Sudoku is the addictive number puzzle game that has taken the UK by storm and is now taking over the rest of the world! It is branded by many as "The hottest puzzle since the Rubik's Cube!"

Studies show that playing Sudoku can improve memory, mind clarity, and even stop and prevent brain illnesses such as Alzheimer! Therefore there are some scientists & researchers recommending playing Sudoku as part of our regular daily activity.

Find out what everybody's talking about - join this exciting 21st century world phenomena and get your Sudoku on!

What You Get:

• Sudoku unit with over 1,000,000 games and 6 levels of difficulty.
• 2 self-programmable games.
• Sounds for exciting play.
• Easy to play & user friendly.
• Plays like a full size game.
• Batteries INCLUDED!
• Clamshell packing.
• Complete instructions.
• Comes in silver, black, pink, or metallic blue.

The History of Sudoku:

The name or "Sudoku" comes from Japan and consists of the Japanese characters Su (meaning 'number') and Doku (meaning 'single') but the puzzle itself originates from Switzerland and then travels to Japan by way of America.

Sudoku has its deep roots in very ancient number puzzles. For many centuries people have been interested in working out solutions to puzzles. This has been the basis of much of modern mathematics and science.

A magic square is a puzzle involving the ordering of consecutive numbers into a square (of size at least 3x3) comes to us from the mists of history.

The first known form is the Magic Square that is first documented in China 2000 years ago. In this puzzle is both a numerical and positional problem, as all the rows, columns and diagonal lines through the grid must add up to the same number. Just like Sudoku a number can only be used once. The aim of the puzzle was to try to devise new ordering of the number to complete the puzzle starting from scratch. Solutions were considered to have mystical properties and became entangled in the I-Ching (Book of Changes) method of divination.

The 3x3 solution shown above is called the Lo Shu diagram. It was considered the gift of the turtle from the River Lo (the turtle had the Chinese pattern enscribed on its back). It was first recorded in print in the 1st or 2nd Century AD. The magic square probably reached Europe from China by way of the arabs who brought news of many of the Chinese inventions with them along the Silk Road. Thabit ibn Qurrah from the 9th Century AD is credited with introducing the magic square to the Western World.

In Europe the most famous first appearance of the square is in Albrecht Dürer's engraving called 'Melancholia' in 1514 where a 4x4 magic square is clearly shown with an arrangement of the first sixteen numbers gives a sum of 34 in each row, column and diagonal. Any philosopher of the renaissance age would have known and understood the properties of magic squares.

Swiss Genius

The great mathematician Leonhard Euler is the man chiefly credited with the creation of the puzzle that we now know as Sudoku. Born in Basle, Switzerland in 1707 just after the giant leap forward in mathematics pioneered by Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz, he both consolidated and pioneered mathematical knowledge in many fruitful new directions. When he moved from Basle to St Petersburg, Russia, it was to study medicine but by the chance happenings of fate he ended up as the chief mathematician at the St Petersburg Academy, Russia. In 1741 he moved to Germany for 25 years but eventually returned to the Academy in Russia where he died at the grand age of 76. He was totally blind for the last seventeen years of his life.

Euler turned his mind to all sorts of mathematical problems. Amongst other things he is responsible for the symbol pi being denoted by the familiar greek letter π and also i as the square root of -1. His pioneering work on imaginary numbersusing his new notation transformed many key fields of mathematics.

May be only as a hobby, Euler developed the basics of 'Sudoku' which he termed Graeco-Roman Squares or Latin Squares - he used letters as the grid square symbols rather than numbers. He mused on what would happen if you removed the rule for magic squares that the sum of the diagonals must add up to the same number as the rows and columns and turn it into a puzzle of permutations. It was first published in 1782 in Verhandelingen uitgegeven door het zeeuwsch Genootschap der Wetenschappen te Vlissingen 9, Middelburg pp. 85-239. This dissertation was probably first given as a lecture to the Academy on October 17th 1776.

Euler's immense legacy of pioneering research has been much used by mathematicians and scientists ever since but the rather obscure puzzle he created was not taken up by others, not even as a pastime.

It took two centuries before the puzzle was used by Howard Garnes in an American magazine. As in every good story the puzzle took on an extra twist. Instead of just the rule of ordering rows and columns the puzzle added the rule that the grid is split into 3x3 regions of 9 squares and these regions must have only one occurrence of each symbol too. This makes it a more challenging problem for people to solve. Howard Garnes called the puzzle 'Number Place' when it was first published by Dell Puzzle Magazines, New York in 1979.

It didn't take that long for the puzzle to move to Japan. Although the Japanese like brain teasers as much as anybody else, it is believed that it is the property of the Japanese language itself that caused Sudoku to undergo its final transformation into a worldwide phenomenon.

The Japanese language is a little tricky for crosswords as it is symbolic rather than phonetic. You can not use a grid of crossword letters in the same way as you can in English. So the 'Number Place' puzzle that the Japanese saw in Dell Puzzle Magazine had great potential as a replacement for the familiar crossword puzzle in newspapers and magazines.

The American name 'Number Place' was translated as Suji Wa Dokushin Ni Kagi meaning 'the numbers must occur once only', but was quickly abbreviated to or in Western script Su Doku 'number only' or 'number single'

First introduced in Monthly Nikolist magazine in April 1984 it rapidly became a very popular pastime for the first time.

The Japanese added yet another twist to the Sudoku puzzle too. They imposed the rule that the pattern of revealed squares had to be symmetric and not just random. Although the first computer programme to generate and solve it was developed to in 1989, the best puzzles are still reckoned to be devised by human skill and judgement.