Sudoku, the Number Lover's Puzzle

Sudoku is a puzzle that involves logic, combinations, and placement of numbers in a 9 x 9 grid. The object is to fill the grid up with digits in a pattern where every column, every row, and each one of the 3 by 3 internal grids composing the grid contain all the digits from 1 to 9. The initial beginnings of a Sudoku puzzle are a grid that is partially completed, and the solution to the puzzle is usually unique to each puzzle.

In the late 19th century, French puzzle masters began to experiment with deleting numbers from "magic squares," which were blocks of nine digits. A daily paper based in Paris, Le Siecle, was the first newspaper to publish a partially completed "magic square" of 9 x 9 blocks with 3 x 3 inner squares, in November of 1892. The puzzle was not technically a Sudoku, because the numbers used to fill in the puzzle were double-digit, not single-digit, and you had to solve it using arithmetic, rather than logic. However, the puzzle had some of the key characteristics of Sudoku puzzles - every row, every column, and every 3 x 3 square had to add up to the same number.

In July of 1895, a rival newspaper, La France, tweaked the puzzle format, resulting in a puzzle that was very similar to today's Sudoku. The 9 x 9 magic square puzzle was simpler, with every row, column, and diagonal containing only the digits 1 through 9. There were not nine sub-squares marked, but each 3 x 3 sub-square area was made up of the nine digits and there was only one solution for each puzzle. The weekly number puzzles were featured in French newspapers for about ten years, but they disappeared around the time of World War I.

Today's Sudoku puzzles were probably anonymously designed by Howard Garns, a retired architect in Indiana who is a constructs puzzles as a freelancer. Garns, 74, was a frequent contributor to issues of Dell Pencil Puzzle and Word Games, and the earliest examples of Sudoku were first published by Dell in 1979, with the title Number Place. Although Garns may have been the creator of today's modern Sudoku puzzles, he died in 1989, before he was able to see his creation become a phenomenon around the world.

Sudoku puzzles were first made popular in 1986 by Nikoli, a Japanese puzzle company. The company introduced the puzzle in their monthly newspaper as Suuji wa dokushin ni kagiru, which means "the digits must be single." The name was later abbreviated to simply Sudoku, using the first part of the compound words to create a shorter name. In 1986, two new concepts were introduced by Nikoli; the number of prefilled square was restricted to being 32 or fewer, and the puzzles had to be symmetrical. Sudoku puzzles quickly gained in popularity, with the format being a worldwide phenomenon by 2005.

Sudoku has crept into many facets of entertainment and hobby pursuits. The first newspaper in the US to publish a Sudoku puzzle was The Conway Daily Sun in New Hampshire. The first live television show featuring the puzzle, Sudoku Live, was broadcast in July of 2005 on the Sky One cable TV channel. Nine teams made up of nine players, with one celebrity on each team, represented different geographical areas and competed to solve a single Sudoku puzzle. Every player held a device for entering digits, and the home audience participated in their own interactive competition. The grand prize winner of the series was the team from England, which won more than ₤23,000 throughout a series of games.

Software featuring Sudoku puzzles is popular on hundreds of websites, as well as PCs, iPods, mobile phones, and numerous video game consoles. The puzzle has totally infiltrated many facets of daily life for millions of people. In fact, there has been at least one instance where Sudoku could have actually interfered with the course of justice. In 2008, and Australian jury was trying a drug-related case, at a cost of more than AU$1,000,000, and the trial had to be aborted when it came to light that five of the jurors had been playing Sudoku during testimony, rather than listening to the evidence.