Though Dodgson’s condensation method is interesting and
excellently suited to hand-computations [5] since it involves
the evaluation of only 2nd order determinants, it has a great
obstacle: the process cannot be continued when zeros (which
Dodgson called ciphers in his paper [6] ) occur in the interior
of any one of the derived determinants, “since infinite values
would be introduced by employing them as divisors”[6]. A
solution to this problem, as Dodgson suggests, is to rearrange
the original determinant and recommence the operation [6],
[13].