Adventures in Sudoku

Sudoku is the ancient art of eliminating nerds from social interaction. Hello, my name is C. J. Godwin, and I play Sudoku. Do you?

Probably the ability to solve Sudoku puzzles is akin to recognizing camouflage. It’s an ability to find patterns in a grid, nine-by-nine, with nine three-by-three squares within. It’s the Rubik’s Cube ironed flat, except a cube, of course, only has six sides.

Commonly Sudoku is played using the number sequence, one through nine—each row and column must complete the sequence (adding up to forty-five) as well as each smaller three-by-three square. However, since the puzzle is series based, it can be played using any non-repeating series. It can be played using colors or letters. Furthermore, you don’t even need to know all elements in the series in order to solve the puzzle. Friends sometimes clip Sudoku out of magazines for me, and yet they cut off the nine-letter word clue that lists the possibilities. That’s the kind of friends I have.

Once I picked up this Sudoku book from the “free” bin in the public library. Every puzzle was purely made up of Hebrew or Yiddish terms. So every puzzle had this kitsch clue that gives the possible ingredients, and THEN, these puzzles were so cleverly crafted, THEN there was an acrostic word in the grid once you solved the puzzle. Each puzzle had a double challenge! I am not Jewish, however, so the secondary word find was kind of lost on me. Still, I admired the cleverness of the construction. No doubt there’s some brilliant computer program that produces these wonderful things instantly.

Sudoku is really just a matter of good housekeeping. Every puzzle is solvable. Guessing and intuition do not serve. It is a game of logical neatness based on Sherlock Holmesian deduction. It is a way to tidy up things in your mind, even when your external world is racked with dirty socks and unpaid bills. It could be good therapy for the subprime mortgage crisis…well, it couldn’t hurt you any worse. Yes, in Sudoku, you can put things in order.

After you fill in all the give-away squares in the grid, then it becomes a game of pairing. You want to solve for covalent bonds. First you find the pairs within the three-by-three grids (or at least this is the way I play it), then you find the pairs within the columns and rows. There are two maxims of the puzzle:

1. You should only ever have two possibilities per square in Sudoku.
2. If you do have more than two, it simply means you should eliminate the other possibilities rather quickly.

I’ve been playing the puzzles in my daily paper for a year, and I’ve come to the point where Monday through Friday is pure busy work. I tried to read a book on how to solve Sudoku. The book talked about x-wing patterns and sounded like a Jedi manual. The fun for me, though, is not knowing the solution, but solving the problem. I don’t look at the answers. I don’t know why they print them. You know if you can solve the puzzle then you’ve done it right. I didn’t finish the book. If I can’t figure it out or fail on my own, I’m not interested.

I tried a couple of free online sites—www.sudoweb.com and www.websudoku.com—both were too easy, about the Wednesday range, no worse. I did the “Evil” level on the latter and I made the mistake of choosing the biggie size option. The grid was so much bigger than what I’m used to, that my mind had a hard time holding onto the entire image.

Just as I enjoy solving the individual puzzles, Sudoku drives me to seek a universal solution. Of course if I ever do find a theory for all of Sudoku, that means I will have conquered it. What will I do then? I’ve already memorized all the three- and four-letter words standard in crosswords. (That’s why I started playing Sudoku.) What fun is there for me to do a puzzle where there isn’t something diabolical still beyond me? I don’t know how I would prevent my mind from seeking to discover the ultimate solution, but I hope that if I do find it, that there is another kind of puzzle coming out that will take up at least a year of my life anew.

Or maybe I’ll spend more time blogging.