Sudoku is amazingly popular This is a beginning programmer’s guide with a gaming slant. It mixes learning and fun It teaches the reader how to build a fun, complex, and addictive puzzle game

Sudoku Programming with C teaches you how to write computer programs to solve and generate Sudoku puzzles. This is a practical book that will provide you with everything you need to write your own books of Sudoku Classic and Samurai puzzles. But be warned: after reading it, you'll discover that the puzzles in your local paper are not so challenging after all! We like Sudokus because they test our capacity to recognize and interpret patterns. But how are the clues generated? Where do those quasi-symmetrical configurations come from? When the author explored the Web to find out, he discovered that there were many sites that explained how to solve Sudokus, but none that told him how create them. He also saw many sites and apps to play Sudoku, but, perhaps not surprising, no indication of how they worked. So, he had to develop his own applications in order to find out. And, from the very start, he decided that he would publish the code for anyone else to use and perhaps tinker with, but the author wrote it in such a way that also lets readers with limited knowledge of programming techniques understand it. In fact, you could decide to start generating thousands of puzzles almost immediately, and go through the explanations of algorithms and techniques later, a bit at a time. The author chose to write the application in ‘plain old C’ because he wanted to make the code accessible to as many people as possible. In this book, you will find an explanation of all solving strategies, and the code to implement them. Writing the Solver application was more difficult than writing the Generator, because it required designing and implementing each strategy separately. However, the author wanted to include a solving program capable of listing the strategies necessary to solve any particular puzzle. He also wanted to check whether a puzzle was solvable analytically, without any guessing. This book includes the full listings of both the Generator and the Solver, and explanations of all C modules, with walk-throughs and examples.

SIMPL (Synchronous Interprocess Messaging Project for Linux) is discussed at many different levels. At its most fundamental, SIMPL is a set of library functions which allow the passing of encapsulated messages between cooperating processes. On another level, SIMPL is an active open source project which began over a decade ago. Over the years this project has accumulated an extensive body of sample code and extensions. SIMPL is also a great way to design software applications where complexity is encapsulated in separate, easily testable, readily extendable modules. The current state of software development is compared to the hardware world before the advent of integrated circuit chips. The term softwareIC is coined to describe the software equivalent of the integrated circuit. The SIMPL toolkit, along with tokenized messaging and the SIMPL testing framework is shown to be a great way to build these softwareICs. Several are illustrated throughout the book.

At its most fundamental, SIMPL is a set of library functions which allow the passing of encapsulated messages between cooperating processes. These processes may be local to one host computer or spread over a network.On another level, SIMPL is an active open source project which began over a decade ago. Over the years this project has accumulated an extensive body of sample code and extensions. Currently SIMPL libraries are supported for C/C++, Python, JAVA and Tcl programming languages. A sample Sudoku puzzle solver project illustrates all these in a single application.

The Ruby Programming Language is the authoritative guide to Ruby and provides comprehensive coverage of versions 1.8 and 1.9 of the language. It was written (and illustrated!) by an all-star team: David Flanagan, bestselling author of programming language "bibles" (including JavaScript: The Definitive Guide and Java in a Nutshell) and committer to the Ruby Subversion repository. Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto, creator, designer and lead developer of Ruby and author of Ruby in a Nutshell, which has been expanded and revised to become this book. why the lucky stiff, artist and Ruby programmer extraordinaire. This book begins with a quick-start tutorial to the language, and then explains the language in detail from the bottom up: from lexical and syntactic structure to datatypes to expressions and statements and on through methods, blocks, lambdas, closures, classes and modules. The book also includes a long and thorough introduction to the rich API of the Ruby platform, demonstrating -- with heavily-commented example code -- Ruby's facilities for text processing, numeric manipulation, collections, input/output, networking, and concurrency. An entire chapter is devoted to Ruby's metaprogramming capabilities. The Ruby Programming Language documents the Ruby language definitively but without the formality of a language specification. It is written for experienced programmers who are new to Ruby, and for current Ruby programmers who want to challenge their understanding and increase their mastery of the language.

Constraint logic programming lies at the intersection of logic programming, optimisation and artificial intelligence. It has proved a successful tool in many areas including production planning, transportation scheduling, numerical analysis and bioinformatics. Eclipse is one of the leading software systems that realise its underlying methodology. Eclipse is exploited commercially by Cisco, and is freely available and used for teaching and research in over 500 universities. This book has a two-fold purpose. It's an introduction to constraint programming, appropriate for one-semester courses for upper undergraduate or graduate students in computer science or for programmers wishing to master the practical aspects of constraint programming. By the end of the book, the reader will be able to understand and write constraint programs that solve complex problems. Second, it provides a systematic introduction to the Eclipse system through carefully-chosen examples that guide the reader through the language and illustrate its power, versatility and utility.

