Number puzzles appeared in newspapers in the late 19th century, when French puzzle setters began experimenting with removing numbers from magic squares. newspaper, and then The Times (London), in 2004, thanks to the efforts of Wayne Gould, who devised a computer program to rapidly produce unique puzzles.įrom La France newspaper, July 6, 1895: The puzzle instructions read, 'Use the numbers 1 to 9 nine times each to complete the grid in such a way that the horizontal, vertical, and two main diagonal lines all add up to the same total.' Predecessors However, the modern Sudoku only began to gain widespread popularity in 1986 when it was published by the Japanese puzzle company Nikoli under the name Sudoku, meaning 'single number'. The puzzle setter provides a partially completed grid, which for a well-posed puzzle has a single solution.įrench newspapers featured variations of the Sudoku puzzles in the 19th century, and the puzzle has appeared since 1979 in puzzle books under the name Number Place. In classic Sudoku, the objective is to fill a 9 × 9 grid with digits so that each column, each row, and each of the nine 3 × 3 subgrids that compose the grid (also called 'boxes', 'blocks', or 'regions') contain all of the digits from 1 to 9. Sudoku ( / s uː ˈ d oʊ k uː, - ˈ d ɒ k-, s ə-/ Japanese: 数独, romanized: sūdoku, lit.'digit-single' originally called Number Place) is a logic-based, combinatorial number-placement puzzle.

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