Quinn Whitesall
January 25, 2008
English 101 Block 4
History of…
Sudoku
Sudoku, an extremely popular puzzle game, has spread across the world like wildfire in places like the United States, Europe, Japan, and New Zealand. The object of the puzzle is to get the numbers one through nine in each three by three block, and each column and row to appear only once. It may sound difficult at first, but it is actually very easy to catch on and it is good, clean fun for people of all ages. Many recommend this puzzle to exercise your brain and prevent, or at least slow down the process of brain disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease. Today, there are Sudoku clubs, strategy books, videos, chat rooms, card games, a game show, and competitions. Sudoku is not just a fun puzzle game; it has a very interesting history that dates back to 1793 when the puzzle was first created.
Many people may think that Sudoku originated in Japan. Actually, a Swiss mathematician named Leonhard Euler invented a grid called “Latin Squares” in 1793. His invention has similar concepts and principles as today’s Sudoku. Many years later, in 1979, a retired architect by the name Howard Garns presented the “Latin Squares” as a puzzle. However, he gave the puzzle a twist by adding a few more three by three grids. Garns named his creation “Number Place” and it was published as a partly-completed grid where the solver had to fill in the rest of the numbers. The rules stayed the same: you could not repeat the numbers one though nine in the same three by three block, column, or row. It was published in Dell Magazine’s Pencil Puzzles and World Games later that year.
It was not until the year 1984 that the puzzle was introduced to Japan where it picked up the name Sudoku. The puzzle first operated in Japan in the Monthly Nikolist in April of that year under the name “Suji wa dokushin ni kagiru.” This translates to “single,” “celibate,” “unmarried.” However, it is common in the Japanese language to shorten the terms to the first two Kanji characters, which is where the term “Su Doku” came from. “Su Doku” means “single number.” Five years later, DigiHunt, the first home computer version of Sudoku was published by Loadstar/Softdisk Publishing on the Commodore 64.
In 1997, a retired Hong Kong judge from New Zealand found a partially completed puzzle in a bookshop in Japan. He then developed a computer program over the next six years to make these puzzles quickly. Since puzzles were popular in the British Times, he decided to promote the puzzle under the title “Sudoku.” Sudoku was launched in the British Times on November 12, 2004 and have been printed daily since. Three days after the British launched Sudoku, Australia and New Zealand published these puzzles under the name “Codenumer.”
Today, Sudoku goes by many names, such as: “Nine Numbers,” “Single Number,” “Codenumber,” “Number Place,” and of course “Sudoku.” There are now more than six-hundred thousand copies of Sudoku magazines published in Japan everyday. Sudoku is the new craze and is competing with crosswords and other variety puzzle magazines for the shelves of newsstands. It is said that Sudoku is “the Rubik’s cube of the twenty-first century” and is the “fastest growing puzzle in the world.”
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*Quote from mom fro minterview.
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