Solving Japanese Puzzles with Heuristics

This paper presents two heuristics algorithms to solve Japanese puzzles, both black and white puzzles and color puzzles. First, we present ad-hoc heuristics which use the information in rows, columns, and puzzle's constraints to obtain the solution of the puzzle. The best heuristic developed for black and white puzzles is then extended to solving color Japanese puzzles. We show the performance of the proposed heuristics in several examples from a well known web page devoted to this kind of puzzles. Comparison with an existing solver based on constraint programming and with a genetic algorithm is carried out.