Word: sudoku
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...Then the Japanese picked up the puzzle; a New Zealander named Wayne Gould put them into his own magazine and peddled the idea to the Times of London. In a trice, like home electronics, and autos and anime, this Japanese imitation overtook the American original, making Sudoku the Toyota of puzzles...
...comic books, especially those produced by Disney). I was hooked, instantly and eternally, not so much by the crosswords as by the number and word games that filled out the Dell pages. So I figured I owed her, and Shortz, a grudging attempt to get with the Sudoku program...
...Based on a Japanese phrase for "single numbers," Sudoku is actually an American invention. In 1979 Dell Pencil Puzzles and Word Games featured a puzzle called Number Place: nine boxes of nine boxes -imagine a big tic-tac-toe board with a tiny tic-tac-toe board in each square. The object is to fill in the numbers 1 through 9, nine times, so that no number is repeated in a horizontal or vertical line, or in any of the small boxes...
...Lady Pat wants to convince me that Sudoku is the caviar of puzzles, an ideal mind expander, opening a world of numerical possibilities with a minimum of means. All right. I acknowledge the game's elegance. And, heaven knows, I'm a number freak. Attach a few of them to a pitcher's or batter's record, and I'm off in Rotisserie or SABRmetrics dreamland. Ahh, slugging percentage! Oooh, WHIP (walks plus hits divided by innings pitched)! Those numbers have meaning, personality, clout. They lend biographical nuance and historical comparison to the game of baseball...
...what do you learn from Sudoku? Where's the allusive fun? The numbers in a Sudoku box are dry, curt, numbing; they live only in their own, square, self-contained universe; they refer to nothing but themselves. Numbers lack the allusiveness of words, their reverberations, their playfulness - how they rub up against one another and transform themselves. Add an S to comic and get cosmic; add one to laughter and get slaughter. You don't get this alchemy with numbers...