Sudoku - History

Sudoku - Its History
The game was created around 1783 by a Swiss mathematical genius named Leonard Euler. He called such puzzles as Latin Squares. These were also grids of equal dimensions ( starting with 4 x 4) in which every number or symbol occurs once in each row and column. It differs from the Sudoku grid only in the subdivision of blocks conditionality. In the 1980’s the game turned up in the United States and was renamed the Number Place Game. However a Japanese puzzle magazine found an example of this in an American magazine, modified the game into a slightly more difficult verssion and christened it as Sudoku which means “number single”. It was introduced to the Japanese readers in 1984 and the game became a craze. However the present domination of the game is due to a retired New Zealand lawyer and puzzle fan Wayne Gould, aged 59, who spent six years developing a computer program to mass produce the puzzles. He promoted this final version to the Times and Daily Mail in November 2004. The immense popularity of Soduku internationally is being dubbed in the world media variously as the “Rubik’s cube of the 20th Century” or the “fastest growing puzzle in the world today’. As I mentioned earlier there is no mathematics involved and a person need not be even literate. It is amenable to symbols or colors.