Exact Method for Generating Strategy-Solvable Sudoku Clues

A Sudoku puzzle often has a regular pattern in the arrangement of initial digits and it is typically made solvable with known solving techniques called strategies. In this paper, we consider the problem of generating such Sudoku instances. We introduce a rigorous framework to discuss solvability for Sudoku instances with respect to strategies. This allows us to handle not only known strategies but also general strategies under a few reasonable assumptions. We propose an exact method for determining Sudoku clues for a given set of clue positions that is solvable with a given set of strategies. This is the first exact method except for a trivial brute-force search. Besides the clue generation, we present an application of our method to the problem of determining the minimum number of strategy-solvable Sudoku clues. We conduct experiments to evaluate our method, varying the position and the number of clues at random. Our method terminates within 1 min for many grids. However, as the number of clues gets closer to 20, the running time rapidly increases and exceeds the time limit set to 600 s. We also evaluate our method for several instances with 17 clue positions taken from known minimum Sudokus to see the efficiency for deciding unsolvability.