Daily News Leader (Staunton, VA)

Daily News Leader (Staunton, VA)

March 19, 2006

Do you Sudoku?

Author: Maria Longley

Author: The News Leader

Section: Lifestyles
Page: 1C

Estimated printed pages: 2

Article Text:

By Maria Longley/staff

mlongley@newsleader.com

It's so popular, it's become a verb: "Do you Sudoku?"

The number-logic puzzle is the national craze that has percolated to coffee houses, restaurants and breakfast tables throughout the Central Shenandoah Valley.

Newspapers worldwide -- including The News Leader, which began carrying it earlier this month -- now run the logic game next to the daily crossword puzzle. Bookstores have whole tables full of Sudoku puzzle books.

Downtown Staunton's book store, The Bookstack, can't keep enough of the puzzle books in stock, says owner Suzi Armstrong.

"A lot of the books started really coming out during this past Christmas season," she said. "But my customers started telling me about them back in September."

Sudoku players say the game is maddeningly addictive.

Local attorney John Hooe III started playing it when he noticed The Washington Post running it about three months ago.

"Yes, I'm addicted," he says dryly.

Hooe, 53, plays a couple a day and can finish the easy puzzles that run on Monday and Tuesday in about five to 15 minutes.

"My eyes blur when I get to the medium difficulty ones. I'm still a novice."

The rules are simple, but many non-players are perplexed, even intimidated, by the curious-looking grid with numbers and blank cells.

Although the puzzle does not involve arithmetic, the game is an exercise in mathematics -- deduction, to be precise, said Laura Taalman, a James Madison University math professor and Ph.D.

Taalman has a business called Brainfreeze Puzzles that creates and sells logic puzzles, among them advanced difficulty Sudoku puzzles.

Solving Sudoku involves making conjectures and pattern recognition, Taalman said.

"It's not arithmetic. A lot of people say it's not mathematics for that reason. But logic is true mathematics," Taalman said. "But people who think they're not mathematical actually enjoy Sudoku. I don't like calculation, but I love logic puzzles."

She believes people get satisfaction out of solving Sudoku puzzles, in part, because they're constructed so that there is exactly enough information to solve the puzzle. "You look at what you're given, and you figure out what else is possible given the rules. You can't guess. And if there is more than one answer, then it's a poorly constructed puzzle."

With a well-constructed Sudoku puzzle, once the first rows or columns are solved, the rest come "in a cascade of numbers. It's very intuitive, and it's almost Zen," Taalman said.