Guest Author - Amy Daniels

A few months ago as I was walking through the book section at Wal*Mart I noticed a puzzle book dedicated to a math game I have been playing since I was 12 years old. What confused me though was the title; Sudoku. From what I remember this game has always been called Number Place. I walked on by and didn't think any more of it until I got in the car.

There is a strange phenomenon that occurs to almost everyone I know. As soon as you hear about something new almost immediately you start noticing it everywhere you go. This was no exception. No sooner had I turned on the car radio than I heard the NPR puzzle master Will Short talking about his newest Sudoku book.

In the following weeks I noticed Sudoku books in every store I went to but really got irritated when I noticed the local librarians copying the Sudoku puzzle from the newspaper on a daily basis. I couldn't help it; I was mad!

To me this game was and should always be called "Number Place." I was jealous that a game I played for years became popular among so many people and only after the name was changed. It took me a few days to realize how I felt and then was so embarrassed that I just had to laugh. Who in the world would get upset over a puzzle having a different name?

I decided it was time to do some research to see just how long this popular number game has been around.

In 1895 an early version of the Sudoku puzzle was published in a French newspaper. It is believed the game was influenced by the Swiss Mathematician Leonhard Euler who coined the termed "Latin Squares" for a similar game that was frequently carved in architecture, some thousands of years old.

Though the name has changed many times through history the rules of the game have never changed. The object has always been to fill a grid made up of subgrids with different symbols in such a way that each symbol occurs exactly once in each row, exactly once in each column and exactly once in each subgrid. The number and size of grids vary according to difficulty level. Some puzzles combine the use of numbers and letters.

The game as we know it today was invented in 1986 by Howard Garns. Mr. Garns distibuted the puzzle, called "Number Place" in Dell Magazine publications. Nikoli Co. LTD, a puzzle publisher in Japan, discovered the game and in 1987 republished the format under the title "Sudoku",which literal meaning is "single number."

Knowing that this is a game that has physical evidence of being around since 990 AD and possibly even longer, how could I possibly feel so possesive over it. It was also interesting to learn that historians believe this puzzle to be regarded by ancient civilizatons as a numerological talisman.

Thanks to the information age, Sudoku fans can play this popular puzzle any time they want on the web. Check out the related links below for some of my favorite sudoku puzzles on the web.