Initial Ideas from yesterday's reading:
- The outcome itself has the 3x3 style grid like a sudoku but contains both numbers and letters. I wanted to think about the idea of a puzzle and what design can do to create new puzzles.
- As a practical product it doesn't have much purpose, but what I found interesting is that it physically represents the mental processes someone undergoes when doing a sudoku puzzle, the thinking and questioning about where an item should go to be "correct"
Personally I feel this can relate the practice of design also, particularly when there is a "right" way to do things, such as book design or typography. This mental process is really interesting, could this perhaps become part of the outcome? All the different thoughts, processes and tests?
- The book couldn't have more content otherwise the pages wouldn't be legible (thinking back to Day 5 of Brief 6), could introduce page breaks after every grid is formed so that it doesn't become difficult to read. or just need to make sure that no piece of text will have another piece printed on the other side.
Further Research:
- The puzzle, however, raised interesting combinatorial problems for mathematicians, two of whom proved in 2005 that there are 6,670,903,752,021,072,936,960 possible sudoku grids.
- Although sudoku-type patterns had been used earlier in agricultural design, their first appearance in puzzle form was in 1979 in a New York-based puzzle magazine, which called them Number Place puzzles.
- They next appeared in 1984 in a magazine in Japan, where they acquired the name sudoku (abbreviated from suuji wa dokushin ni kagiru, meaning “the numbers must remain single”). In spite of the puzzle’s popularity in Japan, the worldwide sudoku explosion had to wait another 20 years.
- Develop a timeline of the puzzle, where it came from, where it's going.
- Could include something personal to it? - In 1997 New Zealander Wayne Gould, a retired judge from Hong Kong, came across a book of sudoku puzzles in Tokyo and decided to develop computer programs for generating them. Seven years later he sent some of his puzzles to The Times of London, which printed its first one on Nov. 15, 2004. Other British newspapers followed suit, and within a few months sudoku had become a worldwide phenomenon, with the puzzles appearing in newspapers from the United States to Finland, South Africa to Costa Rica, and Israel to Singapore.
- By 2006 hundreds of sudoku books had been published, and addicts could be seen everywhere—in offices, on buses and trains, and on the beach—working with paper and pencil or puzzling over interactive sudoku that had been adapted to mobile phones, video games, and the Internet.
- In May 2006 Time magazine listed Gould as one of the world’s 100 most influential people.
- The first sudoku world championship was held in March 2006 in Lucca, Italy. Jana Tylova, a 31-year-old accountant from the Czech Republic, defeated 84 other puzzle solvers from 22 countries in the two-day competition.
Wayne Gould (高樂德法官) (born 3 July 1945 in Hawera, New Zealand) is a retired Hong Kong judge, most recently known for helping to popularise sudoku puzzles in the United Kingdom, and thereafter in the United States.
He pioneered the global success and popularity of the Sudoku puzzle outside Japan where it had been popular for many years. Gould spent 6 years developing a computer program, known as Pappocom Sudoku that could mass-produce puzzles for the global market. His work led to the publication of sudoku puzzles in many UK newspapers.
Part of his strategy in the U.S. market was offering newspapers a daily puzzle at no charge, unique to each paper, for publication accompanied by an offer of its solution via the Pappocom website. The website also offered those consulting it a low-cost program that generates and, if desired, assists in solving, unlimited Sudoku puzzles of difficulty and style specified by the user.
While Gould didn't invent sudoku (credit goes to Howard Garns, an Indianapolis architect, in the 1970s; the puzzle eventually made its way to Japan, where it got its modern name), Gould had the genius to recognize its elemental, addictive appeal. He also had a brilliant if counterintuitive marketing model: give the puzzle away. More than 400 newspapers worldwide run his Pappocom sudoku puzzles free in return for promoting Gould's computer program and books. The results must be lucrative, as sales of the books alone have passed 4 million.
Agricultural Base:
His first puzzles, which were known then as Number Place, were published in 1979. But now a curious precedent has turned up. More than 20 years earlier, in the 1950s, W. U. Behrens of Hannover, Germany, discussed very similar grids filled with numbers—not as a game or a puzzle for the amusement of newspaper readers but as a design for agricultural experiments. The connection is pointed out in a new paper (PDF) by R. A. Bailey and Peter J. Cameron of the University of London and Robert Connelly of Cornell University: http://www.maths.qmul.ac.uk/~pjc/preprints/sudoku.pdf
Both Sudoku and the Behrens designs trace their heritage back to Latin squares, studied by the 18th-century mathematician Leonhard Euler. In an n-by-n Latin square, each of the numbers from 1 through n appears exactly once in each column and row. A standard Sudoku puzzle is a 9-by-9 Latin square with the additional constraint that each number from 1 through 9 also appears exactly once in each of nine 3-by-3 blocks, or regions, into which the grid is subdivided.
What could this possibly have to do with agriculture? Suppose you’re testing several new seed varieties to see which ones produce the best yield. When you layout test plots in a field, you need to be careful to avoid biases, such as putting all the samples of one variety in the area that has the most water or the richest soil. A Latin-square arrangement is a good start on such a design. With n crop varieties, an n-by-n Latin square assures that each plant type is equally represented in every column and every row, compensating for many common patterns of variation, such as a field that gets steadily moister from one side to the other. But a Latin-square arrangement cannot guarantee fairness in the presence of other patterns, such as compact patches of better or worse soil. And so Behrens proposed choosing designs from a subclass of all Latin squares, namely those in which numbers are distributed evenly not only among the columns and rows but also in predefined blocks. This subclass of Latin squares he called gerechte designs, meaning fair or impartial.
Behrens did go on to consider the case of a 9-by-9 grid with 3-by-3 blocks, and so the following figure may well represent the first published Sudoku solutions:
The figure is taken from: Behrens, W. U. 1956. Feldversuchsanordnungen mit verbessertem Ausgleich der Bodenunterscheide. Zeitschrift für Landwirtschaftliches Versuchsund Untersuchsungswesen 2:176–193. (Scanned copy courtesy of Robert Connelly.)
- http://bit-player.org/2006/a-new-crop-of-sudoku
No comments:
Post a Comment