How many Sudoku puzzles are there with at least one solution?

Question

A Sudoku puzzle is a 9 by 9 matrix of blanks(which we can represent as 0), and elements of the set {1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9}. How many Sudoku puzzles are there with at least one solution. Yes, I am even counting grids with no blanks.

Answer 1

Due to Felgenhaur and Jarvis

(see their paper here: http://www.afjarvis.staff.shef.ac.uk/sudoku/sudoku.pdf)

and Fangying, Mengshi, and Aslasksen

(see their paper here: http://www.math.nus.edu.sg/aslaksen/projects/SHI-ZHANG_Sudoku.pdf)

we know that the total possible number of legal 9x9 Sudoku enumerations is $N_{\text{enumerable}}=6670903752021072936960$.

I will provide an upper bound to the number of puzzles with at least one solution solution, $N_{\text{solvable}}$.

Summing up the number of ways we can replace $n$ squares on a given enumerated grid with $0$'s, and then multiplying by the number of legal grids gives

$$N_{\text{solvable}}<N_{\text{enumerable}}\cdot\sum_{n=0}^{81}\binom{81}{n}=6670903752021072936960\cdot2^{81}=16129255571964761146444296776129424146741329920\approx1.62\times10^{46}$$

This is only an upper bound because it will certainly be an over-count (this is easy to see), so I welcome any refinements to this upper bound as edits below my post.

Answer 2

Building off of user 155385's answer we can get a lower bound as well as tighten the upper bound. You need at least 17 clues to solve a sudoku puzzle, and it's believed (albeit not proven) that any more than 40 clues uniquely determine a solution (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematics_of_Sudoku#Maximum_number_of_givens).

If we trust this maximum value of 40, then a lower bound is $$N_{enumerable}*(\binom{81}{81} +\binom{81}{80} + ... + \binom{81}{41}) = N_{enumerable}*1208925819614629174706176$$

Where we are choosing grids with 81 clues filled in, then 80 clues filled in, and so on.

We can also sharpen the upper bound slightly to

$$N_{enumerable}*(\binom{81}{81} +\binom{81}{80} + ... + \binom{81}{17}) = N_{enumerable} * 2417851466759455344675448.$$ The ratio between lower and upper bounds here is almost exactly 1:2.