Re: Japanese Number Puzzle Conquers Britain

On Wed, 25 May 2005 15:49:36 +0100, Robin Chapman wrote:

> MrPepper11 wrote:
>
>> May 24, 2005
>> Japanese Number Puzzle Conquers Britain
>>
>> LONDON (AP) -- Britain has a new addiction.
>
> Dunno about that, but certainly British newspapers do.
>
>>
>> A Japanese brainteaser that has quietly appeared in puzzle magazines in
>> Asia and North America for years, Sudoku hit Britain in the pages of
>> The Times newspaper in November. It now has thousands of avid
>> followers, a host of Web sites and books, and runs daily in eight
>> national newspapers, which compete fiercely to offer their readers the
>> best puzzle.
>
> The Times has been doing it for a while, but a couple of weeks
> ago the Grauniad got it in a big day --- on one day putting one
> on every page of its tabloid insert.
>
>>
>> It looks like arithmetic, but requires the application of logic. It can
>> be fairly straightforward or fiendishly difficult.
>
> As for computer algorithms, I found this site
>
> http://spivey.oriel.ox.ac.uk/mike/comp2005/results.html
>
> and I amused myself by implementing the algorithm suggested by Knuth
> in Python. It's all very straightforward. It took well under 200 lines
> of code, and it solves newspaper problems immediately. Hardly any of these
> require nontrivial backtracking....so much for fiendishness....

OK, I've been avoiding these Sudoku threads, because it looked like
something incomprehensible. Well, the tabloids explained it in a way
that's comprehensible, but still doesn't make much sense.

Fill a 9 x 9 grid with 9 copies of each digit, 1 to 9 inclusive,
such that each row, each column, and each of the 3 x 3 boxes in
the 3 x 3 matrix of 3 x 3 boxes, has each digit appearing once?

That's it?

How the heck do you make variations on that? Admittedly, it seems
intuitive that there are a very large number of ways to accomplish
this goal - what do they do, make one up, and omit some of the
digits and make the reader fill in the missing digits?

Thanks,
Rich




.

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