NY Crossword solvers have been interested in the NY Times sudoku for a long time, especially after The Crossword came out in 1942 with fun word and logic puzzles. 2014 saw the release of the Mini Crossword, Spelling Bee, Letter Boxed, Tiles, and Vertex. Early in 2022, the NY Times added Wordle to their collection. They work hard to make sure that players of all levels can enjoy puzzles every day.
Every day, the NY Times puts out a sudoku with easy, medium, and hard levels for all of its readers.
Why NY does everyone like Sudoku?
It is said that nature hates a vacuum. People seem to have an innate need to move into empty spaces. This may help explain why sudoku, the current worldwide craze in which you have to fill in blank squares with numbers, is so popular.
Since the first NY Times sudoku was published in the US in The NY Post, more than half of the top American newspapers now publish one or more sudoku every day. Since the crossword craze of 1924–1925, no puzzle has been added to newspapers so quickly.
Publications that don’t have sudoku or similar puzzles have lost readers over the years. The most obsessive solvers pick a book from the many options and work the puzzles one after the other.
How It Began
When Wayne Gould, a retired judge from New Zealand, got The Times of London to print the riddle, there was a sort of fever in England. After finding sudoku in a Japanese puzzle magazine, Judge Gould made a computer programme that can make sudoku at any level of difficulty.
Japanese puzzle magazines have logic puzzles that are new and different. They are as popular in Japan as crossword puzzles are in the United States. But Judge Gould says that sudoku stands out for two reasons: its rules, which can be summed up in one line, and its size, which stays the same no matter how hard it is.
Every puzzle craze in history has come at the right time, and sudoku is no different. Tangrams, a seven-block puzzle that started in China and spread around the world around 1817, would not have been possible before there was a lot of international trade and printing. The 15 Puzzle (1880) and the Rubik’s Cube (1980) were both made using new methods. Crosswords also needed a lot of people to understand them and for newspapers to be able to make and print crossword grids easily, which didn’t happen until the 1920s.
Sudoku, whose name comes from the Japanese phrase “only single numbers allowed,” couldn’t have become popular before personal computers were invented. Almost all sudoku puzzles are made by computers using programmes that understand all logical ways to solve problems, from the easiest to the hardest. This means that the computer can figure out how hard or easy a puzzle is to solve mathematically. Before computers, it would have been hard, if not impossible, for a person to know how hard a sudoku puzzle is. Each sudoku puzzle must have a unique solution.
People solve puzzles for many different reasons. The main one is that puzzles give the person who solves them a feeling of being in charge. Most of life’s problems don’t have clear solutions, and many of them can’t be solved. We jump right into problems and try hard to figure out how to solve them. Finding the right answer to a sudoku puzzle or any other puzzle made by people can make you feel like you’ve done a lot.
Crosswords and sudoku are both enjoyed by a lot of the same people, but there are also some differences. People with sharp logical minds like Sudoku, while people with more literary minds like crossword puzzles. Some crossword fans don’t like Sudoku because they think it’s easy. To solve a good crossword, you need a large vocabulary, a lot of knowledge, a flexible mind, and sometimes even a sense of humour. It affects many parts of life and gives people some “Aha!” moments. On the other hand, Sudoku is just a game of logic where each puzzle is the same as the last.
A puzzle industry saying says that every type of puzzle has a weakness. For example, the classic crossword relies too much on short words with a lot of vowels, such as aloe and oleo, to work. When solving an acrostic problem, it can be hard to move letters from a list of words to a grid and back again. The biggest problem with Sudoku is that it doesn’t let you make mistakes. If you put the wrong number in a square and then use that wrong number as the basis for more arguments, it’s almost impossible to find the problem and fix it. When you erase the whole puzzle and have to start over, it can be frustrating.
Sudoku doesn’t have the problem of repetition, which could be a flaw. There are 6,670,903,752,021,072,936,960 different ways to fill in a 9×9 sudoku grid, and there are almost an infinite number of ways to choose the first number in each combination. There are always Sudoku puzzles available, so this can’t be true.
To learn more about how to play Sudoku online, click here.