Sudoku puzzles are the newest puzzle craze currently sweeping across many parts of the United States. The game has only one basic rule, that is, every row and every column on a 3 by 3 box of Sudoku puzzles has to contain the numbers 1 through 9, but only once with no one digit repeating itself.
Sudoku puzzles, also referred to as Number Place in the United States, are said to be deceptively simple, since a player can start the game quite easily only to find himself later on getting stuck in the middle of the game with no clear puzzle solution in sight.
Good Sudoku puzzles ideally should ultimately have only one solution, using only one’s logic skills, meaning guesswork is not an effective method in solving the puzzle.
However, solving Sudoku puzzles on pure logic alone can prove to be a difficult task. For logic to be effective, a puzzle should be able to move progressively. This simply means that at every stage in the solution of the puzzle, there must be at least one square or block whose value can be determined easily. Determining that one value should then uncover at least one other fully determined value, and so on and so forth. Yet, this process...