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### Solve Sudoku Puzzle Using Deep Learning, OpenCV And Backtracking

The sudoku game is something almost everyone plays either on a daily basis or at least once in a while. The game consists of a 9 9 board with numbers and blanks on it. The goal is to fill the blank spaces with suitable numbers. These numbers can be filled keeping in mind some rules. The rule for filling these empty spaces is that the number should not appear in the same row, same column or in the same 3 3 grid.

### Solving Sudoku With AI or Quantum?

"History is called the mother of all subjects", said Marc Bloch. So, let's talk about how the famous Sudoku even came into existence. The story dates back to the late 19th Century and it originated from France. Le Siecle, a French daily published a 9x9 puzzle that required arithmetic calculations to solve rather than logic and had double-digit numbers instead of 1-to-9 with similar game properties like Sudoku where the digits across rows, columns, and diagonals if added, will result in the same number. In 1979 a retired architect and puzzler named Howard Garns is believed to be the creator behind the modern Sudoku which was first published by Dell Magazines in the name of Number Place.

### OpenCV Sudoku Solver and OCR - PyImageSearch

In this tutorial, you will create an automatic Sudoku puzzle solver using OpenCV, Deep Learning, and Optical Character Recognition (OCR). My wife is a huge Sudoku nerd. Every time we travel, whether it be a 45-minute flight from Philadelphia to Albany or a 6-hour transcontinental flight to California, she always has a Sudoku puzzle with her. The funny thing is, she prefers the printed Sudoku puzzle books. She hates the digital/smartphone app versions and refuses to play them. I'm not a big puzzle person myself, but one time, we were sitting on a flight, and I asked: How do you know if you solved the puzzle correctly?

### Neural Learning of One-of-Many Solutions for Combinatorial Problems in Structured Output Spaces

Recent research has proposed neural architectures for solving combinatorial problems in structured output spaces. In many such problems, there may exist multiple solutions for a given input, e.g. a partially filled Sudoku puzzle may have many completions satisfying all constraints. Further, we are often interested in finding {\em any one} of the possible solutions, without any preference between them. Existing approaches completely ignore this solution multiplicity. In this paper, we argue that being oblivious to the presence of multiple solutions can severely hamper their training ability. Our contribution is two fold. First, we formally define the task of learning one-of-many solutions for combinatorial problems in structured output spaces, which is applicable for solving several problems of interest such as N-Queens, and Sudoku. Second, we present a generic learning framework that adapts an existing prediction network for a combinatorial problem to handle solution multiplicity. Our framework uses a selection module, whose goal is to dynamically determine, for every input, the solution that is most effective for training the network parameters in any given learning iteration. We propose an RL based approach to jointly train the selection module with the prediction network. Experiments on three different domains, and using two different prediction networks, demonstrate that our framework significantly improves the accuracy in our setting, obtaining up to $21$ pt gain over the baselines.

### How I Solved Sudoku With a Business Rules Engine - KDnuggets

On a family trip a few months back, I was flipping through an airline magazine and landed on the puzzles page. There were three puzzles, "Easy", "Medium", and "Hard". At the top of the page a word that would become my obsession over the next couple of months: "Sudoku". I had heard about Sudoku puzzles, but I had never really considered trying one. I grabbed a pencil from one of the kids and started with the "Easy" puzzle. It took me quite some time (and I tore the paper in one spot after erasing too many times) but I eventually completed the puzzle.

### An Integer Linear Programming Framework for Mining Constraints from Data

Various structured output prediction problems (e.g., sequential tagging) involve constraints over the output space. By identifying these constraints, we can filter out infeasible solutions and build an accountable model. To this end, we present a general integer linear programming (ILP) framework for mining constraints from data. We model the inference of structured output prediction as an ILP problem. Then, given the coefficients of the objective function and the corresponding solution, we mine the underlying constraints by estimating the outer and inner polytopes of the feasible set. We verify the proposed constraint mining algorithm in various synthetic and real-world applications and demonstrate that the proposed approach successfully identifies the feasible set at scale. In particular, we show that our approach can learn to solve 9x9 Sudoku puzzles and minimal spanning tree problems from examples without providing the underlying rules. We also demonstrate results on hierarchical multi-label classification and conduct a theoretical analysis on how close the mined constraints are from the ground truth.

