Su-Do-Ku

I know that the idea for making a website that prints sudoku puzzles is far from original. Still the fact that I managed to make one is no small accomplishment. I first got the idea to make a sudoku printer when I was in the local bookstore buying a puzzle book. I recently found myself needing to board an airplane. Not at all looking foreward the punishment that was about to ensue, I decided a bit of mental distraction was in order. Somewhere along the trip I decided that I was going to give making a sudoku site a shot. After several weeks of nights and weekends spent writing code and editing images we have a fully functional concept. I don't think it turned out too bad. There are several people I need to thank. If it were not for them this website could never have been done.

• Gordon Royle. » visit site
• The University of Western Australia. » visit site
• Bill DuPree. » visit site
• Damn Small Linux (DSL) » visit site
• Free Css Templates. » visit site

You can't very well have a sudoku website without puzzles. I'm not the type to steal someone else's copywrighted puzzles, so I started looking for a good resource. A quick search revealed that there are tons of sudoku puzzle generators out there. However I also didn't want to have a list of mediocre puzzles that were all super easy. The problem with puzzle generators is that if the puzzles are all generated in exactly the same way they may all be solved in the same way. I definately would have given up on this site long before I spent months building up my own custom puzzle database by hand using various tools. Thats when I came across Gordon Royle's website Minimum Sudoku. Gordon is working on figuring out the minimum number of filled cells it takes to make a solvable sudoku in his work at the university. The math behind it all goes way over my head. Thankfully he was kind enough to allow me to use his database of puzzles. Now the site has over forty thousand puzzles to choose from.

Now that I had a database with over forty thousand puzzles, I needed a way to sort through them. It would take the rest of my natural life to solve all of them and assign a difficulty rating to each one. Not to mention that if I had manually assigned a rating it would be based on my level of skill. A puzzle I might find difficult would be impossible for a few and easy for most. Bill probably wasn't the first to come up with a computer program that rates puzzles. He was hoever the only person who I could find with a "scriptable" program so that I didn't have to manually enter in every single puzzle one at a time. To further this he released the source for his program so I could modify it to suit my needs exactly. I used Damn Small Linux and the GCC compiler to build and run the script. Thanks to Bill and DSL, the database now has a proper difficulty rating for every puzzle. The rating is based on the number of complex moves it takes to solve each puzzle. Check out Bill's site for a complete description of the difficulty rating system.

In many ways I am the steriotype of a typical man. If you stick me in a shop with the supplies and tools I can build you a perfectly functional cabinet. It won't be pretty, but damned if it won't be functional. I can go to the store and pick out the most comfortable and yet still usable clothing. I might look funny in it, but there's no question I can work in it. So when it came time to design the website layout I knew my limitations. Rather than subject my site's visitors to an abominiation that I tried to create, I decided to rely on the judgement of someone with a bit more aesthetic skill. This is where I turned to Free CSS Templates. I paged through the hundreds of gorgeous web designs they had ready made and chose one that fit my concept. Then I adjusted things a bit here and there to make it all fit.