generate a Sudoku instance. The most popular one is to consider one solved Sudoku puzzle and remove some of the numbers from the cells based on the required difficulty level. Although all Sudoku puzzle creators assume that there is a single solution for a generated puzzle, we notice that a Sudoku puzzle may have multiple solutions. None of the instance generation techniques are able to find how many different solutions are present for a generated Sudoku instance. Here in this paper, we have devised one novel approach that can generate a Sudoku instance and check for its number of possible solutions, and then based on the number of solutions we further categorize the instance that has been generated. This approach is entirely novel and comprehensive for generating Sudoku instances.