Get ready for the Sudoku addiction
The puzzle craze that has swept the world is taking up residency in the print edition of The Irish Examiner and life will never be sane again.
At first a curiosity, it then becomes a challenge and finally a compulsion. Once hooked, there is no going back. Sudoku creeps into the consciousness and installs itself in the intellect until no blank square is safe. Just try to refrain from decorating the bathroom tiles.
Since Sudoku burst onto the scene a few months ago, it has revived coffee breaks, hijacked train journeys and left the latest chicklit and chiller thriller blockbusters on the shelf when it comes to the before-sleep must-do.
The little puzzle with the big following has a long history which belies its sudden popularity in Europe, however, and while it appears in its current incarnation as a Japanese creation, it turns out the game is only really coming home.
The first form of Sudoku has been traced back to the 1700s in Switzerland where mathematician, Leonhard Euler, devised a "magic square", a grid of 81 squares that could be filled out so that every column and row contained the numbers one to nine without repeats or omissions.
Euler was also a philosopher and theologian, which is appropriate given that his legacy has almost become a new religion for some of its more ardent fans.
How Euler's mathematical quirk became a popular phenomenon to rival crosswords is a bit of a mystery but puzzle publishers, Dell, in the United States have been creating a version of it called "Number Place" for at least the last 25 years.
As with many good ideas, the Americans come up with them and the Japanese mass-produce them.
The Number Place concept was imported into Japan in the 1980s, tweaked a little, renamed Number Single [Su Doku or Sudoku as it has become known] and launched upon a population renowned for its passion for puzzling.
Publisher Nikoli has the rights to the game in Japan and was contently satisfying the appetite of the home market when a casual stroll through a Tokyo street by a retired judge from New Zealand sparked a revolution in its fortunes.
Wayne Gould was living in Hong Kong in 1997 when he hopped over to Tokyo for a visit and spotted a Sudoku puzzle book in a bookshop while filling in time on a shopping outing.
Over the next few years, Gould played around with the concept, working out a way of producing the puzzle by computer.
Eventually he developed a programme that would take every conceivable combination of the numbers one to nine and apply them in a mix of rows and columns so there would be an almost infinite number of unique grids.
He secured a try-out for his idea in a local newspaper in the United States where his wife was working and the readers' response was remarkable. Gould then registered sudoku.com on the web and set up his own publishing company, Pappocom, to churn out his puzzles for a growing newspaper market.
Emboldened by his success, Gould took his idea to Britain where, spurred by reader enthusiasm, newspapers cleared precious white space for the little boxes and television even gave Carol Vorderman her own Sudoku show.
Gould's "go west" strategy raised interest in the game's most recent eastern origins too and Nikoli found itself equally in demand. Here's where the Sudoku purists split.
While Gould's grids are computer-generated, Nikoli stick to the traditional method of employing human puzzle-setters. Their games are dispersed to Europe through British company, Puzzle Media, and that's where the brain-bafflers on the left come from.
They come in different degrees of difficulty with varying levels of assistance and are best approached with a pencil and eraser not that we think you won't get every entry right first go.
They'll tease, test and torment you. They'll challenge and cheer you. And ultimately they'll have you doing victory dances in the bathroom. Just don't lose the padlock key.
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