![]() ![]() In its usual form, it is made up of a nine-by-nine grid, with heavy lines dividing it into nine three-by-three boxes. Sudoku is a simple puzzle with no tricks or twists built into it. Whatever the case, Garns' number placement puzzle is now considered to be the blueprint for modern-day Sudoku. It is unclear whether Garns was familiar with either Euler's puzzle or the prototype puzzles carried by the French newspapers in the late nineteenth century. ![]() Sudoku, I mentioned to the reporter, seems to simply expand upon Euler's invention. A Latin square is a square arrangement of digits placed in such a way that no digit appears twice in the same row or column. After being told by the AP reporter what Sudoku was all about, I pointed out to her that the idea can probably be traced back to magic squares or to "Latin Squares," invented by Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler (1707-1783). Magic squares are number placement puzzles, but are solved by considering the actual value of a number since, in a magic square, the rows, columns, and diagonals must all add up to the same total (known as the magic constant). And, of course, there are magic squares, which go back to ancient times in China. These were not really Sudoku yet, since they could be solved in more than one way. By early 2005, Sudoku became a craze in Britain, quickly spreading throughout the globe from there, joining crosswords as a permanent feature of puzzle pages in newspapers.įor the sake of historical accuracy, it should be mentioned that number placement puzzles started appearing in newspapers in the latter part of the nineteenth century in Europe, and especially in France. A few months later Sudoku puzzles started appearing in The Times of London. These appeared in 2004 in the Conway Daily Sun of New Hampshire. In 1997, a retired judge from New Zealand, named Wayne Gould, saw a Sudoku puzzle and started making his own. Within a year, major Japanese dailies were carrying the increasingly popular puzzle. In 1984, an editor for Nikoli magazines in Japan came across one of the puzzles, changed its name to Sudoku (meaning "only single numbers allowed") and included it in his magazines. By the way, the late architect Howard Garns is pegged as being its inventor. It went virtually unnoticed, except by readers of the magazine. Despite its Japanese name, the concept behind Sudoku crystallized in the United States in the form of "Numbers in Place," which appeared for the first time in the May 1979 issue of Dell Pencil Puzzles and Crossword Games magazine. ![]()
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