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. (more…)