Sudoku Puzzles The History
Years ago, barely anyone knew what Sudoku is. The name Sadako, a character from a Japanese horror movie was more popular then. That was then and this is now.
In record time, Sudoku has become a household name not only in the United States but also in the United Kingdom and in other European countries as well.
Newspapers, both in the US and in the UK, have started to subscribe and feature Sudoku puzzles in their pages. Websites dedicated to Sudoku puzzles have been published. There are even forums that are created solely to discuss Sudoku.
Sudoku is a number puzzle that reqires logic. It is composed of a 9 x 9 board that has 9 columns, 9 rows and 9 larger regions. In each of the larger regions, there are 9 smaller cells that the player must fill in with numbers 1-9. The difficult part of the puzzle is that the numbers 1-9 must only appear once in every column, row and region. Since every cell is interconnected, you really have to think before putting any number in a cell.
The word Sudoku is a combination of several Japanese words. Su means ‘number’ while doku refers to the space in the puzzle where the number should be placed. Although, the puzzle became really popular in Japan and eventually gained ground there, there are reports that its origins is actually American and European. This perhaps explains the fascination that westerners have for this puzzle.
According to history, Sudoku was apparently based on a development by a Swiss Mathematics genius named Leonhard Euler. He called his 18th century creation the ‘latin square’ where numbers appear only once in each row and column. In the 1970s, United States based magazine Dell published puzzles that are similar in concept with the Euler grids. The magazine named the puzzle section ‘Number Place’. It was the brainchild of puzzle maker Howard Garns.
It was only in the 1980s that Japan caught the Sudoku puzzle bug. Japanese puzzle giant Nikoli Inc. published its own version of the 9 x 9 grid puzzle, stating that only 30 clues should be given to the players and no more. It became a hit among the Japanese people, appearing in major newspapers and magazines in the country. It was also Nikoli that gave it the name Sudoku.
Two decades after, the Times newspaper in London started publishing Sudoku puzzles inside their pages. It was due to the efforts of a Hong Kong judge who first saw the puzzles in a Japanese bookshop in 1997. Wayne Gould became so fascinated with the puzzles that he developed a software for it. The first puzzle was published in the Times in November of 2004 and became so hugely popular that other British newspapers followed suit and published their own.
The Sudoku player today can actually find a mine of information in the World Wide Web. With just one click of the mouse, they can download Sudoku puzzles that they can enjoy everywhere they go. There are even programs that they can download which can generate different Sudoku puzzles everyday. What is more, they can choose the level of difficulty that will fit their competence in the puzzle.
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