Sudoku-the Addictive Numbers Puzzle

▪ 2007

 March 2006 witnessed the first sudoku world championship, in Lucca, Italy. Jana Tylova, a 31-year-old accountant from the Czech Republic, defeated 84 other puzzle solvers from 22 countries in the two-day competition. The event confirmed what fans of the brainteaser already knew: that sudoku (or Su Doku), like the Rubik's cube a generation earlier, had become an international craze.

      In its simplest and most common form, sudoku consists of a 9 × 9 grid with numbers appearing in some of the squares. The object of the puzzle is to fill the remaining squares, using all the numbers 1–9 in each row, column, and 3 × 3 grid. Sudoku is based entirely on logic without any arithmetic involved, and the level of difficulty is determined by the quantity and positions of the original numbers. The puzzle, however, raised interesting combinatorial problems for mathematicians, two of whom proved in 2005 that there are 6,670,903,752,021,072,936,960 possible sudoku grids.

      Although sudoku-type patterns (with a 9 × 9 grid broken into nine 3 × 3 grids) had been used earlier in agricultural design, their first appearance in puzzle form was in 1979 in a New York-based puzzle magazine, which called them Number Place puzzles. They next appeared in a 1984 magazine in Japan, where they acquired the name sudoku (abbreviated from suuji wa dokushin ni kagiru, meaning “the numbers must remain single”). In spite of the puzzle's popularity in Japan, the sudoku explosion had to wait another 20 years.

      In 1997 New Zealander Wayne Gould, a retired judge from Hong Kong, came across a book of sudoku puzzles in Tokyo and decided to develop computer programs for generating them. Seven years later he sent some of his puzzles to The Times (London), which printed its first Su Doku on Nov. 15, 2004. Other British newspapers followed suit, and within a few months sudoku had become a worldwide phenomenon, with the puzzles appearing in newspapers from the U.S. to Finland, South Africa to Costa Rica, and Israel to Singapore. By 2006 hundreds of sudoku books had been published, and addicts could be seen everywhere—in offices, on buses and trains, and on the beach—working with paper and pencils or puzzling over interactive sudoku that had been adapted to mobile phones, video games, and the Internet. In May 2006 Time magazine listed Gould as one of the world's 100 most influential people.

      Meanwhile, a host of variations began to appear. Sudoku puzzles were created in which the diagonal entries had to be different, specified cells had to be odd or even, or the 3 × 3 boxes were replaced by other 9-cell shapes. There were letter puzzles in which a 9-letter word miraculously appeared in a row or column, and “killer” versions in which the numbers in specified groups of cells had given sums. There were larger puzzles with 16 × 16 or 25 × 25 grids, puzzles made from interlinking sudoku grids, and a three-dimensional version in the form of a 3 × 3 × 3 cube.

      As 2006 came to a close, it remained to be seen how long these addictive puzzles would continue to be featured in newspapers and electronic devices. Meanwhile, puzzle lovers wondered: Would sudoku survive, like crosswords, or would it, like the Rubik's cube, be merely a passing fad?

Robin Wilson

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