Sudoku transitions
A famous philosopher once asked himself:
“Well, how did I get here?”
I’ll tell you how I got here:
“One thing led to another.”
I had a few thousand sudokus in a database, and I wondered if I had any duplicates or near-duplicates. I had the computer compare each one to all the others (we’re up into the tens of millions of comparisons), and found a number of pairs that had 6 colors the same and 3 colors different. I was looking back and forth trying to compare them. I didn’t have blink comparator handy, but I realized that if I put them in Windows Movie Maker, the “dissolve” effect would highlight the differences. This looked interesting; was there a way to find a sequence of sudokus, each one with 3 colors different from the previous sudoku? This turns out to be a “six degrees of separation” type of problem, easily solvable by computer. And that’s how I got here.