Sudoku

[Storyteller.]

Sudoku
By Strider (Nat)

The name of the game is Sudoku. You’ve probably heard about it, or even tried this puzzle out for yourself, but how did math become so much fun? Thanks to a retired judge by the name of Wayne Gould, this number game became popular in 1997, even though it has inspiration dating back to the late 1800s. Gould was able to create a computer program that could make the puzzles quickly, making Sudoku the perfect number puzzle to be published throughout newspapers and magazines.

Although he was the creator of the program that made the puzzle, Gould was not the master of numbers who thought up this nine-squared phenomenon. It seems like retired people think alike about number games, or at least have the time to put them together, because the person who came up with the first Sudoku puzzle was actually a retired architect. Howard Garns was a freelance puzzle constructor who was likely inspired by the earlier Latin square puzzles, which are one square with a 3x3 number system. The first Sudoku, then known as ‘Number Place’ was published in 1979 in a magazine called ‘Dell Pencil Puzzles and Word Games’.

So how did ‘Number Place’ become ‘Sudoku’?

The name may lead one to believe that this puzzle is Japanese, but in truth the only Japanese origins are linked to the title. “Suuji wa dokushin ni kagiru” or “the numbers must be single” was the name given to the game by Kaji Maki, the president of the newspaper publisher that introduced it to Japan in 1984. ‘Sudoku’ is the abbreviated form of “Suuji wa dokushin ni kagiru”, with ‘su’ meaning ‘number’ and ‘doku’ meaning ‘single’.

This is one number game that you don’t need to be a math genius to figure out. The only math required is counting! It is played on a 9x9 grid with 3x3 sub-grids. These sub-grids are known as ‘regions’. Some of the squares will be filled in already for you, and they are what help you to figure out the rest of the numbers in the other boxes. The object of the game is to fill in each row and each column with the numbers 1 through 9. These numbers can be in any order from 1 to 9 as long as there is only one copy of the number in each row and column. Now to make it even more tricky, the numbers 1-9 also need to be in each region. One number cannot be repeated in a region, row, or column.

If you want to play more Sudoku, there are lots of puzzles online and in books, as well as in your daily newspaper. Give them a try and see if you can beat your friends! Or if you’re feeling especially pro, you might want to make up your own puzzle. It’s more challenging than it seems!