History of Sudoko The game has become a phenomenon among those who like to while away their tea break or commute to work by exercising their brains with a puzzle (some say it may even stave off the deterioration of mental capability caused by ageing).
Japanese game Translated into English, 'Sudoku' - or 'Su doku' as some call it - means something like "Single Number". One could describe it, also loosely, as a crossword puzzle using numbers instead of words. Of course, it does not demand the same linguistic skills, lateral thought or general knowledge as a crossword. But nor does a Sudoku player have to possess any mathematical skills.
There is no adding up, subtraction, multiplication or division in Sudoku. You do not even need to know that two plus two equals four. But, boy, can it make your brain ache, your pulse race and knuckles whiten as you grip your pen in exasperation or, finally, ecstasy! The classic Sudoku game involves a grid of 81 squares. The grid is divided into nine blocks, each containing nine squares. The object of the game is this: Each of the nine blocks has to contain all the numbers 1-9 within its squares. Sound easy? It is& and yet it isn't. The difficulty lies in that each vertical nine-square column, or horizontal nine-square line across, within the larger square, must also contain the numbers 1-9, without repetition or omission. The creator of a particular puzzle will have filled in several of the squares to set you on your way. The rest is up to your ability to employ simple logic. Addicts claim a factory hand can be as adept at Sudoku as a university professor.
Swiss origins Plagued by eyesight problems that eventually led to blindness, Euler nevertheless produced formulas in every branch of mathematics, wrote 886 books and papers and also found the time and energy to father 13 children. But the idea that is saluted every day, albeit unknowingly, by fans of Sudoku is Euler's "Latin Squares", which he introduced in 1783 as a "nouveau espece de carres magiques", which translates as "a new kind of magic squares". This was a grid of equal dimensions in which every number or symbol occurs once in each row or column. It differs from the Sudoku grid only in that the latter is subdivided into blocks of nine. Sudoku's modern worldwide vogue can be traced back to the early 1980s, when it appeared in an American puzzle magazine under the name of the "Number Place" game. This was noted by the Japanese puzzle magazine publishers Nikoli. Its attraction was that it transcended language barriers and, in any case, Japanese does not lend itself to crosswords because of the nature of its alphabet. Nikoli copied the idea and introduced it to its readers in 1984. It was such a hit that there are now five Sudoku magazines published in Japan each month, with a total circulation of 660,000. The Sudoku name is registered as a trademark in Japan, so rivals run it under the original US name of Number Place.
World championships It has been said that in a classic 81-square Sudoku grid, the fewest number of squares that can be filled in by the creator for the reader to have any chance of finishing the puzzle is 19. But no one seems yet to have calculated how many Sudoku variations there could be. Some websites claim the possibilities are infinite, though mathematically, that surely cannot be so. One new fan, retired academic Dr Maya Slater, plays Sudoku each day after lunch over a cup of coffee and piece of chocolate, with her retired hospital consultant husband, Nicky. She says: "The joy is the way it all falls into place suddenly. You have to do a certain amount of reasoning and so you have to exercise your little grey cells. We are told we should keep our brains in trim as we get older and this is a very nice way of doing it. "The fiendish ones are more fun," she adds. "I would recommend making a copy of the grid next to the newspaper as, if mistakes are made, the grid can often disappear under a mass of corrections."
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