Sudoku Solver

Input for unsolved Sudoku board taken from New York Times.
Output of solved Sudoku board after running through the Sudoku Solver.
Manually solved Sudoku board from New York Times.

Inspiration

Both of us greatly despise solving Sudoku puzzles, so we decided to take on the ambitious journey of creating a program that will solve them for us.

What it does

The program uses a backtracking algorithm which utilizes recursive methods to solve the Sudoku puzzle in least time with least amount of space consumption. We also implemented JavaFX to create a GUI which displays the input and output boards.

Challenges we ran into

The concept of the backtracking algorithm was very new to both of us at the start of the hackathon, so it took some time for us to learn how it works. We also ran into an issue where the output board was a solved Sudoku, however it altered some of the input squares. Additionally, neither of us had any experience writing a GUI so we had to learn along the way.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are both proud of learning how to implement a backtracking algorithm with recursion as they are difficult concepts to understand. We are also amazed that we were able to learn how to create a GUI using JavaFX without any prior experience.