Post #3805891

New arXiv preprint, "Sudoku Grids That Require Many Clues" (with Cindy Zhang, a UC Irvine undergraduate), https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.05728 and new blog post, "Packing Latin squares into sudoku puzzles", https://11011110.github.io/blog/2026/07/07/packing-latin-squares.html The paper uses a counting argument to show that, when you generalize sudoku to larger squares, most of the puzzle needs to be covered by clues in order to make the solution unique, leaving only a smaller number of blank squares to puzzle out and making algorithmic time bounds for solving these puzzles faster. The blog post illustrates a construction that there wasn't room in the paper to explain in more detail, packing \(n^2\) Latin squares of size \(n\times n\) into a sudoku puzzle of size \(n^2\times n^2\).