VariantsĪ nonomino or Jigsaw Sudoku puzzle, as seen in the Sunday Telegraph Solution numbers in red for above puzzleĪlthough the 9x9 grid with 3x3 regions is by far the most common, many other variations exist. Gould devised a computer program to produce unique puzzles rapidly. The Times of London began featuring Sudoku in late 2004 after a successful appearance in a local US newspaper, from the efforts of Wayne Gould, and rapidly spread to other newspapers as a regular feature. It is now published in mainstream Japanese periodicals, such as the Asahi Shimbun. In 1986, Nikoli introduced two innovations: the number of givens was restricted to no more than 32, and puzzles became "symmetrical" (meaning the givens were distributed in rotationally symmetric cells). Sudoku is a registered trademark in Japan and the puzzle is generally referred to as Number Place (ナンバープレース Nanbāpurēsu) or, more informally, a portmanteau of the two words, Num(ber) Pla(ce) (ナンプレ Nanpuré). The puzzle was introduced in Japan by Nikoli in the paper Monthly Nikolist in April 1984 as Sūji wa dokushin ni kagiru (数字は独身に限る), which also can be translated as "the digits must be single" or "the digits are limited to one occurrence." (In Japanese, dokushin means an "unmarried person".) At a later date, the name was abbreviated to Sudoku (数独) by Maki Kaji (鍜治 真起 Kaji Maki), taking only the first kanji of compound words to form a shorter version. It is unclear if Garns was familiar with any of the French newspapers listed above. He died in 1989 before getting a chance to see his creation as a worldwide phenomenon. Garns's name was always present on the list of contributors in issues of Dell Pencil Puzzles and Word Games that included Number Place, and was always absent from issues that did not. The modern Sudoku was most likely designed anonymously by Howard Garns, a 74-year-old retired architect and freelance puzzle constructor from Connersville, Indiana, and first published in 1979 by Dell Magazines as Number Place (the earliest known examples of modern Sudoku). These weekly puzzles were a feature of French newspapers such as L'Echo de Paris for about a decade but disappeared about the time of World War I. Although they are unmarked, each 3x3 sub-square does indeed comprise the numbers 1-9 and the additional constraint on the broken diagonals leads to only one solution. It simplified the 9x9 magic square puzzle so that each row, column and broken diagonals contained only the numbers 1-9, but did not mark the sub-squares. On July 6, 1895, Le Siècle's rival, La France, refined the puzzle so that it was almost a modern Sudoku. It was not a Sudoku because it contained double-digit numbers and required arithmetic rather than logic to solve, but it shared key characteristics: each row, column and sub-square added up to the same number. Le Siècle, a Paris daily, published a partially completed 9x9 magic square with 3x3 sub-squares on November 19, 1892. Number puzzles appeared in newspapers in the late 19th century, when French puzzle setters began experimenting with removing numbers from magic squares. The puzzle instructions read, "Use the numbers 1 to 9 each nine times to complete the grid in such a way so that the horizontal, vertical, and two main diagonal lines all add up to the same total." Historyįrom La France newspaper, July 6, 1895. It first appeared in a US newspaper and then The Times (UK) in 2004, from the efforts of Wayne Gould, who devised a computer program to rapidly produce distinct puzzles. However, the modern sudoku only started to become mainstream in 1986 by the Japanese puzzle company Nikoli, under the name Sudoku, meaning single number. For example, the same single integer may not appear twice in the same row, column or in any of the nine 3x3 subregions of the 9x9 playing board.įrench newspapers featured variations of the puzzles in the 19th century, and the puzzle has appeared since 1979 in puzzle books under the name Number Place. The puzzle setter provides a partially completed grid, which for a well-posed puzzle has a unique solution.Ĭompleted puzzles are always a type of Latin square with an additional constraint on the contents of individual regions. The objective is to fill a 9x9 grid with digits so that each column, each row, and each of the nine 3x3 sub-grids that compose the grid (also called "boxes", "blocks", "regions", or "sub-squares") contains all of the digits from 1 to 9. Sudoku (数独 sūdoku, digit-single) (,, originally called Number Place), is a logic-based, combinatorial number-placement puzzle. The same puzzle with solution numbers marked in red
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