Sunday, August 28, 2005

Do do sudoku that you do so well



They're all the rage, worldwide. Millions upon millions of people are obsessed with them. And I just don't understand--at all.

They're sudoku, and blame the Japanese for this global craze.

The point of these puzzles is that the numbers 1 through 9 should appear once and only once in any row or column. And I've read a number of explanations of how to do this ... but I just can't. My mind simply goes numb after looking at that grid for more than 10 seconds. For that matter, my mind goes numb after reading the instructions.

I like puzzles, really I do. But I hate these damned things.

1 comment:

Grammarian@mindspring.com said...

I like them. When I was in L.A. I read the L.A. Times every day and they have a regular column of them in there. I did them for a whole week and enjoyed it. But they all seemed about the same to me, even though some were supposed to be hard and some were supposed to be easy.

P.S. You gave incomplete rules. Each digit from 1 to 9 has to appear once and only once not only in each row and column, but also in each 3 x 3 grid. For example, in the puzzle you posted, in the fourth column, the bottom-most space has to have the number 7, because the column already has everything except 6, 7, and 8, and there is already a 6 and an 8 in that 3 x 3 grid.