Sudoku Reviews

Sudoku, where this rapidly developing fad and brain twister leads to, no one can tell. What is clear though is that Sudoku is a fun and challenging way for people of all ages and cultures to hone their logical and deductive abilities.
If anyone has not experienced the fun of Sudoku yet, they are invited to join the bandwagon.
Sudoku has a fascinating history. "Su" means number in Japanese, and "Doku" refers to the single place on the puzzle board that each number can fit into. Although its name is Japanese, its origins are actually European and American.
The 18th century Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler apparently developed the concept of "Latin Squares" where numbers in a grid appear only once, across and up and down. In the late 1970's, Dell Magazines in the US began publishing what we now call Sudoku puzzles using Euler's concept with a 9 by 9 square grid. They called it Number Place, and it was developed by an independent puzzle maker, Howard Garnes.
In the mid-1980s, the president of the Japanese puzzle giant Nikoli, Inc., Mr. Maki Kaji, urged the company to publish a version of the puzzle that became a huge hit in that country. Nikoli gave the game its current name, and helped refine it by restricting the number of revealed or given numbers to 30, based on grid size and having them appear symmetrically. Afterwards the game became increasingly popular.
Sudoku's future development is unknown. While the 9 by 9 grid is the most common form of Sudoku, there are many variants of the game. Four by four (4 x 4) Sudoku with 2 by 2 subsections are simpler. There are 5 by 5 games, 6 by 6 and 7 by 7 games. For the truly addicted, there are even 16 by 16 grids, not to mention a 25 by 25 grid apparently offered by Japanese game developer Nikoli. Sudoku puzzles using letters and symbols, some even spelling words in their final solutions are also becoming available. Other variants require basic computational skills.