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sudoku, the new international craze.

"Sudoku (Japanese: ﾂ絶?昶?愿? sūdoku)

ometimes spelled Su Doku, is a placement puzzle, also known as Number Place in the United States. The aim of the puzzle is to enter a numeral from 1 through 9 in each cell of a grid, most frequently a 9ﾂ×9 grid made up of 3ﾂ×3 subgrids (called "regions"), starting with various numerals given in some cells (the "givens"). Each row, column and region must contain only one instance of each numeral. Completing the puzzle requires patience and logical ability. Its grid layout is reminiscent of other newspaper puzzles like crosswords and chess problems. Sudoku initially became popular in Japan in 1986 and attained international popularity in 2005.
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History of Sudoku

Originally called simply Number Place, the first puzzle was created by Howard Garnes, a freelance puzzle constructor, in 1979. The puzzle was first published in New York in the late 1970s by the specialist puzzle publisher Dell Magazines in its magazine Dell Pencil Puzzles and Word Games, under the title Number Place. The puzzle was introduced in Japan by Nikoli in the paper Monthly Nikolist in April 1984 as "Sūji wa dokushin ni kagiru (ﾂ絶?敘ｽﾅ｡窶堙坂?愿?身窶堙嫁津?窶堙ｩ)", which can be translated as "the numbers must be single" or "the numbers must occur only once" (窶愿?身 literally means "single; celibate; unmarried"). The puzzle was named by Kaji Maki (ﾃｨGﾅｽﾂ｡ ﾂ真窶ｹN), the president of Nikoli. At a later date, the name was abbreviated to Sudoku (ﾂ絶?昶?愿? pronounced sue-do-koo; sū = number, doku = single); it is a common practice in Japanese to take only the first kanji of compound words to form a shorter version. In 1986, Nikoli introduced two innovations which guaranteed the popularity of the puzzle: the number of givens was restricted to no more than 30 and puzzles became "symmetrical" (meaning the givens were distributed in rotationally symmetric cells). It is now published in mainstream Japanese periodicals, such as the Asahi Shimbun. Within Japan, Nikoli still holds the trademark for the name Sudoku; other publications in Japan use alternative names.

In 1989, Loadstar/Softdisk Publishing published DigitHunt on the Commodore 64, which was apparently the first home computer version of Sudoku. At least one publisher still uses that title.

Professor Yoshimitsu Kanai published his computerized puzzle generator under the name "Single Number" (the English translation of Sudoku) for the Apple Macintosh in 1995 in Japanese and English, and in 1996 for the Palm (PDA).

Kappa reprints Nikoli Sudoku in GAMES Magazine under the name Squared Away; the New York Post, USA Today, and San Francisco Chronicle now also publish the puzzle. It is also often included in puzzle anthologies, such as The Giant 1001 Puzzle Book (under the title Nine Numbers).

Bringing the process full-circle, Dell Magazines, which published the original "Number Place" puzzle, now publishes two Sudoku magazines: Original Sudoku and Extreme Sudoku."

wikipedia: Sudoku
 
I was in Boston recently and I must have seen 30 people with those Sudoku books. They run them in the paper there too.
 
My mother (bless her) occasonally sends over newpaper clippings from the UK if she thinks they're interesting. From some of her recent stuff it would seem that "Sudoku" has taken off in a big way over there. Funny really, I've never seen a single person doing a puzzle in Japan. My fiancee didn't even know what it was.

I've seen numerous different 'histories' of the game, some suggesting European roots, some American. They all seem to agree though that it was made popular in Japan, even if not invented here.
 
I cannot imagine playing this game with pencil/paper on a book or newspaper. You'd be doing a lot of erasing, that's for sure.

Keiichi

 
is this the same game you get in "the sun" newspaper?
 
And the Mail, The Times, and pretty much all the others... "The Sun" version just has 2 squares, with one already filled in.
 
About sums up the Sun really. I have done them on ocassion, but get bored after a while.
 
Silverpoint said:
Funny really, I've never seen a single person doing a puzzle in Japan. My fiancee didn't even know what it was.
Click to expand...

At a company I worked for some years ago we generally had a puzzle magazine in the breakroom, with a couple or three people working on the crosswords pretty seriously and practically everyone kibitzing from the sidelines. The absolute hardest ones, in my opinion, are the 100% kanji puzzles with no clues, just a theme. Among the more gratifying of my experiences has been to beat my Japanese coworkers to a couple of them. Among the more humbling of my experiences has been to watch the way they ripped right them them and left me choking on their dust.
 
hmmm, I've seen quite a lot of people doing the Sudoku puzzles, but I never tried them myself. It looks quite difficult... I can do math puzzles, but it takes me quite a long time and I have to totally follow 'logical' way; I have no natural instinct for that kind of thing. I'm better at things like crosswords. In English or French! My Japanese is... practically non-existant, really.

Maybe I should try Sudoku? :?
 
They're actually quite easy to do. It has nothing to do with math. It's all about which numbers can possibly go into a square and which numbers can not. I downloaded a shareware sudoku generator and played the hell out of it during the trial period. While it remained hypnotically transfixing, it became amazingly simpler to do. The only challenge to the thing is to start with fewer and fewer numbers. I ended up averaging about 25 minutes on the "hard" setting.
 
I first saw Sudoku, maybe, in 1995 or so--- maybe 1997, in Tokion magazine--- I've never even heard a Japanese person mention them--- though I know that the puzzle's popularity has been on the rise lately oddly enough---
 
oh, i have seen Sudoku at least in three newspapers here in Latvia. so it's worldwide craze eh
 
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