Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Nested Monte Carlo Tree Search As Applied To Samurai Sudoku, Laura Finley

All Student Theses

As Sudoku has come into prominence as a favorite logic puzzle, mathematicians and computer scientists alike have analyzed the game for interesting properties. The large search space presents a challenge for both generating and solving Sudoku puzzles without relying on techniques that simply permute a valid puzzle. These permutations result in puzzles that are essentially the same since they follow the same solution path. Many Sudoku generating or solving programs rely on brute-force methods to avoid this pitfall, but this is inefficient since there is no heuristic to navigate the huge search space. A nested Monte Carlo tree search has …