Sudoku and Other Diversions (very interesting, if quirky, article)

The American Thinker ^ | 3/19/2006 | Paul Shlichta

[Dark Skies]

My wife, having been told by friends in Europe that Sudoku, the Japanese [1] number-grid puzzle, was all the rage there, asked me to find some Sudokus and teach her how to solve them. A Google search disclosed a website (www.websudoku.com) with billions of Sudoku puzzles, a Wikipedia article with the puzzle’s history and mathematics, and dozens of other sites which (as the little girl wrote in her book report) “told me more than I wanted to know.”

I tried a few Sudokus and found that they could be solved by logical inference without any guesswork. My wife caught on to the method quickly and is now happily puzzling away.

But the wonder is that she—and the world—are interested in such logic puzzles at all. In trying to figure out why, I remembered a Caltech colleague who, at the height of the Cold War, developed a classic anxiety syndrome: high blood pressure, insomnia, and all the rest. His doctor concluded that the source of his anxiety was his newspaper and restricted his reading to the classified ads and the crossword puzzle. He claimed that the classifieds were the most optimistic thing in the paper: all those beautiful homes and cars going for a song, all those interesting and lucrative job openings, and (on the very next page) a bevy of wonderfully qualified applicants ready to fill those jobs—in short, a happy world, very different from the one in the front pages.

And the crossword puzzle? It worked out—with every letter in its proper place. And if you didn’t know how to make it come out properly, they told you the next day. It was a small island of order and symmetry in a chaotic world.

I suspect Sudoku serves the same purpose. It gives you the illusory feeling that you know how to solve the problems in your life. If you can make the numbers in the Sudoku grid come out even, then maybe you can do the same with your bank statement and tax return. Walter Kerr, in his profound Decline of Pleasure, attributed this healing quality to art. But since most of us have lost interest in art, or at least in the unsettling enigmas of contemporary art, we have to make do with puzzles. The austere symmetry of logic can provide a similar soothing pleasure, which is why Archbishop Fénelon warned his seminarians to “be on guard against the enchantments and diabolical attractions of geometry.”

But Sudoku, and other logic puzzles like it, may have the far more important purpose of teaching logic to the masses. Our school system seems to have abandoned all attempts at that [2]. As George Will recently pointed out, they are more concerned with teaching students to “promote social justice” and “perform their identities.” Fortunately, a certain percentage of young people manage to teach themselves basic logical skills. To this end, puzzles like Sudoku may succeed where our education system has failed.

I therefore propose Sudoku as Step One in a three-step program to prepare American Thinker readers for interpreting MSM articles and columns. After a few weeks of Sudoku have purified and organized you thinking, go on to Step Two, the cryptic crosswords that so delight the British, but are most masterfully exemplified by American compilers such as Cox and Rathvon. These are like ordinary crossword puzzles except that the definitions include puns or anagrams cunningly crafted to mislead the reader. Thus “pretty girl in crimson and rose” defines “rebelled”—“pretty girl” is “belle,” “crimson” is “red,” and “rose” defines “rebelled—thus, “RE(BELLE)D.” It may well be that the popularity of cryptics in Britain has helped to make its politicians so adroitly evasive and its voters so cynical.

When Sudoku has trained you to spot logical contradictions and cryptics have taught you to see through evasions and deceptive phrasing, you are ready for Step Three.—the game of “Spin.” The object of this game is to read a MSM article or column and separate the truth from what the writer is trying to make you believe. An easy example is two recent columns commenting on the Academy Awards. The writers had very little good to say about the proceedings, They accused the Academy voters of not having fairly watched all the films, invented farfetched explanations for the success of Crash, and shared a petulant dislike for almost every aspect of the ceremony.

I showed this to my wife and asked her to play “Spin” with it. Her Sudoku training paid off; within five minutes she had correctly solved the puzzle: “They’re sore that Brokeback Mountain didn’t win and are trying to get even.”

