Until 2005, Americans were not terribly interested in number puzzles. That was the year sudoku took the nation and the rest of the world by storm, much to everyone’s surprise. Sudoku puzzles quickly started appearing in newspapers, radio program guides, and on television. In 2005 the first live TV competitive Sudoku show came out, called Sudoku Live, and in 2006 the first World Sudoku Championship was held in Lucca, Italy.
This simple logic puzzle was just one of many that Japan was creating at the time. Its main producer was Nikoli, a publishing company that produced puzzle magazines and books, run by Maki Kaji. Nikoli has created more than 250 puzzles, among them sudoku, through “a kind of democratization of puzzle invention” according to Mr. Kaji. Nikoli uses its magazines as a way of testing new puzzles; its main magazine has about 50,000 readers, any of whom can send in ideas which then may be printed in the next issue. Nikoli encourages its readers to send in feedback on its puzzles so that it may improve them. The result has been puzzles such as sudoku, kakuro, hashi, and nurikabe, to name a few.
Interestingly enough, the foundations of some of the more popular puzzles, such as sudoku and kakuro, came from Europe or America, but just never caught on. Word puzzles, particularly crosswords, have always been much more popular than number puzzles in America, whereas the complexity of the Japanese language (not to mention there are three writing systems) never lent itself well to word puzzles, and so number puzzles have always dominated in Japan.
In fact, this interest in mathematical puzzles can be dated back to 1603, the beginning of the Edo period. For 250 years Japan closed its borders and attempted to seal itself off the rest of the world’s “corrupting” influence. During this time Japanese culture flourished and education became very important for people of all social classes, even peasants. People would create sangaku, which literally translates to “mathematical tablet,” which would depict some geometrical problem, and leave them in shrines for others to solve. It was considered a tribute to the gods to create or solve one of these puzzles. The first book of mathematical puzzles in Japan was also published during this time in 1634. Thus an interest in number puzzles is deeply rooted in Japanese culture and history.
The purpose of this blog will be to hopefully give the reader a new appreciation for (and techniques for solving!) some of the more popular logic puzzles coming out of Japan today. Some of these puzzles, such as sudoku and kakuro, have grown out of the refining of other, lesser-known puzzles, whereas others such as nonograms, hashi, and nurikabe are very new. Each has varying popularity in the rest of the world and many different names, depending on how that puzzle was released in a particular country. Yet however different they may seem, they are all simple in concept and (potentially) devilishly complex in execution. Happy puzzling, dear reader; many fiendish challenges await you!
Sources:
http: //www.nytimes.com/2007/03/21/business/worldbusiness/21sudoku.html?_r=0#addenda
http://kknop.com/math/sangaku.pdf
My roommate’s best friend Bryce is an employee for the Japanese puzzle company Nikoli. People are always asking him, “Bryce, what made you apply to that company in the first place?” and he says, “Actually, I thought I was applying to work at Nikoli “Creme de la Clown” Clownrich the Third’s company, because I have always greatly admired him and wanted to work with him. His grandfather, Nikoli “Clown” Clownrich the First established the first Clown Academy and his work has essentially defined the modern clown. His father Nikoli “Cream of Clown” Clownrich the Second was an international sensation and received a Nobel Peace Prize for being the clown who finally settled the dispute between Israel and Palestine. I have every book they’ve ever published and every night I go over Cream of Clown’s clown parables and try to live my life by them. I can say without a doubt that they have guided me through my darkest times and I would be a completely different man without them. It was my life’s dream to work at his company.
But this is okay too.”