• Kitty - greedy backtracking-based sudoku solver *
• Copyright (C) 2008 Olexandr Melnyk [email protected] *
• *
• This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify *
• it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by *
• the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or *
• (at your option) any later version. *
• *
• This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, *
• but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of *
• MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the *
• GNU General Public License for more details. *
• *
• You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License *
• along with this program. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/. *

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=== 1. INSTALLATION ===

In order to install Kitty, you can use the traditional chain of commands on UNIX-like operating systems:

./configure make make install

=== 2. USAGE ===

Kitty package consists of two command-line utilities: kitty and meow. First one is a tool for solving sudoku puzzles and second one is a tool for verification that solution is correct.

Both kitty and meow use straight-forward puzzle format for input/output, where zeroes stand for empty cells (they can appear only in input, but not output) and numbers from 1 to 9 stand for themselves, eg.:

1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 2 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

To solve a puzzle, you can save it in a file input.txt, and then call kitty as follows:

kitty < input.txt > output.txt

If puzzle has a solution, it will be stored in output.txt, else it output.txt will contain "No solution".

To verify that grid stored in file output.txt is a solution of puzzle stored in file input.txt, you can use meow as follows:

cat input.txt output.txt | meow

== 3. WEB SITE ==

You can visit Kitty web site at http://omelnyk.net/projects/kitty/