kartooner

At the movie the­atre this past week­end I spot­ted a decent-sized ban­ner for the ref­er­ence site, How­Stuff­Works, a site that’s been around for ages it seems.

I remem­ber first hear­ing about the site a few years back and think­ing that Mar­shall Brain had a win­ner on his hands thanks to the smart, fun and vibrant writ­ing. If I wanted to know how a com­bus­tion engine worked, I’d turn to How­Stuff­Works since it always seemed to explain things in a way in which I could com­pletely under­stand the sub­ject mat­ter. Often I’d won­der if I really scoured the archives for weeks on end, that I might actu­ally increase my IQ a few points.

Case in point, a few weeks ago my sister-in-law’s boyfriend informed me that he’s been hooked on the Sodoku craze. I’ve seen the puz­zle printed in the news­pa­per, but never really under­stood how to play, other than it seemed logic-based. The instruc­tions sim­ply state that you have to fill the grid with the num­bers 1 through 9. While it sounds easy, the game itself is a bit more complicated.

How­Stuff­Works has this brain-dead sim­ple expla­na­tion (4 pages in fact) on Sodoku with dia­grams and other inter­est­ing bits of infor­ma­tion, includ­ing the his­tory of Sodoku:

Sudoku began as a game called “Num­ber Place” in the Dell puz­zle books from the 1970s. It was actu­ally adapted from a math­e­mat­i­cal con­cept called “Latin squares,” which can be traced back to medieval times but was first writ­ten about by the Swiss math­e­mati­cian Leon­hard Euler in the 1700s. “Num­ber Place” was not overly pop­u­lar in the United States. But in 1984, it landed in Japan and was an imme­di­ate suc­cess. Nobuhiko Kanamoto, edi­tor of Nikoli, a Japan­ese puz­zle pub­lisher, called it Suuji Wa Dokushin Ni Kagiru (“The Num­bers Must be Sin­gle”). It was later short­ened to “sudoku,” mean­ing “sin­gle number.“

Quite fas­ci­nat­ing con­sid­er­ing I just fig­ured it was rel­a­tively new.