Do you Sudoku? Puzzle has taken country by storm

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BY JOEL GEHRINGER / Lincoln Journal Star

It seems like everyone with Sudoku fever has the same story: They stumble upon it accidentally in some book or newspaper, play it once or twice to test their skill and ride the slippery slope into Sudoku addiction.

Take Jason Brewer, for example. Flipping through the pages of a newspaper last year, he stumbled upon his first Sudoku puzzle.

Looking at the blank grid peppered with numbers here and there, he wasn't quite sure what to make of it.

But he was intrigued.

"I used to do a lot of crosswords, and I saw the Sudoku on the same page, so I thought I'd give it a try," he said.

The rules were simple. Using logic, he was to use given number clues to fill the 81-square grid with the numerals one through nine appearing once in every row, column and box. Luckily for Brewer, his Sudoku puzzle was a "Monday" — the easiest level of difficulty.

"The first one I ever did was really easy," he said, "and I thought, 'Wow, I'm good at these.'"

From that day forward, Brewer was hooked.

"I wanted to prove to myself I could do these things," he said.

He continued to search for the puzzles in his newspapers, playing nearly every day. The puzzle’s logic sucked him in.

Kara Bonavia’s story reads much the same. She first saw Sudoku on a trip to Italy last summer.

“My parents had a book and were playing it on the plane,” she said. “I had no idea what it was. Then this past Christmas I got really bored so I picked one up and started playing.”

At first Bonavia gave an hour here or there to Sudoku puzzles, but now she’s up to a puzzle or two every day.

“It’s a good way to exercise your logic a little, and they’re just so out there,” she said. “You’re not going to have any trouble finding one.”

Call it a fever, addiction or craze, everyday someone new flips though their morning news and catches on to Sudoku mania.

Within the last year, Sudoku (sometimes spelled Su Doku) has taken the country by storm. It was only last July when the Daily Sun in Conway, N.H., became the first U.S. paper to publish the puzzle. Today, over 300 newspapers across the country run them, according to the media magazine Editor & Publisher.

The explosion can all be traced to one man — Wayne Gould. Despite popular belief, Sudoku puzzles didn't come from Japan. The first puzzles with the classic Sudoku design were actually published by Dell puzzle magazine under the name “Number Puzzle" in 1979.

After Dell dropped the puzzles, Japanese publishers picked them up, dubbing them "sudoku," short for "suuji wa dokushin ni kagiru," which translates to "the digits must remain single."

It was in a Japanese magazine that Gould, a retired New Zealand judge, found the puzzle while on vacation in 1997. Like many others, he became obsessed — so obsessed that he devoted the next few years to developing a computer program to generate more puzzles.

In 2004, Gould took Sudoku to the United Kingdom, where the tabloid journalism culture quickly snatched them up and even engaged in "Sudoku wars," with newspapers trying to best competitors with better and more frequent Sudoku puzzles.

Soon after, U.S. papers also caught on. After the Daily Sun's initial publication, the New York Post became the first major U.S. paper to run Sudoku, sparking the puzzle's spread across the country. The Lincoln Journal Star began printing a daily Sudoku puzzle in the classified section in mid-November.

"I retired so I would have more time," Gould said in an interview with The Standard. "Now I'm even busier than I was before."

Gould remains the leading source for Sudoku puzzles. His Website, www.sudoku.org, publishes a new puzzle each day, and it's this puzzle that a majority of newspapers publish. He's also authored two best-selling Sudoku books.

Then again, so have many others. Amazon.com lists over 270 available Sudoku books. In Lincoln, Lee Booksellers Edgewood Center manager Kathy Magruder said her store alone carries "at least 40 different Sudoku books."

"Around Christmastime, we were selling 10 to 15 books a day," she said. "The funny thing is, before October, nobody had really heard of them. But our sales rep said this was going to be the next big thing, and we said, 'OK, we'll give it a try.'"

Sales have cooled since December, Magruder said, but if her publishers' catalogs are any sign, the trend won't slow anytime soon.

"Every catalog we get has at least three or four Sudoku books in it," she said.

Magruder said she's not sure why the puzzles are so popular, but she's not a "puzzle person."

"I'd rather read a book," she said. "But several of my staffers are completely addicted."

Puzzle experts believe Sudoku's sudden rise to the top is because of the recreational exercise it offers for the player's logical thought process.

“It sharpens your brain, number one, and it improves your focus," said Will Shortz, crossword puzzle editor for the New York Times and author of a line of Sudoku puzzle books. “You have to be focused to be a good Sudoku solver, because if you make a mistake and then base further logic on the mistake you made, you have no option but to erase everything and start over. So Sudoku really teaches you to be careful.”

Not only has Sudoku become popular with the general public for its logical challenges, but it's piqued the interest of the scientific community as well.

For example, the London weekly newspaper The New Statesman ran an article explaining what insights Sudoku might provide on gender inequity and the differences between the male and female brain.

The article argued Sudoku is unique among logic puzzles like chess and crossword puzzles because it appeals equally to both sexes, debunking any ideas that suggest men are logically superior.

It also challenges research that says men are better “systemizers” and women better “empathizers.”

But perhaps the most obvious field Sudoku has affected is mathematics. In addition to its popular appeal, the square, symmetrical puzzle also presents a number of challenges for mathematicians.

For instance, mathematicians Bertram Felgenhauer and Frazer Jarvis recently published a paper in which they tried to calculate how many unique Sudoku puzzle solutions existed. Their answer? 6,670,903,752,021,072,936,960.

“The natural question is to wonder whether you’re ever going to be doing the same puzzle again,” said Frank Moore, a UNL mathematics graduate student who recently gave a graduate seminar presentation on the same topic. “Even if someone were to solve one every second, there’s probably not enough seconds in anyone’s lifetime to actually do it.”

