Most people tend to think that the game of Sudoku, or more correctly 数独 has its origins in Japan. The name itself consists of two Japanese characters. The character “Su” means number. And “Doku” means single. Yet it wasn't invented in Japan. In truth, the game comes all the way from Switzerland and finally ended up in Japan via the Americas.
The game itself is deeply rooted in Ancient number puzzles. Over many centuries, people have been involved in creating numerical puzzles and riddles, as well as solving them.
Some of the first documented numerical puzzles come from China around 2,000 years ago. In this puzzle the numbers and position of them, in other words the rows, columns and diagonal lines through a grid, must add up to the same number. In exactly the same way that in Sudoku the number can only be used once in the grid. The same applies here. The gameplay itself is to try and find a new ordering of the numbers so the puzzle may be completed from scratch. Interestingly enough the solutions to these puzzles were said to have supernatural properties. And these solutions themselves became part of the Chinese book of “I Ching” or the “Book of Changes,” which uses numbers as a method of predicting the future.
A solution called the “Lo Shu'' consisted of three by three numbers and it was regarded as coming from the River Turtles that had magic squares inscribed on their back and lived in the River Lo. The Arabs travelling via the Silk Road, bought the magic square game to Europe. You can see an equivocal appearance in the work of Albrecht Dürer in an engraving he called “Melancholia” which was made in 1514 and features a 4 x 4 square which shows an arrangement of the first 16 numbers giving a sum of 34 in all rows columns and across both diagonals. As such, any Renaissance philosopher would have instantly understood the properties of magic squares.
The actual creation of the puzzle, with what we know today as Sudoku, can probably be credited to the great mathematician, Leonardo Euler. He was born in 1707, just after Sir Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz took mathematics to new limits. He moved from Basel to Saint Petersburg in Russia in order to study medicine. But he somehow fell into the position of the Chief Mathematician at the St. Petersburg Academy. In 1741 he visited Germany and ended up staying for 25 years before returning to the Academy in Russia where he remained until his death at the age of 76. In spite of being blind for the last 17 years of his life, he still managed to make several very important discoveries in relation to advanced mathematics.
Euler had the sort of mind that turned to mathematical problems naturally. Probably some of his most famous discoveries were the ratio of a circle's circumference and diameter known as pi. He also produced pioneering work on imaginary numbers and in doing so, transformed the whole field of mathematics.
When not working on advanced mathematical problems, he enjoyed developing the game of Sudoku in his spare time as a hobby. Originally he called these Graeco-Roman Squares or Latin Squares. This was because in the original game he used letters and symbols rather than numbers. He decided to remove the rule which dictated that the sum of the diagonals must add up to the same numbers as the rows and columns. Instead he turned it into a puzzle of permutations. His thoughts on the matter were first published in 1782 in Verhandelingen uitgegeven door het zeeuwsch Genootschap der Wetenschappen te Vlissingen 9, Middelburg. He later went on to give his dissertation as a lecture in the Russian Academy on October 17th 1776.
We need to skip many years before the puzzle was introduced into America by a certain Howard Garns. He called the puzzle “ Number Place” and changed the grid into 9 regions of 3 by 3 squares, with each region having a unique occurrence of each number. This change instantly made the puzzle much more challenging. Howard Garns first published the puzzle in Dell Puzzle Magazine in New York in 1979.
Very soon the puzzle was travelling over the Pacific Ocean and found itself in Japan. Now the Japanese are very fond of braised cheeses and it's believed that it is the property of the Japanese language that caused Sudoku to undergo the final transformation that makes it the wall night parcel we know today. You have to remember that the Japanese language is very tricky for making crosswords. That's because the language is symbolic as opposed to being phonetic. This makes writing crossword puzzles extra difficult when compared to those devised in, for example, the English language. In this way, using numbers in squares as found in the Number Place puzzle, meant that it would be a great substitute for those regular crossword puzzles found in both newspapers and magazines of the day.
Once in Japan, the American name of Number Place was translated into 数字は独身に限る Sūji wa dokushin ni kagiru, which means “the number must only occur once.” Nevertheless, this name quickly became abbreviated to 数独.The first printed puzzle was in the Monthly Nikolist magazine. It quickly became a popular sensation, with Japanese people doing the puzzles as a pastime.
The Japanese decided to add yet another element to the Sudoku puzzle to make it even more difficult. A new rule was imposed that the pattern of revealed squares had to be symmetric and not just random. It also stated that at least 32 of the 81 squares in regular Sudoku could be revealed to give a reasonable level of difficulty. Though many of these puzzles are today generated by computer programs, the Japanese still believe that the best puzzles are devised by human skill.