Sudoku has a remarkably long history given that the craze has
now burst onto the world stage in a matter of months. The tale
begins in the United States, where the puzzle was invented by
Howard Garnes, a freelance puzzle constructor. It was first
called “Number Place” and published in May of 1979 by Dell
Pencil Puzzles and Word Games magazine. The next stop on the
puzzle's journey was Japan, where the company Nikoli noticed
“Number Place” in the American magazine. They published the
puzzle using the name sudoku, which is an abbreviation of the
Japanese phrase “suji wa dokushin ni kagiru” meaning “only
single numbers allowed.” Sudoku has been popular in puzzle-
obsessed Japan since the mid-1980s. During a trip to Tokyo in
1997, sudoku was discovered by Wayne Gould, a retired Hong Kong
judge originally from New Zealand. Gould was so taken by the
puzzle that he started creating his own sudoku puzzles. In the
fall of 2004 Gould convinced The Times of London to print these
puzzles. It was an immediate success, and