This book constitutes revised selected papers of the 19th International Conference on Applications of Declarative Programming and Knowledge Management, INAP 2011, and the 25th Workshop on Logic Programming, WLP 2011, held in Vienna, Austria, in September 2011. The 19 papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 27 papers presented at the conference and initially a total of 35 submissions. The book also contains the papers of two invited talks. The papers are organized in topical sections on languages; answer-set programming and abductive reasoning; constraints and logic programming; answer-set programming and model expansion; application papers; and system descriptions.

The Art of Computer Programming is Knuth's multivolume analysis of algorithms. With the addition of this new volume, it continues to be the definitive description of classical computer science. Volume 4B, the sequel to Volume 4A, extends Knuth's exploration of combinatorial algorithms. These algorithms are of keen interest to software designers because ". . . a single good idea can save years or even centuries of computer time." The book begins with coverage of Backtrack Programming, together with a set of data structures whose links perform "delightful dances" and are ideally suited to this domain. New techniques for important applications such as optimum partitioning and layout are thereby developed. Knuth's writing is playful, and he includes dozens of puzzles to illustrate the algorithms and techniques, ranging from popular classics like edge-matching to more recent crazes like sudoku. Recreational mathematicians and computer scientists will not be disappointed! In the second half of the book, Knuth addresses Satisfiability, one of the most fundamental problems in all of computer science. Innovative techniques developed at the beginning of the twenty-first century have led to game-changing applications, for such things as optimum scheduling, circuit design, and hardware verification. Thanks to these tools, computers are able to solve practical problems involving millions of variables that only a few years ago were regarded as hopeless. The Mathematical Preliminaries Redux section of the book is a special treat, which presents basic techniques of probability theory that have become prominent since the original "preliminaries" were discussed in Volume 1. As in every volume of this remarkable series, the book includes hundreds of exercises that employ Knuth's ingenious rating system, making it easy for readers of varying degrees of mathematical training to find challenges suitable to them. Detailed answers are provided to facilitate self-study. "Professor Donald E. Knuth has always loved to solve problems. In Volume 4B he now promotes two brand new and practical general problem solvers, namely (0) the Dancing Links Backtracking and (1) the SAT Solver. To use them, a problem is defined declaratively (0) as a set of options, or (1) in Boolean formulae. Today's laptop computers, heavily armoured with very high speed processors and ultra large amounts of memory, are able to run either solver for problems having big input data. Each section of Volume 4B contains a multitudinous number of tough exercises which help make understanding surer. Happy reading!" --Eiiti Wada, an elder computer scientist, UTokyo "Donald Knuth may very well be a great master of the analysis of algorithms, but more than that, he is an incredible and tireless storyteller who always strikes the perfect balance between theory, practice, and fun. [Volume 4B, Combinatorial Algorithms, Part 2] dives deep into the fascinating exploration of search spaces (which is quite like looking for a needle in a haystack or, even harder, to prove the absence of a needle in a haystack), where actions performed while moving forward must be meticulously undone when backtracking. It introduces us to the beauty of dancing links for removing and restoring the cells of a matrix in a dance which is both simple to implement and very efficient." --Christine Solnon, Department of Computer Science, INSA Lyon Register your book for convenient access to downloads, updates, and/or corrections as they become available.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 9th European Conference on Genetic Programming, EuroGP 2006, held in Budapest, Hungary, in April 2006, colocated with EvoCOP 2006. The 21 revised plenary papers and 11 revised poster papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 59 submissions. The papers address fundamental and theoretical issues, along with a wide variety of papers dealing with different application areas.

Revised for a new second edition, Intermediate C Programming provides a stepping-stone for intermediate-level students to go from writing short programs to writing real programs well. It shows students how to identify and eliminate bugs, write clean code, share code with others, and use standard Linux-based tools, such as ddd and valgrind. This second edition provides expanded coverage of these topics with new material focused on software engineering, including version control and unit testing. The text enhances their programming skills by explaining programming concepts and comparing common mistakes with correct programs. It also discusses how to use debuggers and the strategies for debugging as well as studies the connection between programming and discrete mathematics. Including additional student and instructor resources available online, this book is particularly appealing as a classroom resource.