Sudoku and Mathematica Paclets workshop

Besides Mathematica, Sudoku’s are one of many things which interest Fred Simons. During the years he wrote a lot of functions for solving sudoku puzzles, and this grew into a set of Mathematica tools that could advise him what to do when he was working on a sudoku puzzle by hand and got stuck. 

Of course, these tools could be used by others as well, but so far there was no useful way of including the necessary documentation and distribute everything to others. 

Mathematica comes with a highly appreciated documentation system. During the last years Wolfram worked on so called paclets. That are units of functionality that extend the Wolfram system and that can be very simple distributed and installed. Paclets may contain anything, but are most often used for integrating kernel functions with their documentation into Mathematica, both in the kernel and in the documentation system. 

The latest release of Mathematica contains tools so that users of Mathematica now (relatively) simply can create their own paclets. That is what Fred did: he added interesting documentation to his set of functions, and the resulting paclet can be used by any user of Mathematica who likes to solve sudoku’s and now and then want to have a hint on how to proceed. 

The talk will concentrate on two aspects:

• how to create a paclet with documentation (of interest for any one who want to distribute his work to others),
• his paclet SudokuHints: how to use it, and some interesting facets of interactivity in Mathematica that was needed in the paclet (of interest for sudoku solvers and Mathematica users).