The paramagnetic and glass transitions in sudoku

TL;DR

This paper models Sudoku puzzles as thermodynamic systems to explore their phase transitions, revealing both paramagnetic and glassy states, and demonstrating their potential as simple, solvable models for studying glass transitions.

Contribution

It introduces Sudoku puzzles as a novel, simple model system exhibiting both paramagnetic and glass transitions, with detailed analysis of their thermodynamic properties.

Findings

Sudoku exhibits two phase transitions: paramagnetic and glassy.

The glass phase shows increased information entropy at lower temperatures.

Sudoku's energy landscape has multiple minima characteristic of glasses.

Abstract

We study the statistical mechanics of a model glassy system based on a familiar and popular mathematical puzzle. Sudoku puzzles provide a very rare example of a class of frustrated systems with a unique groundstate without symmetry. Here, the puzzle is recast as thermodynamic system where the number of violated rules defines the energy. We use Monte Carlo simulation to show that the "Sudoku Hamiltonian" exhibits two transitions as a function of temperature, a paramagnetic and a glass transition. Of these, the intermediate condensed phase is the only one which visits the ground state (i.e. it solves the puzzle, though this is not the purpose of the study). Both transitions are associated with an entropy change, paramagnetism measured from the dynamics of the Monte Carlo run, showing a peak in specific heat, while the residual glass entropy is determined by finding multiple instances of the glass by repeated annealing. There are relatively few such simple models for frustrated or glassy systems which exhibit both ordering and glass transitions, sudoku puzzles are unique for the ease with which they can be obtained with the proof of the existence of a unique ground state via the satisfiability of all constraints. Simulations suggest that in the glass phase there is an increase in information entropy with lowering temperature. In fact, we have shown that sudoku have the type of rugged energy landscape with multiple minima which typifies glasses in many physical systems, and this puzzling result is a manifestation of the paradox of the residual glass entropy. These readily-available puzzles can now be used as solvable model Hamiltonian systems for studying the glass transition.