It's the twenty-first century's answer to the Rubik's Cube. Sudoku is taking over...

Forget those plastic charity wristbands, Sudoku is the new craze. Over the last few months the puzzle-sensation has swept out of Southeast Asia to conquer the known universe. Or at least that slightly nerdy part of it that likes doing puzzles. Having been hooked for a few weeks now, we can confidently assert, without fear of hyperbole, that Sudoku will be the 21st Century's Rubik's Cube.

Ok, it's possible Sudoku will be even more long lasting a fad. Because it is even more fiendishly addictive. On the page Sudoku [or Su Doku] appears like a very simple puzzle. It looks not unlike a crossword. There's [generally] a grid of nine by nine squares, some with numbers already written in. All you have to do is add the other numbers, so that every row, every column and every 3x3 region contains the numbers one to nine. Sounds relatively simple, but it's not.

You use mental reasoning, process of elimination, logic, lots of patience, and trial and error to work out which numbers go where. Tactics involve scans, sweeps, taking notes, shaving your head so you can't pull your hair out, and setting aside long portions of the day to do it right. But you know, it's a craze, so it's worth it.

Especially as the history of Sudoku is so interesting. The puzzle seems to have first been thought up in New York in the late 1970s by the specialist puzzle publisher Dell in its magazine Math Puzzles and Logic Problems. They called it Number Place. Nobody paid it too much mind in this hemisphere, but it was introduced into Japan by renowned puzzlers Nikoli in April 1984. They called it "Su-ji wa dokushin ni kagiru ", which snappily translates as "the numbers must be single" or "the numbers must occur only once."

Over the years Nikoli streamlined both the puzzle and the name ['sudoku' literally means 'single; celibate; unmarried'] and it became established in mainstream Japanese periodicals and newspapers. It's popularity explosion this side of the world dates from 1997, when a retired New Zealander called judge Wayne Gould saw a partly completed puzzle in a Japanese bookshop.

He asked what it was, got hooked and used the next six years [he was retired] to develop a computer program to write the puzzles. Then last November the Times of London started printing them. It took off quickly. Three days later the Daily Mail started printing their version. The Telegraph, Guardian, Sun, Daily Mirror, New York Times and then Irish Independent and Irish Times have all recently joined in. At last count papers in nearly 20 countries worldwide are publishing Sudoku puzzles.

Filling in the Sudoku grids in a newspaper can be kinda frustrating. First of all you have to buy the paper, then you have to make sure not to fill in the grid wrong, then you have to rub it all out and start again. Etc. Which brings us to the site of the week part of this site of the week feature. You don't want to be buying a newspaper [not just for the puzzles anyway], you want to be going to one of the many sudoku sites springing up all over the world wide web. We're plugging sudokusan.com.

With it's four puzzles a day, tips and checker to make sure you're not going wrong, Sudokusan is hours of fun. They publish four puzzles a day set to differing difficulty levels: delicious [approx time to complete 5 minutes], pernicious [20 minutes], malicious [1 hour] and atrocious [until your ears start to bleed]. We haven't managed to complete an atrocious puzzle. Yet. But we will. Soon.

first published on oxygen.ie