The New Sudoku Players' Forum

[gfroyle]

Ed Pegg's Mathpuzzle column contained a link to a Sudoku article in American Scientist.

http://www.americanscientist.org/template/AssetDetail/assetid/48550

A reasonable job on the Sudoku part, but got a bit lost when he tackled the computational complexity issues...

New Scientist will also have an article on Sudoku in their next (current?) issue...

Cheers

Gordon

[PaulIQ164]

Yeah, there's an article in this week's New Scientist. Pretty good, all told. It actually names an inventor for the puzzle that sounds plausible, not Leonhard Euler or anyone.

[Red Ed]

A reasonable job on the Sudoku part, but got a bit lost when he tackled the computational complexity issues...

Got a bit lost on the number of distinct grids, too, quoting Bertram and Frazer's 3,546,146,300,288 (number of reduced grids in a particular sense) rather than the much smaller 5,472,730,538 you get from applying the full range of available symmetries.

[gfroyle]

Yeah, there's an article in this week's New Scientist. Pretty good, all told. It actually names an inventor for the puzzle that sounds plausible, not Leonhard Euler or anyone.

Just got the NS article.. they used a couple of 17s from my collection; I was concerned that they would be mistyped or something, but they seemed to get them right... they were slightly careless in labelling the diagram because they said "the minimum number of clues in a solvable sudoku IS 17" rather than "is ASSUMED to be 17".

I hasten to add that I DID tell Ivan Semeniuk (the author) that this was an unsolved problem...

The American Scientist article mentions that Garns is the "most likely" inventor of Sudoku, but that it is not known for sure. The reason is that the Dell puzzle mags in which they appeared first had a variety of puzzles, but they were not individually credited to specific authors. But by searching through the magazines, someone noticed that Garns was in the overall list of contributors if and only if the magazine contained a Sudoku....

Conclusion: he contributed Sudokus...

Cheers

Gordon

[Pappocom]

Conclusion: he contributed Sudokus...

I agree with your comments. Note that, anyway, the assumption can only be that he "contributed" Sudokus, not that he "invented" them. He might have been doing just what I did in 2004.

- Wayne

[Lardarse]

I agree with your comments. Note that, anyway, the assumption can only be that he "contributed" Sudokus, not that he "invented" them. He might have been doing just what I did in 2004.

You mean introducing them to a new market (the UK) and having them respond with something along the lines of "More please!" ?