Sudoku

I have just been spending 4 hours on a 4x4 Sudoku puzzle where I here after 4 hours sitting in front of the computer find that I have made a mistake and can't find room for the 5 that needs to be somewhere in a quadrant. I can identify in which quadrant the mistake is, but I end up figuring that 4 hours is enough time spend on this.

Sudokuy is really very fascinating, the 3x3 is usually solved in less than 30 minutes, it is a nice way for me to relax, but I have only once had the patience to solve a 4x4 sudoku, that took me something like 4 hours back then.

I have made myself a little programming task of making a Sudoku program of some kind, Sudoku is something that computer programs are much faster at solving than a human brain will probably ever be ... at least if you have anything that resembles as much computing power as what has the everyday person has easily been able to get for the last ~25 years.
Still to make this program I need to learn Java better which right now is the language I am trying to motivate myself to get learned, it's been months since I last did spend time with this, it will probably have to wait until winter like so many other projects involving a lot of sitting down.

Right now I am out working a lot in with geophysics and related things which has me very physically active, if I was to sit down to much now I would get out of shape, it has been hard enough to get myself into physical shape again after the winter, I am kind of planning not to allow myself to get as much out of shape again like I did last winter.

Good old Tetris

I just found this nice little java game and put it on bargheer.dk

I still haven't gotten far enough in my java sessions to be able to make a game like this, but finding this kind of motivated me to get on with my java studies, it would be nice to be able to build online applets like this one.

Where the puzzle came from

I just found out that I have just been rewriting a puzzle made by Einstein :)

The puzzle below is the so called zebra puzzle, I found it in a danish version and made my own translation back to English, it seems there are also some other differences since the solution differs a bit, a bit strange I guess.

A little puzzle

This is solvable without guessing (it's not that hard):

• every house has it's own color
• all residents have a different nationality
• they all have different pets
• all of them drink different drinks
• they all smoke different brands of cigarettes

1. There are 5 houses
2. The Englishman lives in the red house
3. The Swede has a dog
4. In the green house they drink coffee
5. The Dane drinks tea
6. The green house is left of the white one
7. The person that smokes Long has a bird for pet
8. In the yellow house they smoke Kings
9. In the center house they drink milk
   
10. The Norwegian lives in the first house
11. The person smoking Cecil, lives in the house next to where the pet is a cat
12. In the house next to where there is a horse, they smoke Kings
13. The person smoking North state drinks beer
14. The German is smoking Prince
15. The Norwegian lives next to the blue house
16. Water is the drink, next to there where Cecil is being smoked

The big question:
Where does the Zebra live?

If you have got the answer then try and check it against my answer. If you have a different answer that still fits the description that would be quite interesting (I am not totally certain that the solution I came up with is the only possible).