One might expect a game of logic to appeal to very few people--mathematicians, maybe, computer geeks, compulsive gamblers. Yet in a very short time, Sudoku has become extraordinarily popular, bringing to mind the Rubik's cube craze of the early 1980s.
Unlike the three-dimensional Rubik's cube, a Sudoku puzzle is a flat, square grid. Typically it contains 81 cells (nine rows and nine columns) and is divided into nine smaller squares containing nine cells each; call them subgrids. The game begins with numbers already printed in some cells. The player must fill in the empty cells with the numbers 1 to 9 in such a way that no digit appears twice in the same row, column or subgrid. Each puzzle has one unique solution.
Jean-Paul Delahaye is a professor emeritus of computer science at the University of Lille in France and a researcher at the Research Center in Computer Science, Signal and Automatics of Lille (CRIStAL). He recently published Les Mathématiciens Se Plient au Jeu (Belin, 2017), a French collection of articles from Pour la Science.
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