Sudoku - A Wordless Crossword Puzzle

Welcome back to my games article. Here we are going to see a new number puzzle which you might have seen in your day to day newspapers, magazines, books etc. You may have also seen Chess, Crosswords and even bridge in many newspapers but a puzzle which has conquered the newspapers and magazine is Sudoku! ‘A wordless crossword puzzle‘.

One article is not sufficient for me to write about this puzzle. I have planned to make this article as a series, were each article gives a new picture on this wonderful game. In this series you can go through its origin, some basic terms and rules to follow while playing. In my corresponding articles we will get an idea how to solve Sudoku puzzle in easy, medium and high levels and much more.

To keep track of this series, you can use the Sudoku Category link, Sudoku category RSS feeds or even you can subscribe for my site’s email updates which you can fine in ‘Subscribe Site’ sidebar.

History
Sudoku phenomenon started around 18th century in the name of Latin squares. Leonhard Euler a swiss mathematician is expected to be the father of Latin Square puzzle. It was not so popular until 1979 it was reinvented by a American Howard Garns of Dell Magazines in the name of Number place. At this ’same’ time, Nikoli Co. Ltd of Japan also published a number puzzle based on the number place by the name of ‘suji wa dokushin ni kagiru‘ meaning ‘the digits must occur only once’. From this boom of this number puzzles success in Japan, Sudoku started to spread world wide and today it has become one of the essential add-on to any newspapers or magazines.

Sudoku board
Sudoku is played on Sudoku board(probably in paper format). Sudoku board looks alike crossword puzzle but designed in a different way. Here we do not use any words or characters neither any black squares. There will be only random filled squares in some mini-grids. Using some rules we need to complete all the unfilled squares.

Sudoku puzzle takes place on a large grid. Basic Sudoku board is a 9×9 squares (81 small squared) board. Each 3×3 (nine boxes/mini grids) squares are divided by thick black lines to create 9 mini-grids. To represent some areas of the Sudoku board, the mini grids are grouped to form 3 bands and 3 stacks.

Bands are the mini-grids from right to left. Stacks are from top to bottom mini-grids. There are 3 Bands. They are Top-band, center band and bottom band. Stacks too have 3, left-stack, center stack and right stack.

Thus makes the complete Sudoku board. We have seen the complete anatomy of Sudoku board. This helps us in future to talk about any area of a given Sudoku puzzle.

Rules
There are only 3 rules to be known and they are very simple.
1) Each of the rows must have unique Numbers. No duplicate is allowed.
2) Each of the columns must have unique Numbers. No duplicate is allowed.
3) Each of the 9 mini-grids must have unique Numbers. No duplicate is allowed.
Note: . Numbers means any digit from 1 to 9

Aim
In a given Sudoku board (some squares are already filled. Many need to be filled). Apply the 3 rules and try to solve the given empty squares. There is not mathematics or algorithm is involved.

In our coming articles we will see how to break a beginner level Sudoku puzzle .

Tags

sudoku

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