I read about the Sudoku craze about a month ago. Then I saw that Aral Balkan had a Sudoku book with him in NY. Then I found this site, http://www.websudoku.com/, and I am hooked.
Sudoku is a deceptively simple number game where you try to fill in the numbers of a 9×9 grid so that no row, column or group of 9 cells has any duplicate numbers. Of course, a handful of numbers are thrown in to start, and you have to work around them. The word “Sudoku” is a made up abbreviation for a Japanese sentence that basically translates to “the number is not married.” In other words, each number does not have a match in the same column, row or 9-square.
The puzzles are categorized easy, medium and hard. The easy ones are pretty simple to solve once you mess about with it for a while and get some of the logic down. The more you play with the medium and hard ones, the more you start to see patterns and strategies at work. It’s kind of like learning chess, where you keep seeing new ways of looking at the arrangement of things, that you never saw before.
The ideal situation is to solve each puzzle on logic alone. No trying, backtracking, erasing, etc. I know it’s possible for most of the medium level ones. Haven’t been so successful with the hard ones yet!
Wikipedia has a nice article on Sodoku here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodoku
Anyway, don’t say I didn’t warn you.
Here’s a better version in Flash on Miniclip.com (http://www.miniclip.com/sudoku/sudoku.htm)
Yeah, I saw that one, but even the hard ones are relatively easy, and you only get one new puzzle on each level each day.
Aral showed me that book when I was in London…My husband’s addicted to them. I’m afraid to try, for fear I’ll be addicted to them too 🙂 But then, it might be fun to code an engine that generates them.