Slowing the progression of Alzheimer At the end of 2004 Wayne Gould, a retired Hong Kong judge as well as a puzzle fan and a computer programmer, visited London trying to convince the editors of The Times to publish Sudoku puzzles. Gould, that had written a computer program which generates Sudoku puzzles of different difficulty levels, demanded no money for the puzzles. The Times decided to give it a try and on November 12, 2004 launched their first Sudoku puzzle. The publishing of Sudoku in the London Times was just the beginning of an enormous phenomenon which swiftly spread all over Britain and its affiliate countries of Australia and New Zealand. Three days later The Daily Mail began publishing Sudoku puzzles titled as Codenumber. The Daily Telegraph of Sydney followed on 20 May 2005. By the end of May 2005 the puzzle was regularly published in many national newspapers in the UK, including The Daily Telegraph, The Independent, The Guardian, The Sun and The Daily Mirror. But that was not it. In July 2005 Channel 4 included a daily Sudoku game in their Teletext service and Sky One launched the worlds largest Sudoku puzzle – a 275 foot (84 meter) square puzzle, carved in the side of a hill in Chipping Sodbury, near Bristol. The BBC Radio 4s Today began reading numbers aloud in the first Sudoku radio version. Famous British celebrities as Big Brothers Jade Goody and Carol Vorderman, that her book How to do Sudoku is the best-selling book in the country, have testified to its benefits as a mental workout. Even the Teachers magazine which is backed by the government recommended Sudoku as brain exercise in classrooms and suggestions have been made that Sudoku solving is capable of slowing the progression of brain disorder conditions such as Alzheimers. Back to Manhattan In April 2005 Sudoku completed a full circle and arrived back to Manhattan as a regular feature in the New York Post. On Monday, July 11, the Sudoku craze spread to other parts of the USA when both The Daily News and USA Today launched Sudoku puzzles on the same day. In both cases the Sudoku puzzles were instead of traditional crosswords and bridge columns. By 2006 the Sudoku boom sprouted hundreds of puzzle books and magazines, Sudoku clubs, chat rooms, strategy books, videos, mobile phone games, card games, board games, calendars, merchandising products and even a Sudoku TV game show. Sudoku has also sprung up in thousands of daily newspapers all over the world and is commonly described in the world media as the Rubiks cube of the 21st century and as the fastest growing puzzle in the world. The Sudoku boom also sprouted a huge range of variants including smaller and larger grids, multiple overlayed grids, grids with diagonals and odd or even cells, grids with irregular shaped boxes, and many more. Some of these variants are very interesting and sophisticated, maintaining Sudokus position as the most popular logic puzzle in the world. In March 2006, the first World Sudoku Championship (WSC) organized by the World Puzzle Federation (WPF) was held in Lucca, Italy. After solving 45 Sudoku puzzles including Classic Sudoku, Mini Sudoku, Diagonal Sudoku, Irregular Sudoku, Sum Sudoku, Multi Sudoku, OddEven and a dozen other variations during two days, the tournament was won by Jana Tylova, a 31-year-old economist from Czech Republic. Thomas Snyder, 26, a Harvard University graduate student, came second while Wei-Hwa Huang, 30, a software engineer from California working for Google was the third winner. Today, dedicated and mixed puzzle magazines with Sudoku and Sudoku variants by Conceptis are published regularly in over 35 countries including USA, Japan, the UK, Germany, Netherlands, Canada, France, Russia, Poland, Finland, Denmark, Israel, Hungary, Austria, Spain, Norway, Sweden, Greece, Switzerland, Belgium, Italy, Australia, New Zealand, Czech Republic, Brazil, Turkey, Korea, Thailand, Romania, Philippines, Estonia, Latvia, Peru and more.
Posted on: Wed, 24 Sep 2014 11:31:21 +0000
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