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Tue 24 May, 2005 10:17 pm
Crazy about Sudoku - Japanese number puzzle conquers Britain
at 17:49 on May 24, 2005, EST.
JILL LAWLESS
LONDON (AP) - Britain has a new addiction.
Hunched over newspapers on crowded subway trains, sneaking secret peeks in the office, a puzzle-crazy country is trying to slot numbers into small checkerboard grids. It's Sudoku - a sort of crossword without words that has consumed the country.
"There's something about that grid with its empty squares - it's just crying out to be filled in," said Wayne Gould, a retired judge and puzzle aficionado who helped spark Britain's love affair with the game.
A Japanese brainteaser that has quietly appeared in puzzle magazines in Asia and North America for years, Sudoku hit Britain in the pages of the Times newspaper in November. It now has thousands of avid followers, a host of websites and books, and runs daily in eight national newspapers, which compete fiercely to offer their readers the best puzzle.
The Independent offers four a day, of varying levels of difficulty. The Guardian boasts that its puzzle is "hand-crafted by its Japanese inventors," rather than spawned by a computer like the others. The Times is offering a version for mobile phones. The Daily Telegraph promises a 3-D "ultimate Sudoku" version.
The name, which translates roughly as "the number that is alone," has become a handy catch-phrase. A Times columnist wrote dismissively about Prime Minister Tony Blair's recent cabinet shuffle: "It is not exactly Sudoku, is it?"
Sudoku consists of a grid of nine rows of nine boxes, which must be filled in so the numbers one through nine appear just once in each column, row and three-by-three square.
It looks like arithmetic, but requires the application of logic. It can be fairly straightforward or fiendishly difficult.
"I think the attraction is that you can definitely get it right," said Anton Viesel, a 23-year-old London bookseller. "It's very satisfying."
But alongside the joy of Sudoku success comes the frustration of failure. Websites ring with the cries of the addicted.
"I have got a stiff neck from sitting hunched over, a headache from concentrating too long and the house is covered in the bits of rubber you get" when erasing, Sudoku sufferer Amanda Masterman wrote on one Web site.
While its name is Japanese, Sudoku is a variation on Latin Squares, developed in the 18th century by Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler as a variation on an older puzzle, Magic Squares.
Marcel Danesi, a professor of semiotics at the University of Toronto and author of The Puzzle Instinct, said Magic Squares can in turn be traced to Lo Shu, an ancient Chinese puzzle.
Japanese publisher Nikoli Inc. claims to have introduced the puzzle to Japan in the 1980s from the United States, where it was called Number Place. It features in a variety of Japanese magazines and books, but lacks the public profile it has achieved in Britain, where it has been discussed on daytime talk shows and evening news programs.
The British boom can be traced to Gould, a New Zealander who discovered Sudoku on a visit to Tokyo in 1997. He created a computer program that generates the puzzles, then offered them for free to the Times. He now supplies puzzles to newspapers in a dozen countries, including the United States.
Sudoku's success in Britain is partly due to fierce newspaper competition, and partly to a deeply ingrained puzzle-solving habit in this country of Scrabble-lovers and cryptic-crossword addicts.
"I think there's something in the British personality - they like their puzzles hard," said the 59-year-old Gould.
Some argue that Sudoku fever will fade once newspapers lose interest. Danesi says the puzzle - like past sensations such as 1980s icon Rubik's Cube - is likely to retain a strong following even when it has faded from the headlines.
He says it is one of the classic puzzle types, enduring mind-benders whose appeal runs deep.
"It seems to be part of the human system of everyday life to do puzzles," Danesi said. "In a small, minuscule way, solving a puzzle gives us relief from the larger philosophical puzzles."
But Sudoko is pisseasy. I can do one in a couple of minutes and I've only done 3. It's little but a process of elimination.
Maybe I'm an idiot savant. Certainly got the first part down.
never bloody heard of it!
It's just started appearing in the Murdoch papers in Oz, literally in the last week.
smorgs wrote:never bloody heard of it!
I had no idea what it is either.
Quote:Way of the World
(Filed: 17/05/2005)
Nine things you didn't know about Sudoku
1) Sudoku is the name of the game that's sweeping the nation. It consists of a grid of 81 squares, divided into nine blocks of nine squares each. Some of the squares contain a figure. The point of the game is to try to get to the end of the instructions before losing concentration and/or falling asleep.
