Today I want to talk about my favourite Pastime : Sudoku.
It's fun. It's challenging. It's addictive!
Earlier when I used to see sudoku,,I was really very puzzled as to what it is and how it is solved.
Now you can say ,I have become an expert in solving sudoku.
What is Sudoku?
Sudoku, is a Japanese, fun puzzle game. It requires the player to fill in the 9x9 square grid with the numbers one to nine. The numbers should be arranged in such a way that each row, column and mini-grid contains one of each number. A single error in a Sudoku throws the whole game out.
" Fill in the grid so that every row,
every column, and every 3x3 box
contains the digits 1 through 9. "
That's all there is to it.
There's no math involved.
The grid has numbers, but nothing has to add up to anything else.
You solve the puzzle with reasoning and logic.
Solving time is typically from 10 to 30 minutes,
depending on your skill and experience.
Well, it also depends on the difficulty level.
My maximum time is 15 minutes for highest difficulty level.
History of sudoku
Sudoku — or something very similar to it — was invented in the 1780s by Leonhard Euler, a mathematical virtuoso from Basle. When he 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.
He invented a grid-based puzzle and named it “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, employee of a Japanese puzzle magazine. The Japanese made the game slightly more difficult and renamed it sudoku, meaning “number single”. Today there are at least five Japanese sudoku magazines with a total circulation of 660,000.
It began appearing in The Times, London last November and has since spread to every newspaper. A mobile phone version is up and running. TV pilots are being planned. Certainly nothing comparable has been seen since 100 million Rubik’s Cubes were sold in the early 1980s.
Why is sudoku fun?
The simple answer might be that puzzles are fun and new puzzles even more fun. But the truth is more complicated.
Humans have been puzzling since the dawn of time, and the ability to think logically has long been recognised by science as a key element of natural selection. All societies puzzle but, as a rule, the most successful ones puzzle more.
“You cannot find a culture, no matter how technologically primitive or advanced, that does not have puzzle traditions.”
In this sense, sudoku is neither new nor old. The game requires you to fill in a 9x9 square grid (broken down into nine mini grids) with the numbers one to nine, arranged in such a way that each line, column and mini grid contains one of each number. The objective is childishly simple, yet infuriatingly difficult to achieve.
Uses of sudoku
“Sudoku is bound to make kids interested in math, even those who run away from the subject, as it is very enjoyable”.
“A child needs to juggle a lot of factors simultaneously to solve a sudoku puzzle. So it sharpens his reasoning and computation skills.”
“Puzzles are a very interesting way of making a child discover underlying patterns in things, which is what math is all about,” says Debkumar Mitra, research director, Derek O’ Brien & Associates.
How famous sudoku is?
A numbers game has become as popular as Rubik’s Cube. Sudoku may finally make math fun for children.
There is a monster on the loose, and it is out to eat your brain.
Pitiless in its advance and deadly in its cunning, sudoku, a seemingly simple numbers game, has become the biggest puzzle craze to hit the world since Rubik’s Cube.
It’s all over the newspapers and spreading across the Internet.
Most of the newspapers publish one sudoku daily.
So they are out there, in every home, on every Metro train, in every office. Scribbling, scratching, swearing... sudokuing. Will it be the puzzle that ate the world?
So,enjoy solving Sudoku..
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