Computational Complexity

Tuesday, August 30, 2005

 
Back From Vacation

Posted by Lance

I am back from our family vacation to the Black Hills of South Dakota. Thanks to Ryan O'Donnell for guest blogging. I have donated $26 to hurricane relief in honor of all of the winners of Ryan's Game.

I used to keep off the internet completely over vacation but the web has become such a useful resource (for directions, hotels, site information) that we brought along my wife's laptop. All of the hotels we stayed in (as well as the highway rest areas in Iowa) have free internet so we had good access. Still I avoided checking my email and Ryan's weblog entries. I didn't want to worry about anything work related during the week. Of course that meant I came back to a mountain of email and if you had sent me some I will get back to you soon.

Some of these hotels also gave us a free USA Today which ran an article on the recent popularity of Sudoku books in the US. The article had the line "Sudoku involves no math." What did they mean? Probably Sudoku involves no arithmetic. But can you really be logical without being mathematical?

2:32 PM # 4 comments

1.  D. Eppstein says:  
   
   There is of course plenty of interesting math in Sudoku. But I suspect they mean that one can solve typical published Sudoku puzzles merely by following a few simple pattern-matching rules, without a lot of calculation or deduction.
   

   3:11 PM, August 30, 2005

2.  Jonathan says:  
   
   > But can you really be logical without being mathematical?
   
   Yes, if you consider philosophers to be logical.
   

   8:49 PM, August 30, 2005

3.  Anonymous says:  
   
   Isn't that the smartest way to make sudoku popular?
   

   9:02 PM, August 30, 2005

4.  Macneil says:  
   
   Is it true that solving Sudoku is NP-complete?
   

   9:23 PM, September 19, 2005

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