Moore’s first experience with Sudoku was merely as a player, but after a while he recognized the mathematical problems hidden in the puzzle’s structure.

“There’s a lot more things in them that might not be as interesting to the casual observer, but they’re very rich,” he said.

Moore focused his explorations into Sudoku on finding the number of possible solutions, but he said there were other problems he considered tackling, such as finding the minimum number of clues needed to solve a puzzle (which he said is somewhere around 20), and how placement of clues affects the solvability of the puzzle.

In addition, when played with enough, Sudoku puzzles generate unexpected mathematical anomalies, something that Moore thinks will keep those in his field occupied.

“The general public might look at the grid and see just a puzzle, but mathematicians will look at the grid and have something to look at for a long time,” he said.

However, most mathematicians would agree Sudoku has little to do with numbers and everything to do with logic and problem solving, which might explain why so many people enjoy them.

“It seems it’s just another way of popularizing logical thinking,” Moore said. “There’s a lot of people out there who might consider themselves logical thinkers but don’t want to advertise it because that’s not what popular culture likes. But anyone can pick up a Sudoku, and you can’t really tell how hard it is until you do it.”

In fact, Moore said Sudoku puzzles could be created without numbers entirely and still be as challenging and interesting as ever.

“The misconception is that because Sudoku has numbers in it, it must be connected to math,” he said. “The truth is that it has this structure and symmetry. It doesn’t need the numbers. I’ve seen them done with anything from colors to pictures.”

Regardless of the puzzle’s form, people continue to play like crazy, and the Sudoku craze shows no signs of slowing down — yet.

In fact, puzzle elites think Sudoku might be versatile enough to become more than just a passing fad.

“The craze, judging by history, will last four, five, six months, and then it will taper off," Shortz said in an interview with Fortune magazine, "but I think the underlying appeal of Sudoku will make it last forever. It's not just hype. If you do the puzzle, it's very easy to get hooked."

One thing’s for sure — Sudoku addicts are hoping the puzzle sticks, and there’s certainly strength in numbers. As long as Sudoku continues to sell newspapers, books and magazines, it’s here to stay.

“I think it’ll probably stick around,” Brewer said. “I mean, the Jumble is still there after all these years. Sudoku has to stay longer than the Jumble.”

Reach Joel Gehringer at 473-7254 or jgehringer@journalstar.com.

Where to start

Want to see what everyone’s talking about?

With all those squares and numbers, where do you begin?

Fear not, beginning gamers. Here are a few expert tips on successfully solving Sudoku:

1. Use a pencil. They’re great for making notes and, at some point, you’ll probably need to erase.

2. Work the 3-by-3 boxes first. Those clues are easiest to see. Go to the rows and columns second.

3. When you've narrowed a square to two numbers, pencil them lightly into the boxes in the grid. You can come back and change them if you have to.

4. Don't guess. A good Sudoku puzzle can be solved with pure step-by-step logic.

5. If you write the wrong number in a square, it can be difficult to figure out where you've made your mistake later. Unlike a crossword puzzle, where you can localize your mistake, with Sudoku you can't always find where you went wrong and erase it.

6. If you've narrowed the possibilities down to two numbers for the square, row or column, then you know that no other square in that row, column or box can have those digits.

7. When you get new information, always follow it through to its logical conclusion right then and there. If you fill in that information, try to fill in other information based on it while you're at it.

Source: CBS News

Are crossword puzzles a thing of the past?

In 1942, the New York Times became the first major publication to print a daily crossword puzzle.

Since then, crossword puzzles have been king of the puzzle world, but in the past few months they've taken a backseat to Sudoku on bookshelves, magazine racks and newspaper pages.

So has the crossword puzzle finally met its match?

Not yet, according to some of the world's leading puzzle editors. They say the audiences that crossword and Sudoku puzzles attract are similar, but not identical.

 "A crossword attracts a more literary person, while Sudoku appeals to a keenly logical mind," said crossword puzzle editor Will Shortz in a column for the New York Times. "Some crossword enthusiasts turn up their noses at Sudoku because they feel it lacks depth. A good crossword requires vocabulary, knowledge, mental flexibility and sometimes even a sense of humor to complete.

“Sudoku, on the other hand, is just a logical exercise, each one similar to the last."

In The Standard, a British weekly newspaper, Sudoku editor Wayne Gould said crosswords aren't endangered. He doesn't think newspapers would trash such a valuable and popular feature.

"Today, you have to have a puzzle in order to be a newspaper." he said. "I don't think the crossword puzzle will ever disappear. I don't think Sudoku will either."

Newspaper pages alone validate Gould's claims. Even though Sudoku puzzles are crowding the space typically reserved for crosswords in almost every major publication, crosswords aren't disappearing.

And while Lee Booksellers Edgewood Center manager Kathy Magruder said Sudoku book sales are skyrocketing, crossword puzzle collections are slowly but surely selling as many copies as ever.

"We don't sell nearly as many crossword books," Magruder said. "I think (Sudoku books) interest a different group of people."

Magruder said she typically sees an older, more traditional player buy crosswords, while many younger players ride the Sudoku craze.

Sure, Sudoku might be a fad that could easily disappear any day, but many believe it has enough popular appeal to stay on newspaper puzzle pages for much longer.

"It is a craze, and the craze is not going to last forever," Shortz said in Newsweek. "I think a lot of people are doing it now because it's cool, maybe a little hip. Certainly it’s something people are talking about and they want to try it. Certainly this won't last forever, but I think Sudoku is like the crossword puzzle, it's going to be here forever."