An intellectual craze is making its way to The Daily Home’s pages. Sudoku, a wildly popular number puzzle, will begin running in The Daily Home Tuesday, Jan. 10.The logic-based puzzle has been called "the Rubik’s cube of the 21st century."
The game consists of 81 squares composing a 9-by-9 grid. Some of the squares contain a number, the goal being to determine which numbers go into the blank squares.
Sound easy? Not quite. Each column and row must contain the numbers 1 through 9. Each 3-by-3 grid (there are nine in the puzzle) must also contain those numbers.
The version of the game running in The Daily Home is Conceptis Sudoku, created by Dave Green. Puzzles will get progressively more difficult throughout the week, Monday being the easiest puzzle and Sunday the hardest.
Sudoku did not originate in Japan, although its name may suggest otherwise. The puzzle’s name derives from Japanese words "su" for digit and "doku" for single, unmarried, according to a release by King Features.
Sudoku actually has origins in Switzerland. Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler devised a puzzle known as "Latin Squares" in 1783, which featured a grid in which every number or symbol in the Greek alphabet appeared once in each row or column.
Sudoku puzzles began appearing in Math Puzzles and Logic Problems magazine in the late 1970s. Dell called the puzzle "Number Place" and still does.
A Japanese puzzle company discovered Dell’s version in 1984 and began including it in publications. Sudoku caught on in Japan, becoming one of the best-selling puzzles.
King Features caught on to the phenomenon in October, including the puzzle in its lineup, available to many newspapers that subscribe to the syndicate’s content.
"The global popularity of Soduku has been phenomenal to watch," Brendan Burford, puzzle editor at King Features, said in the release. "We chose to add Conceptis Sudoku to King Features’ puzzles and games portfolio because Conceptis is a dominant player in the international logic puzzles market. With Conceptis Sudoku, King Features offers yet another top-quality puzzle in this category."
