So, Sudoku isn't Japanese?

Jun 17, 2006 14:29

I must be blamed for being an ignoramus to think that Sudoku originated from Japan.

Reading an article in theSun yesterday gave me the impression that Sudoku's Swedish, American, New Zealand, British and Japanese promoters have all a claim in its birth and popularity that stretch across two centuries. And it was a computer software that propelled it to stardom today!

I first saw the Sudoku craze in London last year--from airport lounge to bookshops and newspaper pages that syndicate crossword puzzles--thinking that it had spread from Japan to England. Wrong. From the write-up, I now realize that last year, Sudoku became a regular feature in a newspaper in New York, and that completes Sudoku's westward travel around the world, from 1979 to 2005, starting from the US to Japan, and then from Japan to the UK.



Wow! What magic has Sudoku got that a simple-looking 9 x 9-square, number-based puzzle can generate such a feverish following across the world? And with that Japanese-sounding name, it wasn't from Japan?


A quick check on Wikipedia tells me that Sudoku is a shortened form of a longer Japanese phrase "Suji Wa Dokushin Ni Kagiru", which means "the digits must remain single". Someone must have shortened it to "sudoku".

The long and the short of it is that Sudoku can be traced back to an 18th-Century Swiss mathematician by the name of Leonhard Euler. He devised the Latin Square, a square 9 x 9 grid in which all the digits from 1 to 9 appear in every row and column--and never got repeated. It was a forerunner of Sudoku, and the time was 1783!

Fast-forward to some 200 years later when Howard Garns, a retired American architect, used the concept of the Latin Square to create a puzzle, which was then referred to as the Number Place that was featured in a puzzle magazine for the esoteric. The time was 1979. Same 9 x 9 square in a bigger frame of 9 x 9 square, and the digits 1 to 9 don't get repeated. But it remained obscure even to the esoteric.

The craze boomed in 1984 when a Japanese puzzle magazine adopted the Number Place for the local audience. It took a short two years to make Sudoku a hit in Japan, but the rest of the whole world took much longer to catch the fever.

In 2004, Wayne Gould, a retired Hong Judge who is a New Zealander, discovered Sudoku on his trip to Japan. Impressed, he developed a computer program that could generate Sudoku puzzles automatically. He subsequently convinced The Times of London to carry the puzzles in November 2004, probably the first ever in an English newspaper.

Syndication in mainstream press went across the Atlantic Ocean when a New York newspaper carried it in April 2005. The rest, as they say, is history. Sudoku captured the world, from the west to the east, and then back to the west spanning 26 years from 1979 to 2005.

Sudoku is, after all, not about mathematics but about logic, and the permutations do not get beyond nine non-repeatable digits. Practically anybody with a clear sense of reasoning, or logic, can solve the Sudoku puzzles. It thus appeals to the masses.

Today, Sudoku has been turned into community competitions, TV game shows, teletext service, video games for PSP, and games for i-mode mobile phones... The mutations may not stop just here.

The stupid thing is, all this while, I got all mixed up on its origin--until yesterday.

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