En Passant: The numbers game

AS IN the case of a number of things (like, for example, a hadeda, a condom, a baobab, Bob Mugabe’s moustache), I can’t remember when and where I first saw a Sudoku puzzle, but it was probably only about 10 years ago. Sudoku puzzles seem to have come from nowhere – one minute there was no such thing, and the next there was such a thing; a bit like Jacob Zuma’s homestead (but a lot cheaper).

In fact, they’d been around for a while, the first such puzzle as we understand it being published by Dell Magazines in 1979. Then it was called “Number Place”, and it was, according to Wikipedia, designed by a bloke, an American, called Howard Garns from Connersville, Indiana. But Sudoku is really a variation of magic squares that go back to well before the rindepest, in fact before even Paul Kruger was in short pants.

A magic square is an arrangement of numbers in a square grid, where the numbers in each row, each column and (unlike Sudoku) also diagonally add up to the same number. They go back for centuries, in fact to 650BC in China, and I presume they’re called “magic” because they have at times through history had magical or mythical significance attached or attributed to them.

Number puzzles, incorporating elements of magic squares, seem to have begun appearing in newspapers, as an entertainment, in France towards the end of the 19th century. It had the same 9×9 square as Sudoku, with internal 3×3 sub-squares just like Sudoku, but as I understand it, and I might, it included numbers bigger than 9 and you needed to use arithmetic to solve it, instead of logic. That doesn’t surprise me – I mean, the French eat frog’s legs and drive on the wrong side of the road for a start. But at least, like Sudoku, each sub-square, row and column added up to the same number.

However, having got going in France, these number puzzles disappeared from French newspapers around 1914, to reappear in Dell Magazines in 1979 and in a Japanese paper in 1984. At the time in Japan, Sudoku was called Sûji wa dokushin ni kagiru (I kid you not), and I bet you’re glad you don’t have to go into CNA in Church Street to look for a Sudoku puzzle book, and say to the staff there, “Excuse me, have you got Sûji wa dokushin ni kagiru books in stock?” Aahh so!

This Japanese phrase actually means “the digits are limited to one occurrence” or “the digits must be single”, dokushin meaning “unmarried person” in Japanese. The name was later shortened to Sudoku, and it’s sobering to think that if the puzzle had been popularised in an English-speaking country it might be called “The digits must be a spinster” (or bachelor, I suppose), which would be shortened to Digspin (or Digbach).

The mathematics of Sudoku I find too complex to understand. There are apparently 6,670,903,752,021,072,936,960 classic 9×9 Sudoku grids. Once again I kid you not, and that is a huge, huge, ginormous number. That is a number approaching the number of bricks used at Nkandla to secure the safety of our President and his extended family, including chickens in the chicken run and cows in the kraal.

Anyway, I like Sudoku puzzles, and try to solve any that I see in the magazines that Doris buys and newspapers that cross my path. Doris has also brought me a couple of books of puzzles, which I approach in much the same way as I approach a packet of sliced biltong or a box of chocolates – I don’t stop until it’s finished.

I dunno, I find Sudoku addictive; I’m a compulsive solver, and I’m told that that’s not such a bad thing because it exercises the old grey matter, and helps to stop me going gaga and losing all my marbles as I get older. Use it or lose it, they say.

So when Doris brought me a book of 172 Sudoku puzzles last month, I spent quite a lot of time at the kitchen table solving them. They were categorised from “Easy” to “Extreme”, and I have to tell you that every single one, if you were patient and used logic, was solvable. Most in fact were a doddle.

Except one.

Puzzle number 138, categorised as “Extreme”.

This could best be described as a she-dog. Was my hair not becoming more and more valuable to me as I age, I would have torn some of it out in frustration. In the end, just last week I solved it, but I reached a point where I had to take a guess – it was no longer a case of logic, and I think that Sudoku puzzles have to be logical. What mental exercise is there in guessing? I was lucky and my guess was correct.

It’s reproduced on this page. I’ll give a bottle of wine to the first person who brings the solved puzzle to me here at the Vryheid Herald.

PS The bottle of wine went to Woitek Stylo who brought his completed puzzle in to the Herald at 10:15am on Thursday last week.