Sudoku: A Magical Game

Sudoku originates from Japan and in Japanese the character "Su" means numbers and “Doku" means single. However, the game Sudoku did not originate in Japan.

It was in the year 1783, when Leonhard Euler, a Swiss Mathematician, came up with the "Latin Squares". Well Leonhard called his creation the "Magic Squares" where he had devised a grid in which the numbers and symbols appeared once in each of the columns. It was called the puzzle number place and even today it is known as the same.

However, the modern Sudoku that we play these days was most likely designed by Howard Garns, who was a 74 year old retired architect. He was also a freelance puzzle constructor and lived in Connersville, Indiana. Initially when it was first published by the Dell magazines in the year 1979, it was still called as the number place puzzle. These were the earliest recorded examples of Sudoku.

So how do we play the game? It is a 9X9 grid, which has column and rows. The main objective is to fill each of the columns, each row, and all of the 3X3 boxes the digits from 1 to 9. A cell or a single square in the grid is the smallest block. One row, column and region consist of 9 cells and the complete grid consists of 81 cells. The main objective of the puzzle is placing the given numbers in such a way from 1 to 9 in the empty cells so that each row, column and the 3X3 box contains the same number only once. There cannot be a repetition of any numbers.

By: Madhuchanda Saxena

Content: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudoku