May all your problems in life get solved.
Good wishes to all on the international SUDOKU Day.
SUDOKU and Puzzle solving is Interesting with lots of benefits.
187: Interesting Facts about Sudoku
Sudoku is a number game in which missing numbers are to be filled into a 9 by 9 grid of squares which are subdivided into 3 by 3 boxes so that every row, every column, and every box contains the numbers 1 through 9.
- Sudoku is not just a “corresponding” name for this puzzle. In Japanese “Su” means a number, while “Doku” means only/single. So Sudoku means “only single digits”.
- Actually, Sudoku isn’t a Japanese game it all. It is American invented. Howard Garns created it as Number Place in 1979 but died in 1989 before Japanese publisher Nikoli got a hold of it. The game didn’t really take off until 2004 though when Wayne Gould convinced The Times in London to publish it.
- When Sudoku became a world hit in 2005, it is estimated that it is the biggest phenomenon since the Rubik’s Cube in the 1980s.
- In the year following Sudoku going viral, pencil sales are said to have increased by around 700%.
- Sudoku is a logic game and involves absolutely no math or language skills.
- There are 6670903752021072936960Sudoku grids. However, the essentially different Sudoku grids are only 5,472,730,538. Lifetime is not enough to solve all the grids.
- You don’t need to be an expert to make a Sudoku puzzle. Anyone with basic logical reasoning can make a Sudoku puzzle within minutes.
- There is a minimum number of clues to be given for the Sudoku puzzle to have one solution. The least number of clues of a given Sudoku with a unique solution is 17.
- The fastest recorded time to complete a Sudoku puzzle was 1 minute 23.93 seconds, as the Guinness World Records says. The record was set on May 20, 2006 by Thomas Snyder, an American Sudoku champion.
- Arto Inkala, a Mathematician from Finland, claims to have come up with the “world’s hardest Sudoku” in 2012. Typically Sudoku difficulty is graded with 1 star being easy and 5 stars being very hard. According to Britain’s The Telegraph newspaper, Inkala’s Sudoku would be graded 11 on the difficulty scale!
- There is a worldwide Sudoku Championship every year since Mar 2006. The first World Sudoku Championship was held in Lucca, Italy.
- Sudoku is good for anyone and any age and helps develop mental abilities as well as keeps them in good condition.
- Playing Sudoku regularly can have benefits, like boosting your concentration and focus, lowering blood pressure, preventing or easing depression and possibly even preventing dementia and Alzheimer’s disease.
- Sudoku is considered highly addictive and considered as one of the good addictions.
Recommendation
If you did not already know it, Sudoku is a fun game that is great as a pass-time and a mental workout too. If you are looking for a game that can prove to get easier over time and present a challenge for your mental capacity, Sudoku it is. Whether you are young or old, this game offers the opportunity to occupy your mind while it provides a variety of other physical and mental health benefits too.
Question
What are you waiting for?
Titbits
Sudoku inadvertently obstructed justice by interfering with a court case (probably more than once). In Australia, 5 Jurors were caught playing a sneaky game of Sudoku instead of paying attention to evidence being presented.
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168: Tribute to Maki Kaji – “Grandfather of SUDOKU”
Maki Kaji (Pic: Courtesy Legacy.com)
Maki Kaji was the president of a Japanese puzzle manufacturing company (Nikoli Company Ltd). He is widely known as “the father of Sudoku”.
Maki Kaji was born on 08 Oct 1951 in Sapporo, Hokkaido. His father worked as an engineer at a telecom company and his mother was employed by a kimono shop.
Maki Kaji Kaji attended Shakujii High School in his hometown. He later studied literature at Keio University, but dropped out during his first year.
After a succession of jobs including being a roadie, a waiter and a construction worker, he started a publishing.
Kaji launched a quarterly puzzle magazine in 1980 together with two friends from his childhood. They called it Nikoli, after a race horse.
Three years later, he founded a company under the same name. The magazine, the company’s main product, grew to have 50,000 quarterly readers. The number game Sudoku appeared in early issues of Nikoli.
His interest in the puzzle piqued after encountering it in 1984 under the title “Number Place”. He formulated the name “Sudoku” while he was scrambling to get to a horse race. He shortened it from Suuji wa dokushin ni kagiru (“numbers should be single”) at the urging of his fellow workers.
After the game spread to Britain and the United States, it became wildly popular.
Kaji also invented or introduced various other puzzle games, such as Masyu. He resigned as head of Nikoli in July 2021, one month before his death.
Kaji was married to Naomi and they had two children.
Kaji died on 10 August 2021 at his home in Tokyo at age 69, from bile duct cancer.
Maki Kaji will live on for ever in the hearts of all SUDOKU solvers.
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References
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maki_Kaji
“‘Father of Sudoku’ puzzles next move”. bbc.co.uk. 13 June 2000.
“Japan’s ‘father of Sudoku’ Maki Kaji dead at 69”. www.thenews.com.pk. 17 August 2021.
Jump up to:a b c d e f g Albeck-Ripka, Livia; Ueno, Hisako (17 August 2021). “Maki Kaji, ‘Godfather of Sudoku,’ Dies at 69”. The New York Times. New York. Retrieved 17 August 2021.
Jump up to:a b “Sudoku maker Maki Kaji, who saw life’s joy in puzzles, dies”. AP NEWS. 17 August 2021.
Smith, David (15 May 2005). “So you thought Sudoku came from the Land of the Rising Sun …” The Observer.
Devlin, Keith (28–29 January 2012). “The Numbers Game (book review of Taking Sudoku Seriously by Jason Rosenhouse et al.)”. The Wall Street Journal. Weekend Edition. p. C5.
Kelly, Tim; Lies, Elaine (16 August 2021). “Japan’s Kaji, the “godfather of Sudoku,” dies at 69″.