s1jobs.com, the recruitment site I’ve been working on since 2001, has just been independently reviewed by WhatJobSite.com.  The “secret shopper” review was conducted without our knowledge and the first we knew of it was when we saw the results published earlier this month.

The site got a lot of praise, in particular for the emerging technologies we use: “including RSS job feeds and a rather exciting new mobile phone application called txt2apply.”  It’s good to see txt2apply being acknowledged — I’ve always been proud of it as a piece of mobile innovation, and the fact that David McLaughin and I developed it from scratch in just a few days.

I’ve been running a free Sudoku game for a couple of years at www.grantgibson.co.uk/sudoku.  It’s available to play in desktop and mobile formats as well as on widget sites like Netvibes.com. 

The Flash part is really my area of expertise, but I also had to hack together a PHP script to generate the puzzles.  I found a script that does the right sort of thing, and modified it to output in my required format.  However, over the years I’ve had a few people complain that it produces puzzles with multiple solutions (and then only accepts one of those solutions as the ‘correct’ answer).

I don’t know enough mathematics or PHP to correct the problem, so I’m putting out an appeal.  If anyone wants to have a go at correcting the problem — or rewriting the script — please do so.  You’ll be helping me and thousands of other Sudoku fans around the world.

Requirements

Input parameters (via GET URL):

• Difficulty [currently 1, 2 or 3, but can be tweaked if necessary]
• Random [currently a six digit integer, but can be tweaked if necessary]

Output format (plain text):

puzzle=<TITLE>
Daily Random Sudoku: Medium
<AUTHOR>
Your Name Here
<COPYRIGHT>
Your Name Here and Grant Gibson
<DIFFICULTY>
2
<GRID>
.ooo..o..
o.o..oooo
o.o…ooo
o.o..oooo
oo.ooo.oo
oooo..o.o
ooo…o.o
oooo..o.o
..o..ooo.
<ANSWER>
528631974
163974285
497285631
235716849
671849352
984352716
859123467
312467598
746598123

… where answer is the unique grid solution, and grid represents the intial state of the puzzle – dot for blank, o for a displayed number.

I’ve attached the Current Grid Script here.  If you’d like to suggest any revisions, or post up an alternative version of the code please do so — either as a comment here, or directly to me by email.  See my contact page for email details.

Thanks, and good luck!