“It doesn’t interfere with my work,” he says. Siebert claims his addiction isn’t interfering with other aspects of his life. And since she tends to share the same newspaper as Siebert, he’s had to appease any pre-wedding tensions caused by peremptory Sudoku confiscations by printing out a template and filling in the appropriate starting numbers so the two can solve the daily paper’s puzzle at the same time. Siebert, the Fillmore publicist, is so consumed by Sudoku he has drawer-fulls of the puzzles at home waiting to be solved. And for many, it has become a way of life. Again.īut this time, it was a case of once more, with feeling. In April of 2005 the New York Post - owned by News Corp., a company that owns several British papers - started running Sudoku puzzles.Īnd just like that, Sudoku had officially reached the amber waves of grain. When he was finished, he brought the puzzle to the offices of the Times of London, and in 2004, Sudoku began running as a daily feature. Though Number Place never took off in the U.S., Dell introduced the puzzle to Japan in 1984, and it was given a long name that was eventually boiled down to “Sudoku” (pronounced su-DOE-koo), which translates to “only single numbers allowed.”Īn immediate hit, it wasn’t until 1997 when a retired judge visited Japan, saw the puzzle and then spent the next six years developing a computer program to produce puzzles quickly. I tracked him down and it turned out he was an architect in Indianapolis.” “And no issue that did not have this puzzle did not have his name. “I went through these lists of contributors, and the name Howard Garns came up,” says Shortz. Since Shortz, like most puzzlemasters, had a pretty comprehensive collection of Dell back issues, it was only a matter of poring over the names to see which one stuck out. Though Dell doesn’t typically includeīylines with its games, the magazine does run lists of contributors. Not one to leave a puzzle unsolved, Shortz was determined to figure out who invented it. It was this game called ‘Number Place,’ and it first appeared in 1979.”
“It was invented in the United States, actually, and first appeared in the ‘Dell Pencils and Puzzles’ word games magazine. “I’m the one who discovered its history, basically,” says Shortz, on the telephone from New York. The only person with the patience to figure it all out, quite fittingly, was famed puzzlemaster Will Shortz, the editor of the New York Times crossword puzzle and weekly contributor to National Public Radio’s “Weekend Edition Sunday.” Like any legend worth its salt, the true origins of Sudoku took some time to unearth. “I think it’ll be a lot more longstanding though. “A lot of people are comparing it to the Rubik’s Cube of our time,” says Tucker, 36. The first world championship, unrelated to Tucker’s Champions Tournament, will be held next month in Lucca, Italy. 18-19, and the finals will be held in January of 2007 in Las Vegas. The San Francisco tournament will be Nov.
“It’s very addicting,” says David Tucker of Palm Harbor, Fla., who founded the inaugural Sudoku Champions Tournament, which begins a 31-city tour in May in St. That’s pretty amazing, given the only aim of the puzzle solver is to fill every row, column and 3-by-3 box within the 9-by-9 grid with the numbers one through nine.
San Francisco-based game maker University Games Corporation jumped on the bandwagon and hastily produced five Sudoku board games of somewhat questionable quality.Įven book stores aren’t safe: The top 150 best-selling books through last Sunday included a whopping seven tomes dedicated to the number puzzle, with the highest ranked in the 20th position - well ahead of more cerebral brain-teasing books like “The Official SAT Study Guide,” which came in at 90th.Īdd it all up forward, backward or diagonally, and it can only mean one thing. Hand-held versions line the shelves of shops like the Discovery Store and rub shoulders with ads for weird household helpers like “Urine Gone” and jumbo fabric shavers in the pages of the Harriet Carter catalog.
NEWSPAPER SUDOKU ANSWERS SOFTWARE
Dozens of software developers have designed versions for cell phones and personal digital assistants. Hundreds of newspapers across the nation carry a version of it.
NEWSPAPER SUDOKU ANSWERS FULL
Not yet on these shores a full year, Sudoku, a number puzzle that was first embraced in Japan, is everywhere.
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