Su Doku Master 1.0

for Mac OS X

Overview
Su Doku puzzles are quite simple crossword like puzzles. The puzzle consists of a partially filled in 9x9 grid divided up into nine 3x3 groupings where the goal is to fill in the blank squares with the digits 1-9 such that no column, row or 3x3 grouping contains more than a single occurrence of each digit. Su Doku Master allows you to enter your own puzzles, work with some preloaded puzzles or generate new puzzles of varying degrees of difficulty. You can then print out the puzzles if you want to work on them by hand.

Features

Solving Puzzles
By using the Solve command Su Doku Master can solve valid puzzles for you quickly with the easiest ones being solved almost instantaneously and some of the hardest ones taking only a few seconds. Alternatively the Count Solutions command allows you to check if a given puzzle actually has a single valid solution without actually altering the puzzle. This gives the option of checking partial solutions to make sure you're on the right track. Once you've completed a puzzle you can use the Check command to make sure the solution is correct. Puzzles can be saved to files to be shared or loaded again to be solved later.

Puzzle Generation
Puzzle generation is available at a number of different levels of increasing difficulty determined by the number of initially visible squares. On the easiest level 35 squares are visible. On the hardest level there are 20 visible squares but at this time it may take an extremely long time to generate a puzzle of this difficulty (I hope to make some improvements on this in a future version), However the second hardest level can generate puzzles with 21 visible squares in a matter of minutes fairly consistently.

Registration

This program is provided free of charge, complete, and not crippled in any way. I've decided to create a new type of shareware licensing system which I call Releaseware. I would like to keep my software free of charge, complete and not crippled yet still receive enough contributions to make it worthwhile to maintain and develop. So instead of making everyone pay to upgrade to a full version I'm going to freely release the next version of the software once I've received a pre-determined amount in registrations. You are free to contribute whatever amount you like, the more you contribute the sooner the next version will be released.

Version 2.0 Planned Features

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Remaining till Version 2.0 Release

Feedback
I'm always interested in any feedback you may have. So please feel free to e-mail sudoku@groethe.org with any comments, feature requests or bug reports.