It’s fitting that more people in the United States do Sudoku than play baseball, basketball or football. It’s a game that requires no cardiovascular endurance and provides the player a quasi-intellectual alternative to reading. If you’re not familiar with the American numbers game with a Japanese name and you haven’t read a newspaper or walked down an airplane aisle in two years, Sudoku is like the mathematical counterpart of a crossword puzzle and can be justifiably considered a U.S. “craze.” And according to a Reuters article over the weekend, 167 million Americans, more than half of the U.S. population, play Sudoku. On Saturday, over 800 Sudoku players from all over North America held the game’s first ever national championship in Philadelphia. Stanford doctorate candidate Thomas Snyder became the first U.S. Sudoku champion when he completed an advanced puzzle in 7 minutes. There are many things I can complete in 7 minutes. An advanced Sudoku puzzle is not one them. I’ve dabbled in those difficult puzzles and it usually takes me 7 minutes to put the first number in. I also have a chronic Sudoku problem that involves spending a long time on a puzzle and right at the end, when I think I am going to bask in the satisfaction of having completed some silly little puzzle that belongs on an LSAT practice exam, I realize that I’ve fucked up. And unlike a crossword puzzle, where you can go back and correct a mistake, it is impossible to figure out where I went wrong. A spokesperson for the event said that the popularity of Sudoku stems from the fact that anyone can do it and unlike a crossword puzzle, it doesn’t assume “a certain vocabulary and some cultural knowledge.” Well I like crossword puzzles for this very reason — not everyone can do them. Whereas the crossword is an exercise in intellect, Sudoku seems more of a test of patience. Whatever the game measures, it is now a competitive sport whose champion wins a $10,000 prize. And all those people on airplanes and waiting rooms and the public bus scribbling numbers in boxes are no longer killing time. Now that there’s a championship, all these people are officially “training.”
•Reuters: Sudoku players Hold Championship
If you (using a pencil), write in all 9 numbers (1-9) in each empty box, then start erasing the numbers in line (vertically or horizontally) with the current single number boxes, the puzzle solves itself.
I think.
you just sound bitter that you can’t solve one.
I like crosswords and sudoku- they’re both fun and challenging in different ways, but one requires skill with words, the other numbers.
It’s not skill with numbers. It’s skill with patterns. The puzzles would be the same if they used A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, and I.