Media reports tell us that the ‘Sudoku’ craze is sweeping the nation. While I’m not too convinced about the reality of this, it did lead me to have a somewhat heated discussion with my flatmate and (later and slightly less heated) with a family friend. In this discussion, I argued that such puzzles were a complete waste of my time as it was trivial (yes, I did use that worryingly Cambridgidian word) to write a computer program to solve them.

One thing led to another and a number of hours down the line, my program still cannot solve Sudoku puzzles… the shame of it all!