Sudoko Puzzle History
In the late 1800s, newspapers started featuring number puzzles, a trend that began when French puzzle creators began to experiment with taking out numbers from magic squares. Le Siècle, a daily in Paris, showcased a partially finished 9×9 magic square with 3×3 smaller squares on November 19, 1892. This puzzle was not a Sudoku because it used numbers with more than one digit and required solving it through arithmetic rather than logical reasoning, yet it shared important traits: every row, column, and smaller square added up to the same total. On July 6, 1895, Le Siècle's competitor, La France, improved the puzzle, making it very close to a modern Sudoku and called it carré magique diabolique ('diabolical magic square'). It made the 9×9 magic square puzzle simpler by ensuring each row, column, and smaller diagonal only had the numbers 1–9, without marking the smaller squares. Despite not being marked, each 3×3 smaller square still contained the numbers 1–9, and the rule about the smaller diagonals meant there was only one possible solution.
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These number puzzles became a regular feature in French newspapers like L'Écho de Paris for about a decade, but they faded away around the time of World War I.
Sudoku applications are widely favored across personal computers, internet platforms, and smartphones. They are available in numerous Linux versions. Additionally, the game has been introduced on various gaming consoles, including the Nintendo DS, PlayStation Portable, Game Boy Advance, Xbox Live Arcade, Nook e-book reader, Kindle Fire tablet, several models of iPod, and the iPhone. A significant number of Nokia devices also feature Sudoku. Indeed, just two weeks following the launch of the online App Store within the iTunes Store by Apple Inc. on July 11, 2008, the App Store already contained nearly 30 Sudoku applications, developed by different software creators, specifically for the iPhone and iPod Touch. The game "Brain Age: Train Your Brain in Minutes a Day!" became particularly popular, receiving critical and commercial acclaim for its Sudoku sections and selling more than 8 million copies globally. Its success led to the creation of a sequel, "Brain Age2," which includes over 100 new Sudoku puzzles and additional activities.
In June 2008, a high-profile Australian trial related to drugs was halted when it was revealed that four to five out of the twelve jurors had been occupied with Sudoku instead of paying attention to the trial proceedings.
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