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Sudoku
My mother is addicted and my sister – who is far from a mathematical genius, raves about them - perhaps because you don’t have to be any good at mathematics - all that is needed is a grasp of logic. However, it was not until March this year that I had even heard of them. So what is Sudoku and where did it come from?
Sudoku is a logic-based number placement puzzle, the 21st century’s equivalent of the Rubik’s Cube. It is an obsession that divides the population between those who can do it (with or without a struggle) and those who refuse to admit that they just haven’t got the brains for the job. The objective is to fill in a 9 x 9 square grid (broken down into nine mini-grids) with the numbers one to nine, arranged in such a way that each line, column and mini grid contains one of each number.
Sudoku - or something very similar to it - was invented in 1781 by Leonhard Euler, a blind Swiss mathematician. Unable to work from books, he developed the ability to compute complex sums in his head and a talent for composing puzzles. His grid-based puzzle, christened Latin Squares, was virtually identical to Sudoku, yet it remained barely noticed until it turned up - renamed the Number Place Game - in America in the 1980s. It was spotted by Nobuhiko Kanamoto, an employee of a Japanese puzzle magazine, who suggested that it might work for their readership. The Japanese made amendments, rendering the game slightly more difficult than the American version, and renamed it Sudoku, meaning “Number Single”. The name refers to the fact that the numbers are limited to single digits, one to nine. Today there are at least five Japanese Sudoku magazines with a total circulation of 660,000.
In England, the first newspaper to publish Sudoku was The Times in November 2004 and the country’s other newspapers soon followed its lead. In Finland, Sudoku first appeared in Helsingin Sanomat in September 2005. A year later, in November 2005, Sudoku Ristikot, hit the racks. This monthly magazine contains Sudoku puzzles (and solutions) with a difficulty levels ranging from very easy to very hard. YLE TV2 quickly picked up the baton by launching the world’s first interactive mobile Sudoku on TV, played by viewers using SMS messages.
Gripped by Sudoku fever, it was not surprising that a Finnish mathematician, Dr Arto Inkala, was soon claiming to have created the world’s hardest Sudoku puzzle. Known as ‘AI Escargot’, because it looks like a snail (AI are the initials of Arto Inkala) the puzzle took three months to create.
“Escargot demands those tackling it to consider eight casual relationships simultaneously while the most complicated variants attempted by the general public only require people to think of one or two combinations at any one time”, Inkala said. AI Escargot has, however, been solved by Sudoku experts but its creator has promised to produce more challenging versions, with the aid of computers (as was Escargot).
For those unable to solve AI Escargot, Dr Inkala has written a book “AI Escargot - The Most Difficult Sudoku Puzzle”. The synopsis of the book reads: “This book contains AI Escargot, the world famous Sudoku puzzle which became the most difficult Sudoku puzzle known in 2006. There are also several hints for solving AI Escargot in the shortest and most logical way……. The author, Arto Inkala, is a puzzle creator and a doctor of science in the field of applied mathematics.”
For those unable to find a copy of Dr Inkala’s book, Anygraaf Oy has created an easy-to-use Sudoku Generator on the internet. According to their web site, the Generator can create puzzles and solutions with varying levels of difficulty for print or web publication. The internet Sudoku Generator can publish Sudoku puzzles directly to the internet in an interactive format. Users can dynamically generate new Sudoku puzzles themselves in either of the three difficulty levels. Hints are available via a button, which adds one number to the puzzle at a time. A demo of the web Sudoku is available at www.anygraaf.fi/sudoku.
Mike Bangle is the owner of Talking English language consultancy and can be contacted at mike.bangle(at)phnet.fi
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