Re: Sudoku Game and GSoC

["Thomas H.P. Andersen" <phomes gmail com>]

>>            Add custom option (for empty Sudoku)
>>                https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=559298
>>                https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=602655
>
>
> Ah yes, so this was eliminated. I haven't been very involved with
> development since this became part of gnome-games, but this feature was
> there in the version I wrote long ago fwiw. I guess that's to say that this
> feature was removed at some point in an effort to "simplify" things. I'm all
> for putting it back, but it does seem worth at least thinking about since at
> some point someone thought it was worth taking out (if I were less lazy I
> could look back through the changelog and see when this happened)

Just a quick note from me here. I was the one that removed the custom
game entry (if I remember correctly). The problem at that time was
that we had so many bugs and a whole bunch of them was tracked back to
playing unsolvable or otherwise "bad" puzzles. We ment to put it back
in with proper checks before allowing it to be played. Sadly I never
got around to that part.

>>    Puzzle Generation
>>        Multi-threaded
>>            https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=580056
>
>
> Multi-threading would be nice, but a lot more could be done to improve
> generation of difficult puzzles. IIRC, the current algorithm just makes
> *random* puzzles and then scores them. I long intended (but haven't had
> time) to make an algorithm that would actively *try* to create hard puzzles.
> I imagine enormous efficiency gains could be made if you did some coding in
> this direction that would probably outpace the gains of multiple CPUs.

Yes, the current way is to just generate a bunch of puzzles and then
scores them. Unfortunately it only generates a difficult one very
seldom. There are other gtk based sudoku games out there so maybe it
could be fun to create a gobject class to genereate puzzles? It could
be a separate "AI" library to depend on like glchess does or just some
code to keep in sync on the projects. (something exclusive for
gnome-sudoku would of course be acceptable too)

-- "the other" Thomas