Why a Sudoku-solving program looks smart: Recursion, backtracking, and the idea of 'trying from the most likely failure points'

I was thinking about a program to solve Sudoku.You fill a 9x9 grid with numbers from 1 to 9. The same number must not be ...
I Programmer

The Trick Of The Mind - Recursion

While not an algorithm itself, the technique of recursion is used within algorithms – particularly divide-and-conquer algorithms. It is an advanced idea and potentially confusing. The status of ...

A story about how I realized this is how applied math skills are acquired

It started with the recurrence relation function on the Casio FX-GC100 graphing calculatorSince a recurrence relation is ...
I Programmer

A Programmers Guide To Theory

Recursion is interesting from the point of view of complexity theory and computer science in general because it is the natural way of implementing algorithms that take exponential time. This isn't ...