The art of simplicity is a puzzle of complexity. (Douglas Horton)

No puzzle looks simpler than a Sudoku.  But behind the very few rules of this game hides enormous complexity.  It’s now proved that there are 6670903752021072936960 different grids for a standard 9×9 Sudoku.  More refinements and subtleties taking symmetries into account have been examined as well as other variants of Sudoku.  Solving strategies have been studied inside out, enumerated and refined.  Sudoku grids and Latin squares have kept mathematicians busy for a long time and lots of hidden patterns and complex concepts still remain to be discovered.  This little game is a treasure island for mathematicians and developers : we only need to dig deep enough and long enough…

This …

I am preparing a series of posts related to Sudoku. I am revisiting the “SQL only” solution I posted somewhere else a long time ago…  This time, we’ll get serious and optimize everything we can!  This lemon will be squeezed to the maximum!

Start your Pharo image (not mandatory since I will provide all necessary SQL scripts) and MySQL server as we’ll try to solve some Sudoku puzzles only with one SQL statement (no stored procedures or functions)!

Part 1 coming soon!