Sudoku Training for the Brain

Sudoku is the addicting new puzzle craze that is sweeping the globe. Walk along the streets of most major cities worldwide and you’ll be hard-pressed not to see at least a single person bent over a Sudoku puzzle. If you start playing Sudoku, you will learn pretty quickly why it is considered one of the most addictive puzzle games in history.

Sudoku has its origins in the 1700s by a Swiss mathematician named Leonhard Euler. Number puzzles very much like Sudoku have already been in existence and have found publication in many newspapers for over a century now. Howard Garns, a 74-year-old retired architect and freelance puzzle constructor, was considered the designer of the modern Sudoku, originally called the Number Place puzzle. In Japan, publishers abbreviated the phrase ’suuji wa dokushin ni kariru’ which literally meant ‘the digit must remain single’, and came up with the more poplar name, Sudoku.

Sudoku is played on a 9 x 9 grid, made up of nine 3 x 3 sub-grids. The goal of Sudoku is to fill in all the cells with the correct numbers. Sudoku is a simple looking game and yet is very challenging. This is a very low-cost hobby that definitely bestows a good work out for the brain.

Sudoku puzzles are said to be deceptively simple, since a player can start the game quite easily only to find himself later on getting stuck in the middle of the game with no clear puzzle solution in sight. However, if we look at Sudoku puzzles more closely, we can actually identify some basic reference to concepts that are of purely mathematical nature. While Sudoku puzzles appear to continue boggling the minds of many puzzle addicts, it is interesting to note how the puzzles can be solved with relative ease by many computer programs.

But when you first encounter a Sudoku puzzle, there’s no need to think about mathematics. There are lots of schools of thought on the best way to solve your Sudoku puzzle but you can simply start with the obvious. Analysis is the final approach to solving a Sudoku puzzle.

Sudoku: you can learn it in 10 seconds, and yet the logic needed to solve Sudoku is fun, mind-boggling and relaxing - all at once. So try out a little Sudoku today.