Eighty-One Squares,
Oh Joy reserves of erudition, patience, or brilliance. Think ofitasa crossword, but using only the numbers one through nine, with just 81 squares. There’s but one correct possible solution, no need for any of that tedious mathematical knowledge, and it takes maybe a minute to grasp the rules. And here they are: You have a 9×9 grid divided into nine boxes, or minigrids, each measuring 3×3; all you have to do is fill in each vertical column and horizontal row with the digits one to nine in any order without repeating; each 3×3 box must also contain those nine numbers. That’s it. The simpler the Sudoku, the more numbers have been pre-filled by the compiler, leaving you to deduce the rest. The number of possible 81-square combinations is 6,670,903,752,021,072,936,960, so that ought to keep you busy for a while. Granted, messing about with numbers may not sound an overly engrossing pursuit, but Sudoku is already being talked up as this decade’s Rubik’s Cube (be still, T
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