The Sudoku generator that ships in my puzzle game is a plain randomised-backtracking solver. It works, but "it works" is a vibe, not a number. So I pointed three different solving strategies at the exact same engine and counted how hard each one actually has to search. The engine and the benchmark are open source . Every node count below is deterministic — clone it, run node benchmark.js , and you get the same figures I did. The setup A grid is a flat array of 81 cells (...