# Porting Norvig's Sudoku Solver to Common Lisp

DevFeed: [Porting Norvig's Sudoku Solver to Common Lisp](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/solving-every-sudoku-puzzle-34470.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<https://tapoueh.org/blog/2012/07/solving-every-sudoku-puzzle/>)

Author: Dimitri Fontaine PostgreSQL Major Contributor; Author

Published: 2012-07-10T18:37:00Z

Content type: article

Language: en

Sources: [Dimitri Fontaine](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/dimitri-fontaine.md>)

Topics: [Common Lisp](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/common-lisp.md>), [Algorithms](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/algorithms.md>), [Data structures](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/data-structures.md>)

Tags: [algorithm](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/algorithm.md>), [data-structure](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/data-structure.md>), [lisp](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/lisp.md>)

## AI overview

The author examines Peter Norvig's Sudoku-solving approach while developing an idiomatic Common Lisp version. They argue that porting the algorithm requires understanding the original Python code precisely, especially when using different data structures.

## Source excerpt

Peter Norvig published a while ago a very nice article titled Solving Every Sudoku Puzzle wherein he presents a programmatic approach to solving that puzzle game. The article is very well written and makes it easy to think that coming up with the code for such a solver is a very easy task, you apply some basic problem search principles and there you are. Which is partly true, in fact. Also, he uses python, and that means that a lot of trivial programming activities are not a concern anymore, such as memory management.