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England goes gaga for Sudoku

The logic game Sudoku has become wildly popular in British newspapers and looks ready to spread around the world soon. PHOTO: AFP

Silence reigns over a packed commuter train pulling into London as hundreds of men and women wrestle separately with a Japanese puzzle that has taken Britain by storm, and now threatens to conquer the world.

Sudoku, a simple-to-learn but fiendishly complex grid-based number game, is attracting new fans by the minute with its unique concoction of logic, digits and sheer patience.

Over the past week, newspapers have scrambled over each other to produce their own versions, seen as a sure-fire way to reel in readers. A magazine is also being launched and technophiles can even play the game on their mobile phones.

"Its brilliance is in its simplicity," said Mike Harvey, features editor of The Times newspaper, which introduced Sudoku to Britain last November and had a near-monopoly of the market until the past few days.

"It is the only puzzle I have come across where the instructions are so simple and easy to understand but the solution can be so complicated," he said.

"As soon as we launched it we thought it was going to be very big. However, we were pretty amazed at how big it has become," Harvey said.

"Now that everyone has jumped on the bandwagon it is an absolutely huge and national phenomenon and increasingly an international phenomenon."

Sudoku, which roughly translates as "single figure," requires a player to put the digits one to nine in a box made up of 81 squares, so that no number is repeated in any of the nine vertical or horizontal lines.

To complicate matters further, the grid is also sub-divided into nine blocks of nine single squares, and they too must each contain the numbers one to nine.

"It just seems to be one of those things that our readers have really taken to heart," said Derek Brown, deputy features editor of Britain's best-selling daily newspaper, The Sun, which launched a "Sun Doku" last week.

"It is one of those things that is easy to learn but difficult to master," he said, noting that the game was now a permanent fixture in his tabloid.

Despite its Japanese name, the original concept of Latin Squares -- a grid in which every number or symbol occurs once in each row -- was dreamt up in the 18th century by famous Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler.

The modern-day version, which differs due to its nine sub-divided blocks, was spotted in an American magazine by a Japanese magazine publisher, Nikoli, in the early 1980s and taken back to Japan, where Sudoku was born.

It only began to catch on as a worldwide craze, however, after a retired Hong Kong judge and puzzle fan, Wayne Gould, picked up a Sudoku book while on holiday in Tokyo in 1997 and decided to write a computer program to generate his own puzzle grids, which he began giving to newspapers last year.

"It is a welcome relief from the word games that you find everywhere in newspapers," Gould, a native New Zealander, said in a telephone interview.

"And it is not actually a numbers puzzle either, although it looks like one. It is a logic puzzle and there are very few puzzles that test logic, which is a thing we should be using every day," the 59-year-old said.

Gould, who has his own Web site www.sudoku.com, generates hundreds of Sudoku puzzles a day, which he provides to at least a dozen newspapers in Britain, the US, New Zealand and South Africa -- and the list is growing.

"It has spread all over the world in a strange variety of countries," he said, citing Croatia and Slovakia, while deals with dailies in the United Arab Emirates and Barbados are also in the pipeline.

"Just at the moment, with the upsurge of interest, I am getting three or four enquiries from around the world a day so it won't be long before it is everywhere," he predicted.

The brain teaser comes in different levels from easy, which can take up to an hour to crack, to fiendish, which often proves too difficult to solve, resulting in the dreaded moment when a player realizes he or she has repeated a number in one of the lines or boxes and has to back-track or start again.

"If you get it wrong it is really frustrating," said Nicholas Webb, a London lawyer who has been hooked on Sudoku since it first appeared in The Times.

At the same time, the 28-year-old who "Sudokus" regularly on the bus to work, said, "There is a great feeling of satisfaction when you finish one of them."
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