Why a Sudoku-solving program looks smart: Recursion, backtracking, and the idea of 'trying from the most likely failure points'

I was thinking about a program to solve Sudoku.You fill a 9x9 grid with numbers from 1 to 9. The same number must not be ...

Just Splitting Mahjong Tiles Leads to a Massive Flowchart—The Invention of Recursive Functions

When studying programming, you notice something strange.Processes that are extremely complex for humans to think through can ...
I Programmer

Programmer's Guide To Theory - What Is Recursion

So far so good, but what has all of this got to do with something far less familiar – recursion? Recursion is just another way of repeating things. It’s simple at first but it has a habit of becoming ...
I Programmer

The Trick Of The Mind - Recursion

While not an algorithm itself, the technique of recursion is used within algorithms – particularly divide-and-conquer algorithms. It is an advanced idea and potentially confusing. The status of ...