2) The Sudoku story begins in 1741, when Professor Hans Sudoku, widely regarded by his contemporaries as the most boring man in the world, attempted to liven up his dinner parties by placing prototype versions of today's Soduku puzzles beside each placement. According to the professor's calculations, the drop-out rate after the first course immediately fell by 31 per cent. It took Professor Sudoku's new puzzle a further 261 years before it caught on.
3) In the past few weeks, the craze has caught on in Britain in a big way. In their general election manifestos, both major parties placed emphasis on "facing up to the challenge and opportunities of Sudoko" (New Labour) and "ensuring Sudoku is more accountable to the hard-working taxpayer" (Conservatives).
4) In their famous joint party political broadcast, Prime Minister Tony Blair and his Chancellor, Gordon Brown, were due to be filmed by director Anthony Minghella helping one another crack a particularly tricky Sudoku. Sadly, shortly after filming began, the two men fell out over whether the fifth number from the left on the top row was a six or a three, and Brown tore up the puzzle, saying there was no point carrying on if Blair was going to be like that. Minghella then switched his filming plans to a fireside chat performed largely by body-doubles.
5) Sudoku has now been taken up by more than 179 different radio and television shows across the British Isles. In a bid to boost the show's ratings, the producers of the ailing Top of the Pops have recently introduced a special "Sudoku Slot", in which every week a well-known pop singer tackles a Sudoku live in the studio while performing his or her latest hit single. This week, Kelly Osbourne sings One Word while getting to grips with a medium-to-tricky Sudoku.
6) All this week, Thought for the Day presenters on Radio 4's Today programme will begin by musing on the popularity of Sudoku. "When we manage to puzzle out a Sudoku, we experience a burst of happiness," says the Rev Susan Spice on Wednesday's programme, "and to me this is - in a very real way - a glimpse of the Kingdom of Heaven". Rabbi Leo Finch agrees. "In a funny sort of way, life is like a game of Sudoku," he reflects on Friday. "Yes, we may fill in all the boxes, but we are still left feeling empty".
7) British newspapers have taken to Sudoku in a big way. Last Friday, the Guardian promised readers "The only newspaper section with Sudoku on every page!" while the Independent suggested that one of its readers could become a grand master in the first Sudoku Championship of Great Britain. Meanwhile, on Page 3 of the Sun all this week, a different topless model sucks on a pencil and pouts her lips in puzzlement while trying to work out that day's Sudoku. In yesterday's Times, Lord Rees-Mogg sagely predicted that "the next leader of the Conservative Party will undoubtedly be the man or woman who manages to exhibit the most complete grasp of Sudoku. Step forward, Mrs Edwina Currie".
8) Channel 4 is giving over its entire August schedule to daily, peak-time showings of "Celebrity Sudoku", in which eight top celebrities are locked up in a house with only a pile of Sudokus for entertainment. Inside sources suggest that the celebrities deal with it in different ways. Jade Goody starts to eat the pile of Sudokus, before being told by celebrity brainbox Carol Vorderman that it is not a meal, and busty model Jordan walks out and slams the door in a tantrum when fiery chef Gordon Ramsay ruins her Sudoku by spitting on it.
Later in the series, former top Tory Iain Duncan Smith is voted out by viewers after going no further than his socks in Strip Sudoku.
9) The Sudoku craze shows no signs of abating. Artist Tracey Emin has announced that her new installation at Tate Modern will be called My Head's in a Mess Cos I Can't Bloody Work it Out, Can I? and will consist of over 9,000 discarded Sudokos. And David and Victoria Beckham have just announced that their new baby, due out soon, is to be called Sudoku Beckham. Associates say the baby is named after what the couple were doing when the baby was conceived.
Source
Who needs a puzzle that you can solve using the web?
http://www.sudokusolver.co.uk/
edited for a missed word....
that's very kind of you hingehead...I'll go and get 'crazy' about it.
Here is one See if you can solve it.
I'm addicted. My housemate and her b/f are addicted. My sister would be if she had time, as would her hubby.
I brought a book of the puzzles to tday festivities. The b-in-l said he thought they were ridiculously easy, so I had him try the 'very hard' puzzle. He did it, but it took a couple hours. Not so easy.
They definitely vary in difficulty. Games magazine has an article this month about the guy who wrote the program. The puzzles have been around earlier, but the whole thing really took off when it became somewhat easy to construct them on computer. Definitely addicted.
Another site:
http://www.websudoku.com/
Some it on the bus
or at home
- but at first in the paper which offers that for it's readers: the Guardian :wink:
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