Today is National Puzzle Day, so here are ten things you might not know about a popular kind of puzzle, Sudoku.
The word comes from the Japanese name for the puzzle as it appeared in the paper Monthly Nikolist in April 1984, which was “Sūji wa dokushin ni kagiru” meaning "the digits must be single". “Dokushin” means an "unmarried person" in Japanese. This was later abbreviated to Sudoku.
Puzzles of this type have been around since the 19th century, albeit in slightly different formats. A French newspaper published a puzzle which was a 9×9 magic square with 3×3 subsquares and numbers missing as early as 1892. Unlike sudoku, however, this puzzle contained double digit numbers and required mathematical ability to solve (Sudoku, despite using numbers, is actually a logic puzzle rather than a maths one). In 1895, another French newspaper published a puzzle called carré magique diabolique ("diabolical magic square") in which each row, column and diagonal contained the digits 1 to 9, but didn’t have subsquares.
The US was publishing sudoku puzzles from 1979, thus beating Japan to it, in a publication called Dell Pencil Puzzles and Word Games. It appeared in this magazine as “Number Place”. We don’t know for certain who the inventor was, but using logic based on which contributor’s name always appeared in issues containing a Number Place and didn’t in issues without one. That method points to one Howard Garns, a retired architect and freelance puzzle compiler from Connersville, Indiana. Sadly, he died in 1989 and didn’t live to see his puzzles absolutely everywhere.
The first newspaper outside of Japan to publish a Sudoku puzzle was The Conway Daily Sun (New Hampshire), which published a puzzle by Wayne Gould in September 2004. Gould was a judge based in Hong Kong who came across a partially completed sudoku in a bookshop while visiting Japan. He produced a computer programme to make the puzzles and began pitching them to Newspapers.
The first UK newspaper to pick up sudoku was The Times on 12 November 2004. The very next day The Times published its first letter about the puzzle, from one Ian Payn of Brentford, who complained that the puzzle was so absorbing it caused him to miss his stop on the tube.
The minimum number of clues for a Sudoku puzzle to have a unique solution is 17.
There are 6,670,903,752,021,072,936,960 possible Sudoku grid configurations.
It has been made into a game show. The first sudoku themed game show was broadcast on Sky One in 2005. Hosted by Carol Vorderman (who else?) and featured nine teams of nine people, including one celebrity from different regions of the UK competing to solve a puzzle. Later in 2005, The BBC launched SUDO-Q, a game show that combined Sudoku with general knowledge, although it used smaller grids of 4x4 and 6x6. Since 2006 there has been an annual World Sudoku Championship. The first was held in Italy and was won by Junichi Tanaka from Japan.
Japan has a sudoku themed museum, "Sudoku Kaikan," which is dedicated to the history and culture of Sudoku; and a theme park, "Sudokuland," which has a Sudoku-themed roller coaster and a Sudoku-themed maze among its attractions.
Some sudoku records: The fastest recorded time to solve a Sudoku puzzle was set in November 2018, by Wang Shiyao who completed a standard 9×9 Sudoku grid in just 54.44 seconds. The largest Sudoku puzzle had a grid size of 9,999 x 9,999 and was created by researchers at the University of Liverpool. It needed a computer to solve it and even so took over 100 hours to solve.
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