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

I love articles where a seemingly simple puzzle turns out to be much more interesting when you look at it from the perspective of math and code. It’s especially interesting to learn that there aren’t actually that many possible 4×4 Sudoku grids. I also enjoy working with puzzles and creating my own crosswords in SuperColoring. Articles like this make me want to try creating a more unusual crossword and see how much harder it would be to solve.

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!