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October 12, 2006
The Sudoku craze
The beauty of the game is that no advanced mathematical skills, formulas or complicated rules are needed which make it pretty appealing to an average person, writes Faridah Hemani
Feel as if engulfed in a mental fog? Try Sudoku, which is one of the biggest mind games to have taken Britain and the whole world by storm. Nearly every daily newspaper of England carries a Sudoku puzzle and the American newspapers are also catching on fast. Its games are also widely available on the Internet and a number of the latest mobile phone models have Sudoku in their games suite.
On most international flights these days, you will see at least a couple of Sudoku fans in your vicinity who will open their Sudoku books and get busy with their erasers, sharpened pencils even before the plane has taken off. Whether its meal service, in-flight entertainment or a wailing infant, nothing can distract them from their quest to solve the puzzle.
If you are wondering what makes Sudoku so addictive and intriguing, unlike most popular word or trivia games we are familiar with like Scrabble, Crossword or Trivial Pursuits, it is a number placement game. The beauty of the game is that no advanced mathematical skills, formulas or complicated rules are needed which makes it pretty appealing to an average person.
The game relies purely on logic, analysis and deduction. The idea is simple. Each puzzle is a grid consisting of nine (three by three) smaller boxes (also called regions) and each region has nine squares. The idea is that the player has to enter digits 1 to 9 in a manner that each row, column and region contains these nine numbers with no repetition whatsoever. Each puzzle comes with a certain number of pre-filled squares called “givens” that will help you get started. Sounds pretty interesting right? You bet it is!
The name of the puzzle is Japanese, but it was originally created by an American, Howard Garns under the name ‘Numbers Place’ in 1976. However, they were published in Japan by the name Sudoku meaning “digits must remain single” in 1986 and that is where they started gaining popularity. As can be expected, the puzzles vary in complexity from easy to evil. It is not the number of ‘givens’ that determine the difficulty level but rather the complexity of the number placement and the necessary degree of analysis required.
Guesswork will take you nowhere but basic techniques like elimination and frequent scanning help in successfully cracking an amateur puzzle. However, more difficult puzzles require a great degree of concentration, frequent backtracking and ‘what-if’ scenario analysis.
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