Solving Sudoku with Ant Colony Optimisation

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new Ant Colony Optimization algorithm for solving Sudoku puzzles, featuring a novel anti-stagnation operator called Best Value Evaporation, which improves performance on large instances.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel ACO-based Sudoku solver with a unique anti-stagnation operator, outperforming existing methods on large puzzles.

Findings

Outperforms existing methods on large Sudoku instances

Introduces the Best Value Evaporation anti-stagnation operator

Demonstrates improved convergence and solution quality

Abstract

In this paper we present a new Ant Colony Optimisation-based algorithm for Sudoku, which out-performs existing methods on large instances. Our method includes a novel anti-stagnation operator, which we call Best Value Evaporation.