A cool algorithm to check a Sudoku field?

Question

Does anyone know a simple algorithm to check if a Sudoku-Configuration is valid? The simplest algorithm I came up with is (for a board of size n) in Pseudocode

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Answer 1

One minor optimization you can make is that you can check for duplicates in a row, column, or box in O(n) time rather than O(n^2): as you iterate through the set of numbers, you add each one to a hashset. Depending on the language, you may actually be able to use a true hashset, which is constant time lookup and insertion; then checking for duplicates can be done in the same step by seeing if the insertion was successful or not. It's a minor improvement in the code, but going from O(n^2) to O(n) is a significant optimization.