Queen Sudoku Nerd

Although I haven't mentioned it lately, I am still completely addicted to sudoku. I have done so many that I can now complete even the "evil" or "fiendish" ones with no trouble. I love the beauty of a perfectly logical puzzle that has a unique solution and requires absolutely no guessing. Moreover, I find that doing one last puzzle online before bed clears my brain of all the words and ideas swirling around and gets me in a good frame of mind for sleep. For a while I was doing them all day long, but now I just do one at bedtime and occasionally one in the car if I'm a little early to pick up Julie at preschool.

So a couple of weeks ago the Boston Globe started putting a sudoku in the Sunday magazine. The first week it was so easy I could barely write fast enough to fill in the boxes. But the second week, I got stuck. And I never get stuck. When you do them often enough, you know all the logic necessary to complete a puzzle, and there's really no way to get stuck. So I erased and started again. I reached the same point and couldn't go any farther. I checked my progress with the answer (printed upside-down at the bottom of the page, duh!) and saw that I had done everything correct so far. There was just no way to proceed without guessing, which is a no-no. I waited until last Sunday, sure that I would see a correction printed in the magazine, apologizing for the error in the puzzle. Nothing! So I fired off an e-mail to complain. I was a little nervous, even though I knew I had to be right, so I was relieved when someone over at CooksTalk (I told you we don't talk exclusively about food!) said that the puzzle had to be wrong because when you first look at a sudoku, it has to be diagonally symmetrical (that is, the numbers that they give you have to be positioned in a mirror-image way across the puzzle as divided diagonally—sorry, I can't explain it any more clearly) and this one is not. There is one digit missing, and that would have led me to solve it easily. And someone else at CooksTalk solved it by trial and error and got a different but equally correct solution, so that's yet another reason it has to be wrong. I'm very eager to hear back from the Globe!

Comments

[Jen]

So not only am I addicted, (and all of our family, obviously) but it's now an obsession with people in my school and at Prozdor. It's taking over the world and I loooove it :)

[pam]

Wha ...? You blame me for your addiction? Girl, I did you a favor! You didn't have enough to do as a mom of 3!

[Karen]

It's true -- there was that one part of my brain that was rusting over from lack of use...! ;-)

[Chris]

Aside from the fact that numbers aren't my friends, I've often thought I'd get totally addicted as well. Which is why I've resisted thus far.

[Karen]

Go ahead, just try one. You don't have to keep doing it. You can stop anytime you want. Go ahead, just see whether you like it. ;-)

All kidding aside, you don't have to be a numbers person for sudoku. It's very much a logic puzzle. There's really no math involved. I've even seen them for kids with little symbols (like star, heart, triangle) instead of numbers.