kartooner.com

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.