Soduko Puzzles

See below our daily updated Soduko Puzzle

Soduko are easy to learn yet highly addictive language-independent logic puzzles which have recently taken the whole world by storm. Soduko 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.

Soduko 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.

soduko 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 soduko, 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 Soduko

The concept of soduko (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. soduko 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 soduko concept was not invented in Japan as many people may believe, but the name soduko was.

In 1986, after some important improvements were added, mainly by making symmetrical patterns and reducing the number of given clues, soduko became one of the best selling puzzles in Japan. Realizing that the only problem with the soduko puzzles was their long name, Kaji Maki, the president of Nikoli abbreviated it to soduko - (Su = number, digit; Doku = single, unmarried). Today there are more than 600,000 copies of soduko 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 soduko 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 soduko puzzles. Gould, that had written a computer program which generates soduko 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 soduko puzzle.

The publishing of soduko 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 soduko 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 soduko game in their Teletext service and Sky One launched the world's largest soduko 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 soduko radio version. Famous British celebrities as Big Brother's Jade Goody and Carol Vorderman, that her book How to do soduko 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 soduko as brain exercise in classrooms and suggestions have been made that soduko solving is capable of slowing the progression of brain disorder conditions such as Alzheimer's.

Back to Manhattan

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

Today there are soduko clubs, chat rooms, strategy books, videos, mobile phone games, card games, competitions and even a soduko game show. soduko 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 soduko Puzzle Books please use the links below:-