How Do You Do That Sudoku That You Do So Well?
Sudoku is a kind of logic puzzle that became popular in Japan in the ‘80s and in the UK early this year, and this summer it suddenly began appearing in several American newspapers. The Seattle Times started running daily Sudoku puzzles in July, right below the bridge column in the Northwest Life section. (They can also be found at the Times web site, with the option of listening to mystical Japanese music as you play.) Just last week Seattlest saw piles of various Sudoku puzzle books prominently displayed at the Kinokuniya bookstore in the International District. We’ve always been a crossword fiend -- We’ve been known to dig old newspapers out of recycle bins just for the puzzles -- but challenged by this new phenomenon, we had to give Sudoku a try.
A blank Sudoku puzzle is a 3x3 grid comprised of 9 large boxes, and each box is a 3x3 grid containing 9 small cells. About a third of the cells are filled with single-digit numbers (called “givens”), the rest are blank. The object is to “complete the grid so that every row, column and 3x3 box contains every digit from 1 to 9 inclusively.”
The puzzles in the Times, syndicated by Knight Features, are rated by difficulty, with one star being the easiest and five stars being most difficult. The one-star puzzles have 37 givens, compared to a scant 25 in the five-star ones. However, despite all these numbers, there’s no actual math involved in Sudoku. The numerals merely act as symbols -- letters or colors or icons would serve the same purpose. And, other than the act of filling in largely blank grids, Sudoku has little in common with crosswords. Sudoku-solving is a methodical, narrowing-down process of elimination -- you determine all the numbers that don’t fit into an individual cell, until you’ve discovered the only one that does. Then you repeat the process for all the other blank cells until the puzzle is solved.
We quickly found that the “hard” puzzles aren’t necessarily more difficult so much as they are more time-consuming. A couple days after attempting our first puzzle (a one-star affair), we were able to complete five-star puzzles with relative ease. In contrast, We’ve been doing crosswords for years, yet we still often find many late-week New York Times puzzles impossible to finish. And while crosswords entertain with trivia and clever wordplay and interesting constructions, all Sudoku leaves you with is a boring grid of numbers and, for us, an exhausted brain.
Perhaps that’s why Sudoku fans claim it wards off Alzheimer’s. However, crosswords supposedly have the same effect, and as they’re much more fun, we're gonna stick with them.
