Sudoku History

Sudoku was first published in 1979 by Dell Magazine as Number Place. Most people credit Howard Garns with the creation of this world wide phenomenon. Their logic for this claim is that Howards name was always present as a contributor for Dell Magazine when A Number Place puzzle was included but his name was absent when the issue did not contain a Number Place. Unfortunately Howard died in 1989.

Throughout history there have been a number of puzzles that were very similar to the game that we know as Sudoku. In the late 19th century French newspapers began running number puzzles with numbers removed. Le Siècle, a Paris-based daily is known to have published a particularly complicated 9x9 magic square which contained 3x3 sub-squares. Although the layout is the same as Sudoku the game contained double-digit numbers and required math to solve. The similarity shared with Sudoku is that each row, column and sub square must add up to the same number.

La France another Paris Daily had refined the game within 3 years to the point that it was almost what we know today as Sudoku. La France altered the game so that the rows and columns contained only the numbers 1-9 but they did not mark the sub-squares. Although there were no marked sub-squares, if you were to mark them you would find that they also contained the numbers 1-9. Although incredibly similar to modern Sudoku it cannot be considered Sudoku because under modern rules, it has two solutions.

Sudoku was introduced in Japan in April 1984 were it got the name "Sudoku". Originally the game was called "Sue wa dokushin ni kagiru" which when translated means "the numbers must occur only once" or "The numbers must be single" The game name was shortened to Sudoku by Maki Kaji. In 1986 Nikoli introduced some changes to Sudoku that have become part of the game we now play. The number of numbers given for any given puzzle was restricted to 32 and the puzzles became "symmetrical" which means the numbers given are distributed in rotationally symmetric cells.