Brain Teaser story: Sudoku from ancient times to the modern world
Posted by: Luk on: June 13, 2009
- In: Curiosities | History
- 2 Comments
The Sudoku puzzle is a logic and number based brain teaser. Sudoku puzzle was nicknamed the Rubic’s cube of the 20th century because to solve it you don’t need to be a math genius, but you will need just a lot of logic and, above all, so much patience.
Is a common belief that the Sudoku puzzle was bron in Japan in 1984, but, actually, this brain teaser has its roots deeply related to the ancient “Latin’s cubes” created in the eighteenth century by the Swiss mathematician Euler.
After two centuries, in the seventies, the Sudoku puzzle was recovered by few math and brain teasers lovers.
In the eighties the Sudoku game became very popular in Japan and in a meanwhile it the Sudoku mania spread all over the world.
In fact, at the end of the seventies on the magazine “Math puzzles and logic problems”, Dell New York publishing proposed “number place”: A brain teaser based on compositions rules of the Latin’s cubes.
The aim of the Sudoku puzzle is to fill with numbers from 1 to 9 the 9×9 grid, divided to 3×3 sub grids called “regions”.
Some of the grid cells of the Sudoku puzzle are already filled with numbers, the payer must fill the other empty cells to solve the puzzle respecting the following rules:
- Number can appear only once on each row;
- Number can appear only once on each column.
This brain teasers was proposed in Japan in 1984 on the Monthly Nikolist magazine with the name of Sunji Wa Dokushin Ni kagiru wich means only single numbers. This long name was soon changed in Su(numbers) and doku(single).
The modern Sudoku puzzle as we all know it was born.
In the 12 November 2004, the English Times of London published the first Sudoku puzzle for the frist time in UK, since then this brain teaser became widely popular all over the world and now is published on magazines and newspapers of more than 20 nations.
Now that you know everything about the Sudoku, try to solve this famous brain teaser, starting with the one in this article or trying this new web Sudoku generator.
1 | Patrick
June 18, 2009 at 2:28 am
Great game – thanks for posting