Su Doku or should that be Sudoku? Whichever, it’s the craze that’s sweeping the broadsheet-reading nation. And I was completely unaware of it until last Sunday.
That was when I was looking in a bookshop and happened to notice a Su Doku puzzle book that seemed to be in the bestsellers section. A quick flick through revealed some kind of numerical/logical puzzle. Maybe the sort of thing I’d like? I bought the book.
It seems that The Times introduced the puzzles to their paper last November, but that they originate from Japan. The numbers are pretty irrelevant since the puzzles are completely logic based and they could be replaced with letters or symbols. Being logical, they can be a bit more accessible than crosswords – at least to me – and so that’s an advantage.
Anyway I completed a few and quickly became hooked. Yesterday’s Independent redesign introduced a puzzle to that paper I notice, although with puzzle #1 they presented an example solution (in the place where in future, yesterday’s solution will appear), and they managed to misprint it. So it really won’t help the novice.
But the Indie isn’t the second paper to jump on the bandwagon. That’s the Telegraph which quickly appreciated the puzzles’ apparent popularity. Now both The Times and Telegraph run daily competitions. With The Times, you can win a bottle of champagne by noon each day, whereas the Telegraph gives you until 9pm when you can win a pair of theatre tickets. So far, the Indie is sticking to doing it for the love of the puzzle.
From what I’ve now heard either the Mail or the Mail on Sunday is also running a puzzle.
But the rivalry between The Times and the Telegraph is legendary and that’s equally the case with Su Doku puzzles. The setters of each paper’s puzzles have their own websites (here and here). And the rivalry spills over into the setters. Here’s The Times’ setter mentioning that other sources of puzzles “might be faulty.” And here’s the Telegraph on The Times’ claims.
Needless to say – there are computer programs around the solve the puzzles for you, although it does seem a completely pointless passtime. Aside from the intellectual exercise of producing such a program that is. (Having said that, I have been known to sit in front of Countdown with a palmtop anagram program, gleefully beating, or at least equalling the scores the competitors get. The numbers game, I’m relatively good at on my own thanks.)
But I’ll leave computers alone, and try to get good at these puzzles on my own terms.