Many of us love and play Sudoku – this addicting number-placement puzzle. As strange as it may seem, but Sudoku is not an ancient game that appeared somewhere in Asia. It is a rather modern creation that originates from France.
First number puzzles that looked like a 9×9 grid with 3×3 sub-squares partly filled with digits appeared in French Paris-based daily “Le Siecle” in 1892. The puzzles were based on so-called magic squares. A magic square is a mathematical notion designating a square filled with numbers so that the sum in all rows, all columns, and both diagonals is the same number. Those puzzles required rather arithmetic than logic skills to solve them and were not yet Sudoku.
In 1895 the competitor of “Le Siecle”, the newspaper “La France”, simplified the 9×9 magic square puzzles so that each row, column and broken diagonals contained only the numbers from 1 to 9. This was almost the modern Sudoku. These puzzles were a feature of French newspapers for about a decade, but disappeared about the time of World War I.
The modern Sudoku are deemed to be designed anonymously by Howard Garns, a 74-year-old retired American architect and freelance puzzle constructor. The puzzle was called “Number Place” and was first published in 1979 by “Dell Magazines”.
The puzzle was popularized in 1986 by the Japanese puzzle company Nikoli, under the name Sudoku. Sudoku is the abbreviation of a Japanese phrase that can be translated as “the digits must be single”.
In 1997 Wayne Gould, a retired judge from New Zealand saw the puzzle in a Japanese bookshop. He spent more than 6 years on developing a computer program to generate puzzles quickly. He decided to promote Sudoku to British newspapers that had a long history of publishing crosswords and other puzzles. On 12 November 2004 “The Times” launched Sudoku in Britain where it quickly became very popular. In the United States Sudoku appeared in 2004, when New Hampshire newspaper “The Conway Daily Sun” published Sudoku puzzles by Wayne Gould. In 2005 Sudoku became an international hit.
The rules of Sudoku, this super popular puzzle game are rather simple: you are presented a 9×9 grid partly filled with digits. Your aim is to fill every column, row and 3×3 square with digits from 1 to 9, so that each digit appears only once. Usually Sudoku puzzles have different level of difficulty: from simple to very difficult. Though traditionally Sudoku is played on a 9×9 grid that is filled with digits, you can find the variations of Sudoku played on a smaller or a bigger grid or using letters, precious stones or something else instead of digits.
If you want to spend some time on playing Sudoku, you do not necessarily go and buy a newspaper. You can play free Sudoku puzzles online at FreeOnlineSudokuGames.com.
