UK goes puzzle-crazy

2005-05-16 10:28

Deborah Haynes

London - Silence reigns over a packed commuter train pulling into London as hundreds of men and women wrestle separately with a Japanese puzzle that has taken Britain by storm, and now threatens to conquer the world.

Sudoku, a simple-to-learn but fiendishly complex grid-based number game, is attracting new fans by the minute with its unique concoction of logic, digits and sheer patience.

Over the past week, newspapers have scrambled over each other to produce their own versions, seen as a sure-fire way to reel in readers.

"Its brilliance is in its simplicity," said Mike Harvey, features editor of The Times newspaper, which was the first to introduce Sudoku to Britain last November and had a near-monopoly of the market until the past few days.

"It is the only puzzle I have come across where the instructions are so simple and easy to understand but the solution can be so complicated," he said.

"As soon as we launched it we thought it was going to be very big, however we were pretty amazed at how big it has become," Harvey told AFP.

Sudoku, which roughly translates as "single figure", requires a player to put the digits one to nine in a box made up of 81 squares, so that no number is repeated in any of the nine vertical or horizontal lines.

To complicate matters further, the grid is also sub-divided into nine blocks of nine single squares, and they too must each contain the numbers one to nine.

"It just seems to be one of those things that our readers have really taken to heart," said Derek Brown, deputy features editor of Britain's best-selling daily newspaper, The Sun, which launched a "Sun Doku" on Tuesday.

Despite its Japanese name, the original concept of Latin Squares - a grid in which every number or symbol occurs once in each row - was dreamt up in the 18th century by famous Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler.

Different levels

The modern-day version, which differs due to its nine sub-divided blocks, was spotted in an American magazine by a Japanese magazine publisher, Nikoli, in the early 1980s and taken back to Japan, where Sudoku was born.

It only began to catch on as a worldwide craze, however, after a retired Hong Kong judge and puzzle fan, Wayne Gould, picked up a Sudoku book while on holiday in Tokyo in 1997 and decided to write a computer programme to generate his own puzzle grids, which he began giving to newspapers last year.

Gould, who has his own website www.sudoku.com, generates hundreds of Sudoku puzzles a day, which he provides to at least a dozen newspapers in Britain, the United States, New Zealand and South Africa - and the list is growing.

The brain teaser comes in different levels from easy, which can take up to an hour to crack, to fiendish, which often proves too difficult to solve, resulting in the dreaded moment when a player realises he or she has repeated a number in one of the lines or boxes and has to back-track or start again.

- SAPA