Sudoku

The New York Times has a short article on Sudoku, a deceptively simple sounding puzzle. I got hooked when I read an article online, so I thought I would spread the joy.

According to the NYT, one of the appeals of sudoku is that the rules can be summed up easily in a sentence. Basically, place the digits 1 through 9 in a 9x9 grid so that each digit appears once in each row and column, as well as each of 9 3x3 blocks which the grid is divided into. That's all there is to it. A lot of newspapers have taken to printing sudoku by popular demand. The flight attendant on my last flight had a sudoku torn from USA Today that she was working in flight between attending to passengers. Since I don't subscribe to print newspapers, I get my fix online.

http://www.lovatts.com.au/sudoku/sudoku.htm The down side to this site is that it only posts one puzzle per day and you're stuck with whatever difficulty level the day's puzzle is. On the up side, it allows you to pencil in up to 5 possible digits per square before committing to a digit.

http://www.websudoku.com/ This site allows you to pick from four difficulty levels (easy, medium, hard and evil), and you can access several billion puzzles at your leisure. There is a button that allows you to check whether any of your answers are wrong, but unless you enable cookies in your browser and change the settings, it won't tell you where the errors are. Also, you must enable cookies to get the pencil-in feature.

Sudoku free for your Palm There are other Palm-based Sudoku games out there, and even some for Pocket PC. This is the one I use, mostly because it's freeware.