Brits Crazy For New Puzzle

People Everywhere Seen Playing Logic Game

(AP) 

The name, which translates roughly as “the number that is alone,” has become a handy catch-phrase. A Times columnist wrote dismissively about Prime Minister Tony Blair's recent Cabinet shuffle: “It is not exactly Sudoku, is it?”

Sudoku consists of a grid of nine rows of nine boxes, which must be filled in so the numbers one through nine appear just once in each column, row and three-by-three square.

It looks like arithmetic, but requires the application of logic. It can be fairly straightforward or fiendishly difficult.

“I think the attraction is that you can definitely get it right,” said Anton Viesel, a 23-year-old London bookseller. “It's very satisfying.”

But alongside the joy of Sudoku success comes the frustration of failure. Web sites ring with the cries of the addicted.

“I have got a stiff neck from sitting hunched over, a headache from concentrating too long and the house is covered in the bits of rubber you get” when erasing, Sudoku sufferer Amanda Masterman wrote on one Web site.

While its name is Japanese, Sudoku is a variation on Latin Squares, developed in the 18th century by Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler as a variation on an older puzzle, Magic Squares.

Marcel Danesi, a professor of semiotics at the University of Toronto and author of “The Puzzle Instinct,” said Magic Squares can in turn be traced to Lo Shu, an ancient Chinese puzzle.