******************************************************************************** README ******************************************************************************** The web surely already has a hundred sudoku apps...does it really need another? Well, I was sitting in my house one evening, toying with a book of "Sudoku" puzzles my son had bought me for Christmas, and I thought I'd skip to the chase and try the very hardest puzzle in the back of the book. (Specifically, the "hard.txt" board included in this distribution.) After applying every rule of logic and intuition I could think of, I couldn't get the board past the half-way point. I've solved a lot of "hard" level puzzles entirely by logic, but this was the first one where I decided you simply needed to brute-force (i.e., "guess") your way through the final permutations. And I simply haven't the patience or interest to do that by hand; the joy in such games is solving them with logic, and simply running through a tedious set of combinatorials...well, that's a job for servants. Mathy servants. Computers :-) So why not just download one of the many Sudoku solvers already on the web? Well, two reasons: (1) That's cheating. If I do the work myself, I can still claim to have defeated the puzzle. (2) We don't have broadband at our home yet, but I did have GCC... Posted in case any Comp-Sci students out there are "puzzling" through recursion and need a refresher in basic game theory. Oh, and as to optimizations: heck yeah, this could be made faster. However, what makes these games fun is doing those logic tricks in your head; this program was intended for use ONLY when brute-force was the only option left...and this works just fine for that. Mark Zieg Berkshire, UK