Everybody loves Sudoku (probably), and evolutionary computation is kind of neat, so what could possibly be better than an animated evolutionary Sudoku solver?
The applet’s animation gives a good feel for how the randomly directed search eventually converges on the right solution through the power of cumulative selection. Have a play with the population size setting to trade-off performance with reliability (harder puzzles will typically require a larger population).
I’ve got lots of ideas for improvements to the Watchmaker Framework for Evolutionary Computation, but before I could get started, I first had to finish off the stuff I had been playing with. So that’s what I’ve been up to this evening and the result is version 0.4.1.