Sudoku is a logic-based, combinatorial number-placement puzzle played on a nine by nine grid divided into nine three by three subgrids. Players fill the grid with the digits one through nine so that each row, each column, and each three by three subgrid contains every digit exactly once, using only logic and no arithmetic. A well-formed puzzle has exactly one solution, and the minimum number of given clues needed for a valid puzzle is seventeen. The modern form was created in 1979 by Howard Garns and published by Dell Magazines under the name Number Place. The Japanese publisher Nikoli introduced the puzzle in Japan in 1984 and shortened its Japanese name to Sudoku in 1986, and the puzzle spread worldwide starting in 2004 through Wayne Gould's computer-generated grids, which first appeared in The Conway Daily Sun and then The Times of London. Sudoku is normally a single-player pursuit, though organized competitions and group solving events also exist, and because the number of valid nine by nine solution grids exceeds six sextillion, solving an arbitrary puzzle in general is computationally complex.
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1. Sudoku (Wikipedia)
Lead, first paragraph
a logic-based, combinatorial number-placement puzzle
Introduction
French newspapers featured similar puzzles in the 19th century, and the modern form of the puzzle first appeared in 1979 puzzle books by Dell Magazines under the name Number Place. However, the puzzle type only began to gain widespread popularity in 1984 when it was published by the Japanese puzzle company Nikoli as "Suuji wa dokushin ni kagiru" (the numbers must be single), and in 1986 Maki Kaji (鍜治 真起, Kaji Maki), the president and co-founder of Nikoli, shortened the name to Sudoku, where "su" is number and "doku" is single.
Lead, players paragraph
Sudoku is a single-player puzzle game
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