Many people realize the benefits of keeping their brain exercised, and for most, a daily sudoku challenge is the fun and engaging way to do it. Where did this puzzle come from and how did it evolve into the format we all know and love? In this article we will discover the history of Sudoku.
The game we all know as Sudoku is a relatively recent invention, but it dates back to Leonhard Euler, a Swiss mathematician who, after studying ancient Chinese ‘magic squares’, began to construct puzzles called Latin Squares at the end of the 18th century. These were not actually produced as puzzles, more as mathematical oddities.
We need to leap forward 200 years before the concepts of Latin Squares gave rise to the forerunner of Sudoku.
In 1979, Dell magazine in the US published what it called a “number place” puzzle. This was the first incarnation of what we now call Sudoku and was attributed to retired architect Howard Garnes.
So how did Number Place become Sudoku?
In April 1984, the Japanese company Nikoli first published a Number Place puzzle in one of its publications; ‘Nikolist Monthly’. They titled this puzzle ‘Suuji wa dokushin ni kagiru’, which, being a bit complicated, was later shortened to ‘Su Doku’, which roughly translates to ‘single number’. It was at this time that Sudoku came up with some of the rules that govern the puzzle today, such as the fact that the puzzle cannot have more than 32 numbers given to begin with. Nikoli still holds the Japanese copyright to the name ‘Sudoku’ and anyone else posting it in Japan should call it something else.
However, the growth in popularity of Sudoku only came about through advancements in computers.
In 1989, the first Sudoku computer game was released for the Commodore 64 computer. This was called ‘Digihunt’. This is still available today in a slightly different format.
A decade later, a retired judge named Wayne Gould was perfecting a program that would automate the generation of Sudoku. In 2004, he convinced Britain’s The Times newspaper to run a daily riddle. The first was published in November 2004. From here, the craze has exploded around the world with virtually every newspaper offering a daily suduko challenge and newsstands full of Sudoku books for sale. There are also mobile phone apps dedicated to suduko, as well as online versions to play with.