Representative image for number puzzles.
Credit: iStock photo
Number 10 was feeling sad, because his best friend, number 9, didn’t play with him or even hang out with him anymore. Ever since they were born, which was many, many, many years back, numbers 1 to 10 shared a common dormitory in the School of Numbers, sleeping together, eating and studying together and of course playing together. Number 10 and number 9 were close, they shared all their secrets and were each other’s secret keepers. They did their additions, subtractions, multiplications and divisions in their classroom together. They enjoyed listening as children all over the world did the multiplication tables, feeling a sense of pride surge through their body.
But all this changed in 1979, when a man named Howard Garns invented a game. It involved the placing of numbers into empty spots inside a 9x9 grid.
Once that number game was invented, numbers 1 to 9 had no time for “normal” activities, especially ones that included friendship and playing with friends. Numbers 1 to 9 became celebrities. The other numbers were in awe of them, due to their fame and popularity.
Though Number 10 was happy for the success his friend was experiencing, he was depressed at being left out. Deep down Number 10 knew they were different from each other, that his bestie was a single digit number, while he was a double digit number, and that one day they would have to endure some kind of separation. But he hadn’t expected that the separation would hurt so much.
With so much free time on his hands, Number 10 visited the school library, to read more about the man who had created the game.
“This man must really hate me to separate me from my best friend,” Number 10 grumbled, as he picked up a book.
The more Number 10 read, the more fascinated he became. Howard Garns born on March 2, 1905, was an American architect who became famous as the creator of the Number Place, a number puzzle. It became a global phenomenon, and was later known as Sudoku. Garns worked at an architecture firm in Indianapolis, US, and in his free time he utilised one of the company’s two drawing boards to create a crossword puzzle with numbers. The puzzle had nine small squares. Garns was very secretive about his puzzle and covered it up every time a colleague approached him.
The Number Place was first published in a magazine called Dell Pencil Puzzles and Word Games in May 1979. Garns felt sad to read that his byline was missing from the actual puzzle page, but it appeared in the list of contributors whenever the Number Place puzzle was featured.
Some people who enjoyed doing the puzzle and perhaps searched for the creator’s name, added two and two together and came to the conclusion that Garns was the creator of the puzzle.
Number 10 felt happy to read that Garns was alive to see his creation being renamed Sudoku, when it gained immense popularity in 1984 in Japan. Sudoku is a shorter term for the longer Japanese sentence ‘Suji wa dokushin ni kagiru’, which translates to ‘the digits are limited to one occurrence’.
Garns passed away on October 6, 1989. Sadly, he was unable to see its global popularity in 2004, when his puzzle was printed by The Times, London, and also The Conway Daily Sun (New Hampshire), with people all over the world playing the number puzzle.
The game required the player to place numbers where they weren’t already present. If a number was already present in a row, column or a small square, it couldn’t be placed there again.
“It’s a challenging game,” Number 10 said as he read the rules again. If numbers 1, 9, 8, 3, 6 and 4 were already present in the top row, it meant that particular row needed only 2, 5 and 7. The player now had to study the nearby rows which are within the same squares and figure out if they can rule out any of the three missing numbers.
Number 10 thought that doing Sudoku must be relaxing and helped keep peoples’ brains healthy, as it was considered a brain game. Though it was addictive, it was a healthy addiction.
Number 10 suddenly realised that the date was September 9, International Sudoku Day. He grinned as the symbolism of the date became clear (9/9), as the goal of this game was to fill a 9x9 grid so that every single column, row and 3x3 grid had all the digits from 1 to 9. He was so impressed with this mentally stimulating game that he forgot that his best friend had left him due to the game. If his loneliness helped keep so many people engaged, then he was all for it.