World's hardest sudoku...
2006-11-07 07:24
Helsinki - A Finnish mathematician on Monday claimed he had created the world's hardest sudoku puzzle, a brainteaser which required three months' work and a billion combinations to produce.
"AI Escargot is the most difficult sudoku puzzle known so far," the puzzle's 37-year-old creator and applied mathmetician Arto Inkala said.
"I called the puzzle AI Escargot, because it looks like a snail. Solving it is like an intellectual culinary pleasure. AI are my initials," Inkala added.
According to a rating published on a Sudoku website (www.sudoku.com) AI Escargot claims the top spot for sudoku's most baffling puzzles.
Escargot demands those tackling it to consider eight casual relationships simultaneously while the most complicated variants attempted by the general public only require people to think of one or two combinations at any one time, Inkala said.
AI Escargot has however been solved by sudoku experts but its creator has promised to produce more challenging versions, as with Escargot, with the aid of computers.
Sudoku, the invention of which is attributed to Swiss mathmetician Leonhard Euler in the 18th century, is a logic-based placement puzzle.
The object is to fill a grid of nine squares with numbers so that every column and every row contains the digits one to nine.