About Sudoku

Sudoku - or something very similar to it - was invented by Leonhard Euler, an 18th-century mathematical virtuoso from Basle. When Euler lost his sight in early middle age and was unable to work from books, he developed the ability to compute complex sums in his head and a talent for composing puzzles.

In the 1780s Euler invented a grid-based puzzle (with a blank grid sudoku), which he christened Latin Squares. It was, in all material aspects, 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. More on sudoku history

The Japanese made amendments, rendering the game slightly more difficult than the American version, and renamed it Sudoku, meaning Number Single (sometimes called samurai sudoku). The name plucks two words from the explanation that ran alongside the first puzzles and refers to the fact that the numbers are limited to singles, one to nine. Today there are at least five Japanese shack Sudoku magazines with a total circulation of 660,000. "The beauty of Sudoku is that it is so easy to grasp the concept," Kanamoto told The Sunday Telegraph last week, "yet it has depth. You can no more get bored of Sudoku than you can get bored of reading novels."

The game caught the attention of Wayne Gould, a 59-year-old New Zealand lawyer and puzzle fan. He spent six years developing a computer programme to mass-produce the puzzles, and brought the concept to Britain. It began appearing in The Times last November and has since spread to the puzzle page of almost every national newspaper. Britain's first Sudoku magazine, Sudoku Selection, launched by the German publisher Bauer, is about to hit the streets. A mobile phone version is already up and running. Television pilots are being planned. Is the country heading for a mass Sudoku seizure?

The source of this article is Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.

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