A novel Sudoku solving technique using column based permutation

“Sudoku” is the Japanese abbreviation of “Suuji wa dokushin ni kagiru”, which means “the numbers must occur only once”. It is a challenging and interesting puzzle that trains our mind logically. In recent years, solving Sudoku puzzles has become a widespread phenomenon. The problem of solving a given Sudoku puzzle finds numerous applications in the domain of Steganography, Visual Cryptography, DNA Computing, Watermarking, etc. Thus, solving the Sudoku puzzle in efficient manner is very important. However, incidentally all the existing Sudoku solving techniques are primarily either guess based heuristics or computation intensive soft computing methodologies. They also solve the puzzle by traversing on each and every individual cell. In this paper, a novel Sudoku solving technique is proposed which solves Sudoku puzzles without guessing a cell and by generating only the desired permutations among columns, which consist of only groups of cells.