Some Truly Awful Sudoku

United Launch Alliance, an aerospace industry roll-up of General Dynamics Atlas, Martin Marietta Titan and McDonnell Douglas Delta launch vehicle divisions, put out this incredibly awful set of 9 Sudoku puzzles on Twitter. The purpose was to whip up enthusiasm for the 2021-09-21 launch of Landsat 9.

None of the Sudoku’s has a unique solution, which makes them absolutely no fun. Fortunately, I’ve written a mediocre Sudoku solver which can grind out all possible solutions.

• Upper left, 90 distinct solutions
• Upper middle, 4 distinct solutions
• Upper right, 2 distinct solutions
• Middle left, 185 distinct solutions
• Middle middle, 2 distinct solutions
• Middle right, 135 distinct solutions
• Lower left, 3 distinct solutions
• Lower middle, 19 distinct solutions
• Lower right, 2 distinct solutions

It’s hard to imagine that the ULA intern who did this could have made a worse set of Sudoku puzzles.

If you squint at the 9 sudokus above, you can see that the intern tried to make pixel art with the puzzles. Top right puzzle might be the rough outline of a jet, middle puzzle might be a butterfly, lower left might be an “X”. The bottom middle puzzle just might be a swastika. Holy crap.