Over the past couple of years Sudoku’s popularity has soared and become a staple next to the generic crossword puzzles and word jumbles. Many people have identified it as our generation’s reply to the Rubik’s cube — a pointless struggle involving no mathematical skills or real intelligence. But still students Sudoku on.
“You just need to know how to count basically,” Mari Briley, a junior in sociology, said about Sudoku.
The game involves 81 boxes arranged in panels of nine squares each. The mind then sequences the numbers one through nine in each panel, and then also across and down.
“I first tried Sudoku about a year ago in a small Sudoku book my mom brought me from England,” Ronnie Mendell Johnson, a junior in mathematics, said. “The biggest draw for me now is trying to do them in a specific time period. At websudoku.com you can select an option to show a ‘competitive timer’ in which your time is shown as you do the puzzle.”
“At the end of solving a puzzle you can then look at your time compared to the average and they tell you what percentile you’re in. It was a lot of fun going from taking forever on an easy level puzzle to being in the top 8-12 percent on the ‘evil’ level — the hardest on the site.”
Part of the draw for students such as Kimberly Gobac, a senior in biology, is the time involved in solving the puzzle. When still learning the ways of Sudoku, the complex sequencing requires stamina as well as trial and error.
Gobac first came across Sudoku in Mexico last Christmas when vacationing with her family. Her cousin let her borrow a book while catching some rays and she became hooked, but now her Sudoku experimentation is usually subjugated to class time.
“It keeps me from getting bored,” Gobac said. “It takes a while to do and it keeps you entertained for the whole class.”
Briley agrees with Gobac. “Sometimes anything is better than a boring lecture class,” Briley said.
At first the grid of missing numbers can seem intimidating and a little boring, as Briley said when a friend tried to introduce her to Sudoku. But once she began it became an addiction.
Others such as Crystal Archbell, a senior in marketing, just can’t seem to find her niche in this worldwide craze. While working at the Discovery Channel Store in Crabtree Valley Mall, Archbell had a store full of interesting contraptions to play with — and Sudoku seemed an inferior alternative.
“I tried it once or twice at work but I think my attention span is too short,” she said. “I love numbers and I love math, but I thought it was stupid. I was also trying it on one of those PDA things, so that might have made it worse. I had to try to sell it to people, too, and when I was explaining it even I sounded bored. And the parents would be like, I don’t think my kid would like that, and I was like me either. Lets move on to planes.”
A computerized device would be a difficult way to start Sudoku because most beginners use the corners of boxes to write the premeditated numbers before finalizing a decision. Briley refers to this strategy as “marking it up,” and only uses it for very difficult puzzles now.
Johnson uses a different approach. “I like to start a puzzle by visualizing the numbers as having colored lines extending from them. Thus, by process of elimination, I usually can get at least a couple of numbers at the start,” he said.
He then concentrates on rows and columns that look fairly full, or situations where a row is missing a number. If a row is missing a number and one block of nine contains that number — butnot in that row — it has to be in one of the other two blocks the row passes through.
“These two methods generally yield a lot of numbers. I also sometimes am forced to use brute-force methods when I’m stuck,” Johnson added. “It’s all really about process of elimination.”
