sudoku (051020)

sudoku (051020)

In a comment on this post at Small Dead Animals, Kelly said:

"Kate I swear if you posted the daily and weekend crosswords I would never again purchase a newspaper"

Well, I think that's a great idea - such a great idea in fact that I decided to add a regular puzzle here in my blog. Now, I don't have the patience to put together a crossword puzzle every day (but that could change). However, there is one puzzle that isn't a problem for me to put in here. That puzzle is sudoku (which means "number single" in Japanese). A puzzle of this type appears in the New York Post, USA Today, the San Fransisco Chronicle, the Orlando Sentinel, and the British national newspapers the Guardian and the Times.

The rules of sudoku are simple. The puzzle board consists of a 9 by 9 grid, which is further divided up into nine 3 by 3 blocks. In each row, column, and 3x3 block, the numbers 1 through 9 each get written exactly once. The puzzle board generally starts with 18 to 30 of the cells in the grid already filled in. For those who need help, a short tutorial on how to solve sudoku puzzles can be found here.

Don't worry about me running out of sudoku puzzles to post here, or seeing one you've already solved. If symmetries are taken into account, there are 5472730538 unique sudoku puzzles.

To solve this puzzle, I suggest first saving the GIF on your computer. Then print it out and solve it in pencil, or if you don't feel like using paper, then solve it using a graphics editor such as Microsoft Paint. In a day or two I will post the solution to the puzzle.

Update: the solution is here.

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