After the success of last year's family chess completion Michael Howlett challenged the family to solve killer sudoku problems quickly.
We all tried to solve a set of killer sudoku problems. We agreed the winner would be the person who solved a test selection of problems fastest. If we didn't manage solve all the test problems then the winner would be the person who solved the greatest number of them.
- We didn't look at the existing literature or code for solving sudoku/killer sudoku problems. We believe it is more interesting to figure out everything from scratch.
- We didn't spy on each others techniques or code.
- All solutions were to be written in python.
- We agreed not to specialise our solutions to the problems provided.
- We agreed to count the winner as the person with the fastest solver at midnight on Christmas Eve.
On Christmas Eve both Micheal and Robert both conceded victory as my solver was the fastest for both of the problems that were available at the time.
A few weeks I increased the number of problems from 2 to 48 and re-ran the competition. I maintained the fastest solver for easy problems but Robert's solver was on average faster at difficult problems. My solver made lucky guesses with the one hard problem available at the time of the competition.