dev|sushi

I was reading Reddit today and came across an interesting article titled Solving Every Sudoku Puzzle. My girlfriend and I enjoy doing Sudoku quite a bit, so an article about solving them obviously caught my eye. I clicked through and arrived at what appeared to be an essay written by Peter Norvig who is (was?) an artificial intelligence (AI) researcher and now works at Google. If you’ve ever taken an AI course in school you’ve probably heard his name before. Norvig’s algorithmic genius is apparent by his simple attack of this potentially expensive problem. The elegance of his solution speaks to his years of programming experience and inherited wisdom.

To break my hiatus here at dev|sushi I decided to publish something I made for myself while working on a project for my freelance business. The form I am creating requires a country selection box and then later to display country names within the application. Instead of doing a god awful static select box on the form and then storing the full country name in the database, I decided to use the MySQL table approach. Simple and effective and allows you to use a nice space saving char(2) over a varchar(150) in your other tables.