There are only twelve 4x4 sudokus (and a cool trick for finding minimal subsets)

Re:There are only twelve 4x4 sudokus (and a cool trick for f... by Fran314 on Monday September 14, 2026 @08:10AM (#49695520)

In the last few days I went down the rabbithole of 4x4 sudokus, and found out that (up to permutations) there are only 12 possible solutions.

I decide to write up the small research I did as well as some fun findings discovered along the way in a blog post.

Also, yes this is extremely pointless and silly, and the math involved is not incredibly high level, but I still think it's an enjoyable bit of recreational math worth your time!

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Re:There are only twelve 4x4 sudokus (and a cool trick for f... by redfast00 on Tuesday September 15, 2026 @08:08AM (#49711308)

Did you check for rotational and mirror symmetry? As in, are the 12 unique sudokus just the same one, rotated in 4 ways, and mirrored along the x or y axis?

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Re:There are only twelve 4x4 sudokus (and a cool trick for f... by probably_wrong on Tuesday September 15, 2026 @08:24AM (#49711485)

I was wondering this myself so I wrote a script that shows that there are duplicated puzzles if you count a rotated Sudoku as being equivalent. Here's one example:

Puzzle 2 is

If you rotate it counterclockwise you have

And if you normalize it, replacing the first row with "1234" (brilliant idea from the post), you get

Which is listed as puzzle 7. A quick check gives me that puzzles 1, 2, 3, 5, 11 and 12 would be unique under rotation, but I wrote that check in five minutes so there must be bugs somewhere. Also, I performed no check for mirror symmetry whatsoever (update: I did a quick one, same result).

I don't want to miss my chance to say that the post is brilliant and that it convinced me to leave what I was doing to check for rotations. I was nerd sniped in the best way and I take my hat off for the OP.

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