Sudoku Helper...

Don't know what's sudoku ?

It's puzzle [in one word :P ]... ;)

So, some puzzles are so gawddamn hard.. It'll take ages to solve...

But, not with this robo...

"This little robot solves a sudoku puzzle all by itself. It scans the sudoku puzzle using a light sensor. It calculates the solution to the puzzle and then writes the digits.

Scanning

First it performs a quick scan to determine which cells are empty.

Thresholding

The scanned image is very noisy and blur.
To make it more sharp the image is transformed to a binary image (black and white).

Segmentation

The binary image may have more than one segment. It may have pixels not belonging to the digit. The center segment is found and other segments are deleted.

Thinning

The image is converted to 1-pixel wide lines with a thinning algorithm.

Feature extraction

Now the digits are classified by extracting some features from them:
Width of the digit

Number of tips Position and direction of tips

For example a digit with only one tip which is pointing to the right is classified as 6.

Solving the Sudoku Solving a sudoku puzzle is a quite simple task for a computer. It is usually implemented using a recursive backtracking algorithm. But since the Mindstorms processor is rather slow, and since it doesn't allow for recursive functions, it took some care to optimize it."

A gizmo which solves sudoku puzzles when it's left free to look at it...

Amazin' , isn't it? :D

Bored ? Try some sudoku => www.websudoku.com/ ;-)

Chek out the Gizmo => http://tiltedtwister.com/sudokusolver.html