So take up a copy of New York Times or Time and play “Spin.” Though we can no longer rely on MSM reporters and columnists to tell us the unbiased truth, we can at least make them a source of innocent merriment, as the Mikado would say.

Notes

[1] Actually invented by American architect-puzzlemaster Howard Garns in 1979. Just like American artists and musicians a century ago, the game had to travel abroad and adopt a foreign name before it could return home in triumph.

[2] The school boards have their own equivalent of Sudoku therapy. Having failed miserably to teach students logic or language or mathematics or science, they have, as Sam Weller put it, “…took to building, which is a medical term for being incurable.” The school boards may fail to teach students to pass statewide exams but at least they can point with pride to the impressive buildings they’ve erected with our money.

Paul Shlichta is a research scientist.

[Dark Skies]

When Sudoku has trained you to spot logical contradictions and cryptics have taught you to see through evasions and deceptive phrasing, you are ready for Step Three.—the game of “Spin.” The object of this game is to read a MSM article or column and separate the truth from what the writer is trying to make you believe.

[proxy_user]

"After a few weeks of Sudoku have purified and organized you thinking, go on to Step Two, the cryptic crosswords that so delight the British, but are most masterfully exemplified by American compilers such as Cox and Rathvon.

American compilers must take second place to the British. The anonymous London Times compilers, and Araucaria at the Guardian, are the ones to beat.

[hamboy]

You might try plaything Mah-jong, if you can finish within 5 minutes then try Sudoku, or else stick to Mah-jong.

Play Mah-jong free online at http://www.freegames.ws/games/boardgames/mahjong/mahjong.htm

[saganite]

Chess is still King when it comes to logical puzzles but Sudoku is fun and occupies quite a bit of my spare time.

[Dark Skies]

I just finished my first sudoku. It was one of the easy ones but I could feel the mud in my brain move around a bit.

My parents are in their late eighties and I got them hooked on the NY Times puzzle to keep their minds sharp...and it works like a charm.

[Mears]

I just finished my Sunday Globe Sudoku. I love it.

I'm always early so I carry a Sudoku book in my car for the times I'm waiting for people(which is often).

[ImaGraftedBranch]

See? It's not just us that plays "find the spin."
lol!

[Beaker]

I love Sudoku. We have a permanent "Sudoku Board" up in my physics department, and we'll solve 7 to 10 puzzles a day at least. And when we get bored with numbers, we'll switch to constants. It's great fun, and it brings the department together because often people will team up to solve a puzzle.

[TASMANIANRED]

The left is antilogic....

[JerseyHighlander]

Could you give an example of a sudoku made up of constants?

I found sudoku about 4 months ago, and have spent 3 mornings a week since.

Anyway, what constants?

[Beaker]

Oh it's just a goof. It's not that hard... you take 1-9, and substitute a physical constant in for the number, and keep that substitution consistant. So, 1 could be c the speed of light, 2 could be avagadros number, 3 could be e the charge on an electron, (or e itself) 4 could be the permittivity of free space epslion(0) 5 could be H-bar, 6 could be planks constant, and so on. It makes it a little bit harder to solve (and geekier) because you can look at the numbers 1-9 and instantly know what's missing, but it's harder to do that with the constants because they don't follow a chronological order unless you know what it is and have it memorized. (Like I said, geeky)

Sudoku puzzles take practice, and once you get the hang of them, you develop your own bag of tricks to solving them.

[gleeaikin]

I got hooked on Sudoku 2 months ago. It is in two papers that come to the house. They go from easy to hard. The very hard cannot be solved by logic, but at some point you have to guess the next step. Then they started Samurai Sudocku with 5 interconnected grids. The first one was medium hard and took me 4 1/2 hours, then they made them harder and I was wasting all day Sunday on them. I realized I was really getting addicted to them.

I enjoy the flow feeling on the easy to medium hard ones. I can also see where my brain is processing somewhat differently. However, I now cut a little piece of the hard ones out and burn them. I am trying to renovate a house, enough with addiction.