by Steve Hall

Have you ever played with a Rubik’s Cube? You may have mastered the Rubik’s cube and are looking for a greater challenge. Try the puzzle game called Sudoku. Sudoku is a number placement puzzle that requires logic skills and patience. It is a fantastic puzzle game that can be found in newspapers, books and on puzzles and games websites.

How do you play Sudoku?

The Sudoku puzzle consists of a series of grids. The grids include one large 9 x 9 grid that houses, nine 3 x 3 smaller grids. The purpose of the game is to place a number from 1-9 in each of the grid cells. You don’t have to worry about finding the sum of the numbers of the rows, columns, like in Magic Squares.

No addition is involved; however there are three conditions that rely on each other and must be followed. Each number 1-9 can appear only once in each column, once in each row, and once in each small 3 x 3 grid. Mathematically, Sudoku puzzles are a derivation of Latin Squares.

The puzzle was designed anonymously by Howard Garns, a 74-year-old retired architect and freelance puzzle constructor, and first published in 1979.[12] Although likely inspired by the Latin square invention of Leonhard Euler, Garns added a third dimension (the regional restriction) to the mathematical construct and (unlike Euler) presented the creation as a puzzle, providing a partially-completed grid and requiring the solver to fill in the rest. The puzzle was first published in New York by the specialist puzzle publisher Dell Magazines in its magazine Dell Pencil Puzzles and Word Games, under the title Number Place (which we can only assume Garns named it).

The puzzle was introduced in Japan by Nikoli in the paper Monthly Nikolist in April 1984 as Suuji wa dokushin ni kagiru, which can be translated as “the numbers must be single” or “the numbers must occur only once” (it literally means “single; celibate; unmarried”). The puzzle was named by Kaji Maki, the president of Nikoli. At a later date, the name was abbreviated to Sudoku (pronounced as American English SUE-dough-coo; sU = number, doku = single); it is a common practice in Japanese to take only the first kanji of compound words to form a shorter version.

Sudoku players unite! The first world championship was held in Lucca, Italy from 10 to 12 March 2006 [18]; it was won by Jana Tylova, a 31-year-old accountant from the Czech Republic. The competition included variants.

Challenge Me, LLC will be hosting the first national face-to-face Sudoku competition in the United States and the largest Sudoku tournament to date. Scheduled to begin in Chicago, Illinois on June 10-11, 2006 participants from 32 regional tournaments will compete to become the champion of their region. The Regional Champions will then compete in a National Final to become the 2006 Sudoku Champions winner and win a $50,000 grand prize (http://www.sudokuchampions.com).

The United States Sudoku Association Inc. [19] is another corporation hosting tournaments across the United States. Currently, they are sponsoring a tournament for charity for the American Legion. Their website also includes a forum.

Based on Wikipedia information for Sudoku - Article Copyright information