About sudoku

History of Sudoku

Sudoku is believed to have its origins in the concept of the Latin Square invented in 1783 by Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler. The Latin Square is a way of arranging numbers such that any number or symbol can occur only once in each column or row and is used as a tool in statistical analysis. The additional parameter particular to Sudoku grids is that each region can only have the numbers or other symbols occurring once.

The first known Sudoku game was published in the US in 1979 under the name of Number Place in Pencil Puzzle and Word Games magazine by Dell Magazines. The game was created by Howard Garns, an architect from Indianapolis, and consisted of a 9 x 9 grid with 3 x 3 sub grids contained within it. Dell Magazines still publishes Number Place and Sudoku puzzles today some thirty years later.

Whilst the puzzle format was created in the US the Sudoku name derives from Japan. In 1984 the publishing company Nikoli introduced the puzzle in Japan named by Nikol’s president Kaji Maki as “'Suuji wa dokushin ni kagiru' which means the numbers must be single or unmarried. Since then the name has been shortened to Sudoku.

For years Sudoku was hugely popular in Japan but relatively unknown elsewhere. Then at the end of 2004 a retired Hong Kong judge, Wayne Gould, who had written a computer program to generate his Su Doku puzzles approached The Times about publishing them. On November 12 2004 The Times published their first Sudoku puzzle and a phenomenon began.

The Daily Mail started publishing their version of Sudoku entitled Codenumber three days after The Times and the craze spread quickly across the UK, Australia and New Zealand. The puzzle began increasing in popularity in the US, its country of origin, shortly thereafter. In the last few years versions of the game have appeared on TV via Teletext, Channel 4 and Sky One and many Sudoku sites have sprung up online. There is even now an annual World Sudoku Championship which in April 2008 was held in Goa, India. The winning individual was Thomas Snyder from the US and the winning country team was from the Czech Republic.

In the last few years the general concept of brain training and brain fitness has become increasingly popular, particularly with elderly people who are keen to avoid deteriorating mental faculties. Sudoku is seen as a core part of this brain training genre and there is a significant body of research now being carried out to understand the real effects behind these activities.

Further Sudoko Information

Puzzles 411 - Play the free interactive javascript Sudoku which features thousands of puzzles including adjustable difficulty, size, and type of Sudoku. Save your puzzle ID to play the same puzzle later....  
puzzles411.com

Dartford Living Magazine - Local Dartford information and games....  
dartfordadvertising.co.uk

Free Sudoku Puzzle Generator - 4 Languages - Play Sudoku in your language on your browser or on your PDA/Mobile....  
sudoku.web-share.nl

Auditing Su Doku Puzzles - An approach for creating auditable solutions to Su Doku puzzles within an Excel workbook. It can prove that your solution is one that meets all the criteria for solving Su Doku puzzles or, in some cases, that the original grid does not resolve to a unique solution....  
acba.co.uk

Arcade Special - Thousands of free arcade flash games including popular ones like Angel Fighters, Joe The Rocket, Crazy Koala, Angry Old Wizard, Living room escape, Rocket Man, Spiders....  
arcadespecial.net

Sudoku Solving Made Easy - For those starting out with Sudoku solving this book is a great introduction to some of the techniques you can use....  
mike-hayes.nl

Free Samurai Sudoku Puzzles - Find thousands of free samurai sudoku puzzles to print out and play. The puzzles are grouped into three levels of difficulty - easy, moderate and hard.....  
freesamuraisudoku.com