Efficient array for solving sudoku problem

Abstract: In Knuth’s example of Dancing Links and Algorithm X (DLX), pointers were used to connect the neighbors with each other. This has caused problems when DLX is used for parallelisation and to solve this some workaround is needed. One solution is to store the pointers as indicesin an array instead. The purpose of this thesis is therefore answer how a solution based on indices compares time wise to a solution with pointers. A comparison was made by implementing two versions of DLX, one with pointers and one with indices. Each version was then used to solve sudoku puzzles and the time taken was measured. The result of this was that the representations had similar complexity but the representation with indices fell behind since each recursion took longer time compared to the representation with pointers. Therefore parallelisation is needed to put the representation with indices up to par with the represnetation with pointers.