Related post: The History of Crossword Puzzles The History of Sudokuīut how does something originally created in the late 19th century become a worldwide phenomenon? The first example we see of modern Sudoku becoming a thing is in New York City in the 1970s. Regardless, we can see how the idea of arranging numbers via a pattern in a grid, then removing some to become a puzzle, came to be. Some of these were math-based instead of logic-based puzzles, meaning they weren’t really true Sudokus. Various French magazine publishers began experimenting with removing numbers from “Magic Squares”. The next time we see an early variant of Sudoku is in France in the late 19th century. At the time, this was more of a project rather than a puzzle, and the recreation potential of Sudoku wouldn’t be realized until some time later. His invention “Latin Squares” consisted of a grid where every number or symbol appeared once in each column. The closest thing we can consider to be the origin of Sudoku comes from Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler, all the way back in 1783. The Sudoku name may conjure images of the Far East and some secret game or puzzle, but the actual origins are a bit less exotic. So here’s a little history of Sudoku to help clear things up. However, while immensely popular, a lot of people don’t really understand exactly where they came from, or what made them so popular seemingly out of the blue. The simplicity and accessibility of Sudoku puzzles is part of what makes them so fun. Your goal is to fill in the grid, so that each row and column, and each smaller 3×3 grid, all have the numbers 1-9 in them. Some squares have a figure, others are left blank. As Sudoku’s global popularity attests, the game is easy to share with friends all over the world, because it is numbers-based and so it does not require any translation.Īs long as people love to test their brains with the fun and challenge of logic puzzles, Sudoku will be a popular and beloved part of millions of people’s everyday lives around the world.Whether you’re interested in testing your brain power, or just want something to help pass the time, Sudoku has become a staple of many people’s routines over the years.įor those who aren’t familiar with Sudoku, each puzzle has a grid of 81 squares, divided into nine blocks of nine squares each. Another reason is that the rules are simple and easy to learn – people of all ages can play Sudoku and can often learn quickly how to approach the puzzle. Why does Sudoku speak to us in today’s fast-paced world? One possible reason is that it appeals to people’s innate sense of order there is something very satisfying about filling out those empty squares on the Sudoku grid. The first World Sudoku Championship was hosted in Italy in 2006 and the 2013 World Sudoku Championship will be held in Beijing. Within the past 10 years, Sudoku has become a global phenomenon. newspaper to feature Sudoku was The Conway (New Hampshire) Daily Sun in 2004. The Times of London began publishing Sudoku puzzles in 2004, and the first U.S. He quickly became a devoted enthusiast of Sudoku and spent the next six years developing a computer program that could generate Sudoku puzzles. The man who reintroduced Sudoku “back” to the Western world was a New Zealand judge named Wayne Gould, who was on vacation in Tokyo in March 1997 when he discovered Sudoku in a bookstore. Also, Japan tends to love puzzles, since it is a country where millions of people make lengthy commutes by train or bus, and they need to kill time while waiting for the next stop. One reason that Sudoku puzzles are so beloved in Japan is because the Japanese language doesn’t work very well for crossword puzzles – so a number puzzle was much more successful in Japanese culture. The game first appeared in Japan in 1984 where it was given the name “Sudoku,” which is short for a longer expression in Japanese – “Sūji wa dokushin ni kagiru” – which means, “the digits are limited to one occurrence.” Sudoku continues to be highly popular in Japan, where people buy over 600,000 Sudoku magazines per month. The puzzle was known as “Number Place,” since it involved placing individual numbers into empty spots on a 9 x 9 grid. But the modern game of Sudoku as we recognize it today was invented by Howard Garns, a freelance puzzle inventor from Connersville, Indiana, USA in 1979 when it was published in Dell Pencil Puzzles and Word Games magazine. The history of Sudoku dates back to an 18th Century Swiss mathematician’s game called “Latin Squares” (according to this article from the Economist) and some of the first number puzzles to appear in newspapers were published in France in 1895.
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