The Sudoku puzzle in this Sunday edition of Le Monde was horrendously difficult, so after spending one hour with only 4 entries filled, I decided to feed it to the simulated annealing R program I wrote while visiting SAMSI last year. The R program reached the exact (and only) solution in about 6000 iterations, as shown (?) on the graph above. The Sudoku grid is defined in the R program by a 9×9 ma