Puzzled?

Puzzle lovers packed Hyde on Friday for a presentation by Wayne Gould, the man behind the Sudoku craze that has swept the world, and recently named to Time magazine’s 100 most influential people of the year list. He is the owner of Sudoku.com, and created the first computer program that generated unique Sudoku puzzles. Sudoku is a number puzzle game that can be solved entirely by logic. Recently, he “18 months ago, no one in this room would have heard of Sudoku,” said Gould, who is the husband of linguistics professor Gaye Gould. He first ran into the game while on leave in Tokyo from his job as a Hong Kong judge. Gould found himself wasting time in a book store, both curious and illiterate. However, he noticed a book of puzzles that had “Sudoku” written across the top, and because of his love of crosswords, he decided to pick it up. The book sat in his bag for months until the Goulds were in Sarento, Italy. Gould had retired, and had time to spend on his hobbies: cryptanalysis (military code-breaking), programming, puzzles, and other intellectual games. Although he couldn’t read the Japanese Sudoku book, he managed to figure out the basic rules of the puzzle. Despite one of the most beautiful views in the world, Wayne and Gaye fought over who got to use the Sudoku book. “It was almost a forgone conclusion that I’d begin writing the program,” Gould said. The incentive was to give himself more puzzles. He spent about six years writing the program. “It’s not like this was a 12-hour a day job,” Wayne said. Gaye quickly added, “It was more like a six to nine.” It took longer to complete the project because the two spent a lot of time traveling. One of the biggest challenges he had to overcome was that it was hard to get the grade right – he wanted to be sure that easy was easy, and hard was hard. Finally, his program was ready. He offered it first to the Conway Daily Sun, which first published his Sudoku puzzle in September, 2004. From there, he took it to Tokyo, and it caught on there. Finally, he ended up in London. At the London Times, he had trouble getting a hold of the Features Editor, Michael Harvey. Forced to wait in the lobby for hours, Gould didn’t give up. He realized that there was only one way out of the building, and that was through the lobby, he was patient – at some point, Mr. Harvey would want lunch. When Harvey finally appeared, he bluntly asked Gould what he had. What Gould had was a copy of the London Times he had altered using “forgery skills learned from the Chinese criminal courts.” He had cut out a section of Features, and inserted a Sudoku puzzle. It looked perfect, Gould claimed, except for a little discoloring in the newsprint. Naturally, Harvey was surprised. He listened to what Gould had to say, and took copies of the puzzle to have his staff try out. By the time Gould had gotten home, he had an e-mail that read that the London Times was interested in Sudoku. On November 12, 2004, the London Times published its first Sudoku puzzle. The next big step came three months later when imposters appeared. Although many of these got the smaller puzzles correct, their harder ones couldn’t be solved without guessing. Gould claims that every one of the puzzles generated by his program can be solved through pure logic. Since then, Gould’s Sudoku puzzles have appeared in over 400 papers spanning 60 countries and all six continents. He has sold over 4,000,000 Sudoku books. Tournaments have even begun to spring up. They are hosted by organizations like the New York Post, the New York Times, and there was a World Sudoku Championship last March in Italy. Competitors participated in an Olympic-style, four team competition that had nine finalists. Gould says some competitors even sported uniforms for the competition. A Czech woman won that competition. Gould’s program, Sudoku, by Puzzles by Pappocom, is available on Sudoku.com for $14.95 for life. The funniest feature of the program is its “stealth” capabilities. If a person should be working and is playing instead, and his or her boss or professor approaches, pressing escape minuses the program, and changes its taskbar icon and name to what the user wishes, such as “Research.doc”.