Sodoku Puzzles

See below our daily updated Sodoko Puzzle

Sodoku are easy to learn yet highly addictive language-independent logic puzzles which have recently taken the whole world by storm. Sodoku uses pure logic and requires no maths to solve, these fascinating puzzles offer endless fun and intellectual entertainment to puzzle fans of all skills and ages.

Sodoku is a number placing puzzle based on a 9x9 grid with several given numbers. The object is to place the numbers 1 to 9 in the empty squares so that each row, each column and each 3x3 box contains the same number only once.

sodoku puzzles come in endless variations and range from very easy to extremely difficult taking anything from five minutes to several hours to solve. However, in sodoku, make one mistake and you’ll find yourself stuck later on as you get closer to the solution… Try the above daily puzzle, and see if you can solve them too!

History of Sodoku

The concept of sodoku (Japanese: 数独, sūdoku) seems to begin with the Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler who in 1783 invented Latin Squares - NxN grids which have all numbers from 1 to N appearing exactly once in each row and column. sodoku puzzles as we know them were first published in the late 1970’s in Math Puzzles and Logic Problems magazine by Dell Magazines. Dell took Euler’s Latin Square concept and applied it to a 9x9 grid with the addition of nine 3x3 sub-grids, or boxes, each containing all numbers from 1 to 9.

So, the sodoku concept was not invented in Japan as many people may believe, but the name sodoku was.

In 1986, after some important improvements were added, mainly by making symmetrical patterns and reducing the number of given clues, sodoku became one of the best selling puzzles in Japan. Realizing that the only problem with the sodoku puzzles was their long name, Kaji Maki, the president of Nikoli abbreviated it to sodoku - (Su = number, digit; Doku = single, unmarried). Today there are more than 600,000 copies of sodoku magazines published solely in Japan every month.

In contrast to the above, during all that time hardly anyone in Europe knew or paid any attention to the sodoku puzzles.

Slowing the progression of Alzheimer

At the end of 2004 Wayne Gould, a retired Hong Kong judge as well as a puzzle fan and a computer programmer, visited London trying to convince the editors of The Times to publish sodoku puzzles. Gould, that had written a computer program which generates sodoku puzzles of different difficulty levels, demanded no money for the puzzles. The Times decided to give it a try and on November 12, 2004 launched their first sodoku puzzle.

The publishing of sodoku in the London Times was just the beginning of an enormous phenomenon which swiftly spread all over Britain and its affiliate countries of Australia and New Zealand. Three days later The Daily Mail began publishing sodoku puzzles titled as "Codenumber". The Daily Telegraph of Sydney followed on 20 May 2005.

But that was not it. In July 2005 Channel 4 included a daily sodoku game in their Teletext service and Sky One launched the world's largest sodoku puzzle – a 275 foot (84 meter) square puzzle, carved in the side of a hill in Chipping Sodbury, near Bristol. The BBC Radio 4's Today began reading numbers aloud in the first sodoku radio version. Famous British celebrities as Big Brother's Jade Goody and Carol Vorderman, that her book How to do sodoku is the best-selling book in the country, have testified to its benefits as a mental workout. Even the Teachers magazine which is backed by the government recommended sodoku as brain exercise in classrooms and suggestions have been made that sodoku solving is capable of slowing the progression of brain disorder conditions such as Alzheimer's.

Back to Manhattan

In April 2005 sodoku completed a full circle and arrived back to Manhattan as a regular feature in the New York Post. On Monday, July 11, the sodoku craze spread to other parts of the USA when both The Daily News and USA Today launched sodoku puzzles on the same day. In both cases the sodoku puzzles were instead of traditional crosswords and bridge columns.

Today there are sodoku clubs, chat rooms, strategy books, videos, mobile phone games, card games, competitions and even a sodoku game show. sodoku has also sprung up in newspapers all over the world and is commonly described in the world media as "the Rubik's cube of the 21st century" and as the "fastest growing puzzle in the world".

For further reading and to buy some sodoku Puzzle Books please use the links below:-