Sudoku Excel solver

I am a numbers kind of guy; and I have enjoyed the Sudoku craze. But I am also an Excel spreadsheet kind of guy, and have often boasted that I can make Excel do anything I want. Then I began to wonder if I could make an Excel work book that can solve Soduko puzzles. Yes I can!

I created a sheet that has a grid for the puzzle you are trying to solve, and then another grid next to it that shows recommended moves. As you enter the recommended moves into the puzzle grid, other recommended moves are generated. The recommendations come from four different sources. One is that the particular move is the only place in that column where that number can go, another is the only place in that row for that number to go, and another is the only place in that 3 by 3 big square for that number to go. The fourth source of recommendations is that that small square cannot hold any of the other eight numbers, and therefore must be the recommended number.

The Excel spreadsheet NEVER misses seeing any easy, available move. It is amazing how many moves it points out to me, that I did not see when looking at the same puzzle.

What the spreadsheet still cannot do, is realize that when a pair of numbers must both go into a pair of spaces, those spaces would be off limits for any other number. And it does not have the ability to realize that when a number is going to be forced into two or three spots all inside the same big square, it will make it impossible for that number to go into any other square in that big square. But those situations do not come up as often, when you never miss an "obvious" move.

The most amazing part for me, is that I was able to do this using Excel - which is not even a regular programming language!

Story published at Static Movement

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Combat with a computer virus!

So my computer came down with a virus. Terrible news. What this one SEEMS to do is spam Google with requests for data. I think someone is just trying to make their website look popular, and maybe raise up its Google ranking. That is conjecture. What I noticed, is that every time I turned on my computer it would tell me:

You (or a program) have requested information from www.google.com

Searching on the internet told me two files named fmideploy.exe and flsmontr.exe might be involved, although nobody really seemed to know what they did. I looked in my system folder and found both of those files, with very recent creation dates - very suspicious indeed. So I took a chance, and deleted them both. And then I continued to examine the System folder, sorting the names by file extension, and then by creation date. And then I again saw, that I had newly created versions of fmideploy.exe and flsmontr.exe! The files I had JUST deleted had been recreated 20 seconds later. So I got off the internet, and again deleted them. And 20 seconds later they had again recreated themselves.

I didn't like that - there is something else on my machine that is amiss. But I can't find what it is. So I tried another option. I deleted the two bad files, jumped immediately into notepad, and SAVED empty documents with those two file names. And that seems to have fooled the piece of the virus that I cannot find - it is happy to see that the two files exist, and does not recreate the troublesome versions of them. Now when I boot up my computer, both of my empty documents briefly open and then close - but no program is asking to connect to the internet anymore.