Genetic Algorithms with Local Optima Handling to Solve Sudoku Puzzles

Sudoku is a popular combinatorial number puzzle game and is widely spread on online blogs and in newspapers worldwide. However, the game is very complex in nature and solving it gives rise to an NP-Complete problem. In this paper, we introduce a heuristic to tackle the problem. The heuristic is a genetic algorithm with modified crossover and mutation operators. In addition, we present a new approach to prevent the genetic algorithm from getting stuck in local optima. We refer to this approach as the "purge approach". We test our algorithm on different puzzles of different difficulty levels. Results show that our algorithm outperforms several existing methods.

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