Sudoku (pronounced soo-DOH-koo) is a numbers puzzle. The word Sudoku comes
from the Japanese su- (number) and doku- (single).
An American working with Dell Puzzles invented it in 1979 and called it Number
Place. It started appearing in Japanese newspapers
as Suji wa dokushin ni kagiru (the numbers must occur only once) in the
1980s and was already a big hit there, its name shortened to Sudoku, when a
retired judge vacationed in Tokyo in 1997, was hooked playing it, and resolved
to spread it in the West.
The puzzle appeared in the Times newspaper in London
in late 2004, where it became a craze, leading to published books, television
game shows, and Sudoku tournaments. The public bought more books on Sudoku than
the latest volume of Harry Potter.
Now, the puzzle appears in over 400 newspapers worldwide, including a
growing number in the United States.
Sudoku aficionados compare the spread of the puzzle to the Rubik’s Cube craze
in the early 1980s.
Sudoku’s Appeal
The central appeal of Sudoku is its simplicity. The puzzle is a nine-by-nine
square grid with nine three-by-three mini grids. The goal is to fill the entire
grid so that every row, column, and mini grid contains the numbers 1 through 9,
each number appearing only once in each row, in each column, and in each
mini-grid.
Some of the boxes in the grid already contain numbers that act as clues,
like a crossword puzzle with some of the letters written in. The puzzle solver
starts with these clues and tries to guess how to arrange the other numbers so
that the number appears only once in the row, column, and mini grid.
Each puzzle has only one solution, and one does not have to be a genius or
good at math to solve it. Solving a Sudoku puzzle meticulously demands logic
and patience. It needs a certain degree of mental concentration and is good for
exercising the memory. All these make solving the puzzle exciting.