OP complains that they are underused in industry, and goes on to show how to solve sudoku. That is not going to help me in my day to day job, can someone come up with a more pragmatic example where we could apply solvers?
As an example, the often-talked-about dependency management problem, is also NP-Complete and thus translates into SAT, and SAT could be translated into dependency manager. The problem our group worked on, generating key and lock cuttings based on user-provided lock-chart and manufacturer-specified geometry, is also NP-complete.
An example is something like scheduling school classes where you’re trying to minimise clashes in the timetable.
I haven’t thought too much about how you’d solve it but you’ve got a few things to work with. There are the different classes, students, teachers and spots in the timetable. That’s a real pig to brute force but the sort of work a solver is used for.
