Resume	Public Key	Blog

Where the world ceases to be the stage for personal hopes and desires, where we, as free beings, behold it in wonder, to question and to contemplate, there we enter the realm of Art and of Science. If we trace out what we behold and experience through the language of logic, we are doing science. If we show it in forms whose interrelationships are not accessible to our conscious thought but are intuitively recognized as meaningful, we are doing art. Common to both is the devotion to something beyond the personal, removed from the arbitrary. -- ALBERT EINSTEIN

• Click here to Launch the Sudoku Solver
  • Java 6 (JRE1.6) is required.
  • The solver is made available under the GPL3 License
  
  
• Current Version: v0.8.8 (2009.3.13)
  • Note: This program makes no attempt to be efficient in any way! It actually began as a bit of a "contest" to see if I could write a piece of code to solve an arbitrary Sudoku puzzle faster than another person could solve a given puzzle it by hand.  After being introduced to the rules of the puzzle, I had a working  prototype (with hard-coded puzzle data) in about an hour or so.  Soon after, it became a demonstration of a simple brute-force, depth-first, recursive-backtracking algorithm for a data-structures course I was teaching. It then grew a bit more to accommodate a GUI and load/save capabilities; even these later features were simply pedagogical.
    
    If you are looking for the fastest or most robust Sudoku solver package on the planet, you've come to the wrong place.  However:  If you want to see an example of problem solving via recursive backtracking, look at the SudokuSolver.java file in the source.
     
• Known Issues
  • The application requires local file read/write privileges to be able to load an save game data files. Since I don't have an authenticated signing certificate, you'll get a warning about the certificate being invalid. This may be fixed if I ever get time to implement the load/save functionality via the JNLP API; where the user will then have the ability to simply grant (or refuse) privileges to read/write only to a designated folder.
     
• Disclaimer
  • Every reasonable attempt has been made to ensure the safety of this program, but bugs do happen, so all standard disclaimers apply!
     
• Documents (Due to the superior compression of .7z over .ZIP, only 7z Compressed files are available for download.)
  • Stand alone application
  • Source
    
  • JavaDoc (on-line)
    

Personal Stuff:

• A note about the background of this page: This small little fractal image was actually generated on an Atari 800xl computer (circa 1990) with a Mandelbrot set generator I wrote in Turbo-BASIC XL. I received the Atari computer as a Christmas gift way back in 1983 and it remained my only computer (with numerous hardware/firmware upgrades and hacks) up until about 1991.
  • Here is my old Atari 8-bit fractal generator Fractasia as it appeared in it's last official release (circa 1993), in its original ARC format:
    • disk1
    • disk2
  • Original usenet posting (Sat Jan 23 10:59:12 1993)
    
    
• My old band (mostly from high school) page. We weren't any good, but we had a lot of fun!

Obligatory Outside Links:

Atari 8-bit Computer Stuff

• Atari 8-bit FAQs
  • Frequently Asked Questions (Michael Current)
  • Emulator Help FAQ (Bill Kendrick)
  • Atari Disk Image FAQ (Steve Tucker)
  • Online Magazines and info:
    • Atari Archives
    • Atari.org
    • The Atari Times
• Some great emulators include:
  • Atari800 Emulator with source and builds for MS-DOS, Windows, Linux, and others. Used as the kernel for many other emulators. (no ROMs)
  • Altirra, A "newer" 8-bit Atari computer emulator for Windows... very compatable!
  • Xformer 2000, from Emulators, Inc. Includes Atari ROMs.
  • Stella, the Atari 2600 emulator.
• Believe it or not, people are actually still creating new software for the ol' 8-bit