Sudoku

Cellular phones & ipods may be the fastest selling commodities in many countries but if you ask me something that took the world by storm in 2005 I would opine it was Sudoku. It has become a craze among commoners that the print media wasted no time to cash in on the opportunity. I am not sure which newspaper became the trendsetter in India but now even newspapers (including reginal ones) that seemed content with semi nude poses of Anna Kournikova & Angelina Jolie now feature sudoku as part of the daily compilation to lure more readers. So what makes it click?

Sudoku relies purely on logic unlike the traditional word based crosswords. While crosswords require a good vocabulary, Sudoku does not need any prerequisites (but for some brains of course!!). Learning to play the Sudoku is quite easy. Different levels of difficulty are present in Sudoku and hence it facilitates people to start from the basic to learn the art of solving it. By the time we do close to 20 – 25 puzzles, we would have learnt more than 90% of the tricks involved in solving it. From here on your previous experience doesn’t matter much… you don’t need to remember things unlike a crossword. Every puzzle is a fresh experience.

The classical sudoku has a 9 * 9 grid divided into 9 grids of 3 * 3. We have to fill numbers from 1 to 9 in each 3 * 3 grid also taking care that the number is unique across the particular row and column. There are also tougher variants with 12 * 12 (numbers from 1 – 9 and alphabets A – C) and 16 * 16 (1 – 9 & A – F). More info on Sudoku can be obtained here.