In case anyone is looking for other novel ways to solve Sudoku. I wrote a CP language a while back that does pretty fast solving for the right kind of problem [1]. Folks might also find this Sudoku benchmarking blog post interesting [2], it includes links to solutions in a bunch of languages.

1) http://sabrlang.org/sudoku

2) http://attractivechaos.wordpress.com/2011/06/19/an-incomplet...