History of the Sudoku Puzzles

The Sudoku puzzle had a very provocative history that spans continents and decades before it came to the version we know of today. It was developed in the West but became very favorite in the East before going back home where it is spreading its popularity.

In the 1780's, a Swiss Mathematician named Leonhard Euler devised a conception that uses a grid where sets of Latin symbols are settled into the squares. Each sticker can only appear once in every row and column. The use of Latin symbols gave this grid the name Latin quadrate and became primarily used in mathematics and statistics.

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The use of the Latin Squares for entertainment came about in the late 19th century when French puzzle setters started experimenting with eliminating numbers from what is called a "magic square". In 1892, Le Siecle, which was a favorite Paris-based daily newspaper, published a partly completed 9x9 magic quadrate with a 3x3 sub-squares. It shares some key characteristics with that of the contemporary Sudoku where each of the row, column and sub-square results to the same whole when summed. The daily's rival, La France, came up with a more polished and simplified version of the puzzle where each of the row, column and broken diagonals had the numbers 1 to 9. The only incompatibility is it does not mark the sub-squares; any way it was a version closer to the contemporary Sudoku.

Almost two hundred years after the creation of the Latin Squares and the use of it for puzzles in the magic squares came the final basis for today's contemporary Sudoku. Howard Garns, a 74-year-old retired architect and freelance puzzle constructor from Indiana designed the puzzle called whole Place. It was first published in the year 1979 when he submitted them to Dell Magazines, a Connecticut-based crossword giant. It has been in publication for over 25 years.

In the early 1980's, Maki Kaji came upon the whole Games in an American publication. He is the president of the Japanese puzzle giant, Nikoli. He then urged the company he leads to publish the puzzle. In April of 1984 the Japanese readers were introduced to the puzzle when it was published in the Monthly Nikolist under the name Suuji wa dokushin ni kagiru. When translated this honestly means that the "digit must be unmarried" or the "number is diminutive to only a singular occurrence". The publisher felt the title was too long and decided to shorten it to "Su" that means whole and "Doku" that means singular or unmarried.

It did not became an overnight success, but it did any way became a huge hit in Japan only after Nikoli added someone else rule to solving the puzzle in the year 1986. This new rule required the clues to be arranged in a symmetrical pattern. This created the final version of the Sudoku we know of today. This puzzle would only come to be favorite in the Western world two decades later.

In 1997, Wayne Gould, a retired Hong Kong judge from New Zealand came upon the Sudoku puzzle from a Japanese bookstore. He then became addicted to it which led him to start developing and spend the next 6 years to have a computer schedule speedily yield puzzles. He heavily promoted and convinced The Times in Britain to publish it. In November of 2004, it was first published in the Times and Gould had it called the "Su Doku". And the rest is history.

History of the Sudoku Puzzles