A scale to measure the difficulty of sudoku puzzles

Abstract

In the last few years, Sudoku has become a popular game, deserving the attention of many researchers. Most Sudoku puzzles are classified as easy, average and hard according to their degree of difficulty. However when asked about the criteria used to classify them, there is no clear answer. This paper presents a PnP (paper-and-pencil) method to solve and measure the degree of difficulty of Sudoku puzzles. Contrary to other methods, this method can classify the puzzles automatically without human intervention. The scale used here was inspired on the type of scale used in the snow trails: green, blue, red and black. The Sudoku puzzle is transformed to SAT, and its level is set depending on the SAT problem being easy or hard to solve in SAT, which is equivalent to the puzzle being solved using an easy or hard PnP method. A classifier and a set of classified Sudoku problems are made available on the web.