The home of Mind twister Sudoku software
Other forms of the puzzle have included Channel 4’s teletext service having a daily Su Doku on page 391 and the Radio Times features a Super Sudoku. On Sky One, as a one-off, the world’s first televised Su Doku TV show was broadcast titled Sudoku Live. Nine teams, consisting of nine players in each, from regions throughout Britain took part by entering numbers with a hand held device with numbers corresponding to answers for four cells. The audience at home could take part through a separate interactive competition. As part of the publicity for the show an 84m square puzzle was carved into a hillside in Chipping Sodbury near Bristol in view of the M4 motorway. Claimed as the world’s largest Su Doku puzzle, it was found to have 1,905 correct solutions! There has even been a radio version on Radio 4’s Today programme.
Later this year in the US, the largest Su Doku tournament to date is scheduled to take place in St Louis. Participants from 32 regional tournaments will compete to become champions of their regions and then go on to play in the National Final with a prize of $50,000 at stake. Lucca in Italy will be host to the first world championship in March this year.
As well as the well-known numeric version, there are versions that use letters, two of which are the Penny Press’s Scramblets and Knight Features Syndicate’s Sudoku Word.
In 1989 a game called DigitHunt was published by Loadstar/Softdisk Publishing for the Commodore 64, this is believed to be the first home computer version of Su Doku. In 1995 a computerized puzzle generator called Single Number was published by Yoshumitsu Kanai for the Apple Macintosh 14 with other versions up to the 2005 Mac OS-X.
Dell magazines still publish the original Number Place puzzle and also have two Su Doku magazines, Original Sudoku and Extreme Sudoku. It is also published under the name of Squared Away and Nine Numbers.
It was first published in the UK by The Times newspaper in 2004 under the name of Su Doku after being introduced to them by New Zealander, Wayne Gould who discovered the puzzle in a Japanese bookshop. It was quickly followed by The Daily Mail who used the name Codenumber (which was later changed to Sudoku) and then by The Daily Telegraph who used the name Sudoku. The widespread popularity of the puzzle was such that several other British newspapers followed suit, with The Sun calling their version Sun Doku.
Dubbed as ‘the Rubik’s Cube of the 21st Century’, the puzzle was designed by Howard Garns, a retired architect and was first published by Dell magazines in 1979 under the name of Number Place. It appeared in the American magazine Dell Pencils, Puzzles and Word Games under this name Garns was undoubtedly inspired by the 18th Century Latin Square invention of Swiss mathematician, Leonhard Euler.
In 1984 the same puzzle was published in Japan by the Nikoli publishing group under the name of Suuji wa dokushin ni kagiru (which translates as ‘the numbers must be single’ or ‘the numbers must appear only once’) in the Monthly Nikolist. It was later abbreviated to Su Doku. In 1986 the number of givens was restricted to no more than 32 and the puzzles were made ’symmetrical’ by Nikoli, with the givens being distributed in rotationally symmetric cells. The publishing company still holds the trademark of the name Su Doku in Japan and the puzzle is published under many different names in a variety of periodicals.
This is the website that gets your grey cells working and hopes to bring you some interesting and challenging puzzles, starting with Sudoku. We are addicted to all sorts of puzzles and brainteasers and we welcome any new or interesting contributions from our members. The idea is to twist your brain with logical and interesting conundrums, puzzles and games to keep you entertained for hours.