So, do you Sudoku?

On June 30, 2005 residents of Bristol, England woke up to an interesting sight in their crops, according to an article featured in The Guardian. Though many villagers from England’s west country are used to crop circles and other “extraterrestrial” phenomena, they were still a bit surprised to find a large number puzzle visible from hundreds of yard away.

Though its not clear whether the Sudoku number puzzle craze has reached the outer depths of space, its just about everywhere else.

The Game:

Using a 9X9 square grid with nine squares in each block, Sudoku puzzles have one very simple rule:

Fill in the grid so that every row, every column, and every 3X3 block contains the digits 1 through 9, with only one number in each square.

Each puzzle has a predetermined number of digits already filled in. These are called ‘givens.’ Using the givens, the player fills in the remaining numbers according to aforementioned rule of Sudoku. The number of givens and their placement in the grid determine the difficulty level of each puzzle.

The History:

The game, as we have it today, was first published in the late 1970s in Math Puzzles and Logic Problems by Dell magazines. The original name for these puzzles was Number Place.

Throughout the ’90s Sudoku (a japanese word the means “single number”) was one of the bestselling puzzles in Japan and the craze has continued up to this day with more than 600,000 copies of Sudoku coming out every month.

On Nov. 12, 2004, The London Times launched their first Sudoku puzzle. The publishing of Sudoku in the London Times was just the beginning of an enormous phenomenon which swiftly spread all over Britain and its affiliate countries of Australia and New Zealand.

A teacher’s magazine backed by the British government recommended Sudoku as brain exercise in classrooms and suggestions have been made that Sudoku solving is capable of slowing the progression of brain disorder conditions such as Alzheimer’s.

In April 2005 Sudoku arrived in Manhattan as a regular feature in the New York Post. On Monday, July 11, the Sudoku craze spread to other parts of the USA when both The Daily News and USA Today launched Sudoku puzzles on the same day.

Today there are Sudoku clubs, chat rooms, strategy books, videos, mobile phone games, card games, competitions and even a Sudoku game show.

Sudoku has also sprung up in newspapers all over the world and is often called the Rubik’s cube of the 21st century.

But the question is, do you Sudoku?

-mattgo@cc.usu.edu

Sudoku history information used with permission from www.conceptispuzzles.com/articles/sudoku/.