Monday, August 06, 2012

There are only 5,472,730,538 possible Sudoku puzzles!

There are only 5,472,730,538 possible Sudoku puzzles!

While this number may sound extremely large, it is actually much smaller than mathematicians thought it would be. A Sudoku grid is a certain type of Latin square, except slightly different because of the additional aspect of no repeated values in any of the nine blocks. There are a total of 6,670,903,752,021,072,936,960 possible solutions, yet
when mathematicians took away rotations, reflections, permutations and relabeling, which takes away the same puzzle in just a different form, the number of solutions was 5,472,730,538.
Contrary to popular belief, Sudoku did not originate in Asia, but was rather popularized there. They are simply made up of nine different Latin squares into one puzzle. Historians are not exactly sure where Sudoku started, but it was first introduced on a large basis in French newspapers in the late 1800’s.
After WW I however, they virtually disappeared until a man named Howard Garns retired from his architect job. He became a freelance puzzle constructor in Indiana and first published a game called “Number Place” in 1979. This concept was then taken by the Japanese publisher Nikoli, where it blew up as a worldwide phenomenon!

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