A numbers game

Since 2005, the Sudoku puzzle has been an international phenomenon, featured in books, calendars, websites and newspapers.

It has turned up in educational games and handheld game consoles and has even been added to the games available for cell phones. Media coverage of the Sudoku game and its popularity has led to a number of worldwide competitions, including the Sudoku World Championship that will be held in Prague in late March.

Immensely popular, Sudoku has invaded the Tech community as well. On any given day, students can be seen reclining in the Student Center with a puzzle in hand or punching in numbers on laptops in class. Why the craze?

For those people who are unfamiliar with the game, Sudoku is a logic-based numbers puzzle.

Players are supposed to fill a nine-by-nine grid given the following conditions: every row and column of nine numbers must include all digits one through nine in any order, and every three-by-three subsection of the nine-by-nine square must include all digits one through nine.

In the puzzles, some of the boxes are already filled in so as to provide both clues and limitations for the solver.

The classic Sudoku form is a grid with a total of 81 boxes, but there are variations like using larger or smaller squares, irregularly dividing the grid and adding extra restrictions on where digits can be placed within the square.

Different levels of difficulty are attributed to the positioning, not the quantity, of numbers filled in as clues.

The difficulty levels range from easy to challenging and various techniques are used to solve them. These methods include scanning, analysis, markup and others.

Tech students seem to favor the puzzle as a pastime because it takes a numerical approach and is a needed change from old standbys like crossword puzzles and word searches.

"Sudoku is a great way to make time go by on long plane rides," said Wesleigh Wangel, a first-year Management major.

"It's a lot of fun for me because I love logic puzzles and, unlike a word search or some other puzzle, Sudoku requires quite a bit more focus and concentration," Wangel said.

When they are completed, Sudoku puzzles are a complicated form of Latin squares.

The Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler is often noted as the original source for Sudoku puzzles because of his work with Latin squares in the eighteenth century.

However, the modern puzzle version that people play today was first published in the 1970s by Dell Pencil Puzzles and Word Games under the name "Number Place."

The puzzle then became popular in Japan in the 1980s after it was published by Nikoli and given the name Sudoku.

Nikoli publishers set rules for the puzzle that are now international Sudoku standards, which include having the number clues form a symmetrical pattern and restricting the number of filled-in boxes to 30 or fewer.

The little number puzzle has undoubtedly taken the place of other types of puzzles as a form of entertainment, but despite the many hours that Tech students have devoted to it, the game does not seem to be a threat to students' GPAs.

"I've seen people fail classes because of World of Warcraft but not Sudoku," said Stephen Cuzzort, a Computer Science graduate student.

Cuzzort said that he does not play Sudoku himself, but understands why the game is such a big draw.

"I think it is attractive to Tech students because you solve each block like an algorithm," Cuzzort said.

Some students just like the challenge.

"I greatly enjoy Sudoku puzzles. They are challenging but at the same time very interesting because each time you play, you find a new trick to use on the next puzzle," said Joy Salter, a first-year Computational Media major.

Other students enjoy the game for its own sake.

"I love Sudoku because it is a very original logic puzzle that is perfect for passing spare time or procrastinating. Right now I am working on a chain of 167 interconnected Sudoku puzzles and I'm almost finished. I think I'm going to paper my room with it when I'm through," said Kaley McClaskey, a first-year Physics major.

While not everyone plays Sudoku, the impact of this little square game of numbers at Tech is undeniable and continues to be felt around campus.