### Hybrid Classification and Reasoning for Image-based Constraint Solving

There is an increased interest in solving complex constrained problems where part of the input is not given as facts but received as raw sensor data such as images or speech. We will use "visual sudoku" as a prototype problem, where the given cell digits are handwritten and provided as an image thereof. In this case, one first has to train and use a classifier to label the images, so that the labels can be used for solving the problem. In this paper, we explore the hybridization of classifying the images with the reasoning of a constraint solver. We show that pure constraint reasoning on predictions does not give satisfactory results. Instead, we explore the possibilities of a tighter integration, by exposing the probabilistic estimates of the classifier to the constraint solver. This allows joint inference on these probabilistic estimates, where we use the solver to find the maximum likelihood solution. We explore the trade-off between the power of the classifier and the power of the constraint reasoning, as well as further integration through the additional use of structural knowledge. Furthermore, we investigate the effect of calibration of the probabilistic estimates on the reasoning. Our results show that such hybrid approaches vastly outperform a separate approach, which encourages a further integration of prediction (probabilities) and constraint solving.

### Solving Sudoku with Convolution Neural Network Keras

Then we apply softmax function on the final scores to convert them into probabilities. And the data is classified into a class that has the highest probability value(refer to the following image). But in sudoku, the scenario is different. We have to get 81 numbers for each position in the sudoku game, not just one. And we have a total of 9 classes for each number because a number can fall in a range of 1 to 9. To comply with this design, our network should output (81*9) numbers.

### SATNet: Bridging deep learning and logical reasoning using a differentiable satisfiability solver

Integrating logical reasoning within deep learning architectures has been a major goal of modern AI systems. In this paper, we propose a new direction toward this goal by introducing a differentiable (smoothed) maximum satisfiability (MAXSAT) solver that can be integrated into the loop of larger deep learning systems. Our (approximate) solver is based upon a fast coordinate descent approach to solving the semidefinite program (SDP) associated with the MAXSAT problem. We show how to analytically differentiate through the solution to this SDP and efficiently solve the associated backward pass. We demonstrate that by integrating this solver into end-to-end learning systems, we can learn the logical structure of challenging problems in a minimally supervised fashion. In particular, we show that we can learn the parity function using single-bit supervision (a traditionally hard task for deep networks) and learn how to play 9x9 Sudoku solely from examples. We also solve a "visual Sudok" problem that maps images of Sudoku puzzles to their associated logical solutions by combining our MAXSAT solver with a traditional convolutional architecture. Our approach thus shows promise in integrating logical structures within deep learning.

### Recurrent Relational Networks

This paper is concerned with learning to solve tasks that require a chain of interde- pendent steps of relational inference, like answering complex questions about the relationships between objects, or solving puzzles where the smaller elements of a solution mutually constrain each other. We introduce the recurrent relational net- work, a general purpose module that operates on a graph representation of objects. As a generalization of Santoro et al. [2017]’s relational network, it can augment any neural network model with the capacity to do many-step relational reasoning. We achieve state of the art results on the bAbI textual question-answering dataset with the recurrent relational network, consistently solving 20/20 tasks. As bAbI is not particularly challenging from a relational reasoning point of view, we introduce Pretty-CLEVR, a new diagnostic dataset for relational reasoning. In the Pretty- CLEVR set-up, we can vary the question to control for the number of relational reasoning steps that are required to obtain the answer. Using Pretty-CLEVR, we probe the limitations of multi-layer perceptrons, relational and recurrent relational networks. Finally, we show how recurrent relational networks can learn to solve Sudoku puzzles from supervised training data, a challenging task requiring upwards of 64 steps of relational reasoning. We achieve state-of-the-art results amongst comparable methods by solving 96.6% of the hardest Sudoku puzzles.