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Comment by Aleran | Hacker News Reader

In all fairness, how can anyone compare Peter Norvig and Ron Jeffries on the same level?

One is an AI genius and the other is a XP coach. They are on very different levels intellectually.

Solving Sudoku isn't exactly rocket science. I can understand if you don't have the cleanest, most elegant solution in the world, but if you can't even make a tiny bit of progress toward writing a Sudoku solver in a few hours, then I don't think you have any business holding a programming job, much less telling other programmers how to do their jobs.

I mean, those Ron Jeffries blog posts read like someone who has never solved a non-trivial programming problem in his life. He literally makes no headway on any difficult part of the problem, and he spends what appears to be the better part of several hours working hard to get nowhere on code that does very little. If someone is listening to him about how to approach programming projects, I've got a bridge to sell that man.

In fact, solving Sudoku puzzles was a programming assignment given in my first year of undergraduate study. We were given input/output specifications, and told to write in C++. That was it.

Seeing as how most of the class passes, I assume almost any joker can write a half-decent sudoku solver if sufficiently motivated.

It's not just that Norvig is smart; he's specifically skilled at writing really good code, apparently because that's something he cared about and worked on. At JPL I worked with a bunch of smart researchers with PhDs but some wrote better code than others, and it didn't mean they were on a different level intellectually.

Norvig's book _Paradigms of AI Programming_ has 900+ pages presenting code as instructive as that Sudoku solver; I've never seen a better collection. http://norvig.com/paip.html

Dude, a sudoku solver is really directly solved via brute force search. If a coder can't come up with the brute force algorithm for a 9x9 sudoku board, there's something wrong with that person.

Brute force? You can write a solver in 15 simple lines of Zimpl code (pun intended), that uses state-of-the-art constraint propagation and all that.

http://www.zib.de/Publications/Reports/ZR-05-51.pdf

The point is that some people are too blinded by their ideology to even come up with a crude solution, let alone an elegant one.

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