Sudoku Puzzles - History

Sudoku puzzles are number puzzles with 9x9 grids composed of 3x3 boxes. The goal of the game is to fill each of the rows, columns and the 3x3 boxes with the digits 1 to 9 without any repetition. The puzzle starts off with a partially filled grid, varying in levels of difficulty.

Sudoku Name

The name Sudoku was derived from the Japanese term, Suuji wa dokushin ni kagiru, literally meaning "the digits must be single". It was soon reduced to a much shorter name, Sudoku--"Su", meaning number, and "Doku", a term coined to refer to the single place on the grid--by Maji Kaji, who is the president of Nikoli, Inc., the first Japanese puzzle company to ever publish Sudoku puzzles in Japan. The instant they did so, this variant of number puzzles became a hit in the Land of the Rising Sun.

Latin Squares

And though the Japanese pioneered the puzzle's popularity, the idea of Sudoku puzzles did not come from Japan. This originated from Latin squares developed by Leonhard Euler. In 1892, Le Siecle, a daily newspaper based in Paris, France issued a newspaper containing a partially filled 9x9 box magic square with 3x3 sub-boxes. This was similar to modern Sudoku puzzles but this number puzzle could be answered by filling the grid with double-digit numbers and required arithmetic rather than logic to be solved. One key resemblance, though, is that each of the rows, columns and sub-boxes add up to the same number. Three years later, the rival newspaper Le France revised the puzzle by limiting the answers only to digits 1 to 9. Le France, however, did not mark the 3x3 sub-boxes. Yet, even without the markings of the sub-boxes, the digits 1 to 9 still appeared only once in each of the sub-boxes.

Modern Breakthrough

The real breakthrough did not occur until 1979. Howard Garns, an American architect, is said to have developed "Number Place", the puzzle considered as the first example of modern Sudoku, and initiated its circulation through different issues of Dell Magazines. This may not be a hundred percent true because the developer of the said puzzle was not really acknowledged. This thought was developed by Will Shortz, who has observed that Garns' name constantly appeared on the contributors' list in issues of Dell Pencil Puzzles and Word Games that contains Number Place and was always absent in issues that do not.

Popularity in Japan

Even with the uncertainty on the original developer of this puzzle, Number Place still made its way to different magazines and newspapers in different countries and reached the pages of Japan, where it got its now very famous name. Within two decades of widespread recognition by the Japanese, The Times newspaper in London included it in their daily issues. By 2005, the Sudoku hype reached the United States and became loved as much as daily crossword puzzles. Today, computers create Sudoku puzzles and they are available on many different Internet websites that can be accessed by millions of people.