![]() ![]() ![]() I'm surprised and amazed at how popular it has become and I can't really explain it.' I have become good but my wife is much better and does them in about half the time. 'This is light relief and anybody, including immigrants who don't speak the native language, can do it. They published the puzzle the following month and it took off. 'I turned up unannounced at the Times, like an old-fashioned travelling salesman, and got my foot in the door. 'I was on my way to Hong Kong via London,' Gould, 59, recalled. Then last October Sudoku spread to Britain. Gould published one of his puzzles in the local newspaper, the Conway Daily Sun, with success. Gould's wife, Gaye, is a professor of linguistics in New Hampshire in the United States. Over the next six years I developed a computer program that makes up Sudoku puzzles on the spot.' 'As soon as I saw the grid with the empty squares, I felt very tempted to fill them in. While he waited for one shop to open, he browsed in a bookstore. Wayne Gould, a judge who had moved to Hong Kong, was shopping in Tokyo in March 1997. But a man from Matamata, New Zealand, was to become responsible for a global outbreak. The new Sudoku meme remained virtually confined to the Far East for 20 years. From its publication in 1984, it became a sensation in a country where the alphabet is ill-suited to crosswords. Publisher Nikoli made two small improvements to the concept and renamed it Sudoku - in Japanese Su means a number and doku roughly translates as singular or unique. There is a universality to it and it becomes addictive.'Īs Dell continued to quietly churn out Number Place through the Eighties, it was spotted, imitated and embraced in puzzle-obsessed Japan. Although some are more difficult than others, the concept is easy to grasp and it doesn't take for ever to solve. It's accessible to most people and that's part of the charm. But we didn't suspect it would become a global phenomenon.' We decided to feature it more and produced a complete book of Number Place puzzles. Taylor said: 'It was only about five or six years ago that we got a lot more mail from people who said they enjoyed it. We called the puzzle Number Place and still do today.'įor years Dell continued to publish Number Place among numerous other brain teasers. ![]() Its editor-in-chief, Abby Taylor, who joined in 1980, said: 'No one knows exactly when it started or who devised it, but the oldest copy I can find in our archive is 1979. ![]() The realisation that this could become a popular phenomenon was made in Manhattan, New York in the late 1970s by Dell Puzzle Magazines, which has been producing crosswords and other puzzles since 1931. More than two centuries later, the difference for Sudoku players is that the grid is subdivided into blocks of nine. Euler had come up with a grid in which every number or sym bol appears once in each row or column. The Sudoku story began in 1783 when Leonhard Euler, a Swiss mathematician, devised 'Latin Squares', which he described as 'a new kind of magic squares'. The requirement is logic or, for those willing to engage in a fiendish game of trial and error, sheer patience. The goal is to fill in the empty squares so that the figures 1 to 9 appear just once in every row, column and individual block. Dubbed the Rubik's Cube of the 21st century, it consists of a grid of 81 squares, divided into nine blocks of nine squares each. Sudoku - pronounced soo-doe-koo - does not require general knowledge, linguistic ability or even mathematical skill. It is using our brains to propagate itself across the world like an infectious virus.' Dr Susan Blackmore, author of The Meme Machine, said: 'This puzzle is a fantastic study in memetics. Scientists have identified Sudoku as a classic meme - a mental virus which spreads from person to person and sweeps across national boundaries. But its true modern origins lie with a team of puzzle constructors in 1970s' New York, from where it set off on a 25-year journey to Tokyo, London - and back to New York. "Sudoku." Wikipedia: The Free Encyclpedia.Numerous articles have attributed the puzzle, which has a Japanese name, to the mysteries of the Land of the Rising Sun. "Sudoku Math." Ivars Peterson's MathTrek. "NP-complete." Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. "Mathematics of Sudoku." Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. Incognito, Andrew, Laura Hodge, and Collin Witt. "Sudoku Squares and Chromatic Polynomials." Notices of the AMS 54 (2007): 708-717. "Unwed Numbers." American Scientist 94 (2006): 12. "Group (mathematics)." Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. "Enumerating possible Sudoku grids." (2005): 1-7. "A Pencil-and-Paper Algorithm for Solving Sudoku Puzzles." Notices of the AMS 56 (2009): 460-468.įelgenhauer, Bertram, and Frazer Jarvis. "Burnside's Lemma." Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |