Summary and Schedule:
Starting tomorrow, we are going to return to having daily posts here, focused on Sudoku. This will begin with content prepared for the first-ever SudokuCon in Boston and then expand out in other ways as we explore some different opportunities in this remarkable number placement genre.

Over three weeks we will have ~40 Just One Cell Sudoku puzzles prepared for a competition at SudokuCon that was organized by Clover and Thomas Snyder, with at least two “puzzles” a day:

• May 19-24: 12 classic sudoku JOC grids from the qualification test
• May 26-31: 12 variant sudoku JOC grids from the qualification test
• June 1-6: Playoff puzzles and other extra puzzles (classics and variant JOCs)

On May 25th, we’ll also have a link to a 2.5+ hour video on “How to Solve Sudoku Like a World Champion”. Here is a summary for this curious and entertaining talk:

• Thomas Snyder, aka Dr. Sudoku, won three world sudoku championships (’07, ’08, ’11) in the early years of the Sudoku craze. In this video you’ll hear stories from many years of competing, including what different sudoku championships entail, how to identify your strengths and weaknesses in solving sudoku, and ultimately train to get faster at solving under pressure. From tales of catching a sudoku cheater to the origins of Snyder’s own solving notation, this talk will take you deep inside the world of speed-solving and how top competitors think.

After that, we have additional ideas to continue to showcase the best that Sudoku has to offer, including more than just puzzles. Sudoku will stay our focus for awhile here on the blog as we continue to work with our partners on other logic puzzles.

A message from Thomas (Dr. Sudoku):

Sudoku (né Number Place) turns 46 years old this month, having first been published in May 1979. I was born a few months after the debut of the puzzle, and had a very slow path to its discovery. While I solved my first (and I think only) Number Place puzzle in 1992 at 12 years old, it wasn’t until 2005 that I was introduced to “sudoku” via the fad and computer-generated puzzles in the west and then eventually to proper Sudoku / Nanpure via Japanese magazines.

There were a lot of reasons I got into Sudoku, and one was dealing with hard times in my life: the break-up of the longest relationship I had had set amidst dealing with my mother’s cancer diagnosis from the year before and the typical challenges in the middle of graduate school of not much working and the path to a Ph.D. seeming bleak. Sudoku was a mental health escape, a rebound relationship. Sudoku has been a critical part of my life now for 20 years.

For me it is with some irony that, in the phrase Sūji wa dokushin ni kagiru (the numbers must be single) that Maki Kaji of Nikoli coined for Sudoku, “dokushin” means bachelor or lonely. I have not been in another dating relationship since I found Sudoku. My rebound relationship with a puzzle has become something else as it has taken up so much time and energy. First as I found I was a very strong solver and could train to win multiple world titles. Next as I found I could paint ideas in the medium of sudoku better than others and make a reputation as a puzzle designer, first in Sudoku and then in anything I chose to make.

While I’m known in puzzle circles as “Dr. Sudoku”, I’ve been hesitant to accept the accolade of being a great sudoku solver as my identity. I want to be known as a great problem solver, and puzzles are great training for the harder problems of life, science, medicine, which is my training and usually my vocation. I’m still conflicted (a) that I have a wikipedia page and (b) that it lists a lot of puzzle accomplishments and nothing from my scientific career, where I consider at least some of the medical diagnostics work I’ve been a part of as counting as my biggest life achievements. I used to say I’d accept fixes in either direction (i.e., remove the page or tell the full story).

But after 20 years with a partner that won’t give up on me, maybe it is time for me to finally commit to Sudoku in a big way. Maybe it is time to recognize through Sudoku that I can do much greater things in education and in science if I think creatively about what a puzzle that provides incredible metrics for data science might offer to study, say, neurodevelopment or neurodegeneration. At least to think of how training and testing in a Sudoku could then lead to a more useful test for some people as not everyone is going to use a logic puzzle when they age but I certainly will. Thinking about Sudoku is also a way to think about me. Recently, as I was leading into my 45th birthday in December and January, I got creative in new ways that people still don’t fully understand. My Sudoku expressions of autobiographical and philosophical concepts, very new and confusing visual forms, came out as I was managing an elevated mood state better than before (at least in not needing hospitalization) but still with some places for improvement. If some of this next year for me is going to still be about learning more about myself and what I can create, I cannot do it without learning and telling more about Sudoku in different ways. So my proposal is to commit to Sudoku and see what comes when we are truly together and not hesitant about our shared relationship.

What to prepare? An overused rhyme in this space may be to bring “something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue”. While this isn’t a literal marriage, this is a good framework for thinking about this project for GMPuzzles where I will play some part but not the whole part.

• Something Old: Ideas from 15-20 years ago, many from my old livejournal, others sketches that need to be resurfaced for the modern audience of post-pandemic sudoku fans that never ran into this stuff. Just republishing the best book Wei-Hwa Huang and I made, Mutant Sudoku, in print and digital forms, would be a huge thing to bring to the celebration.
• Something New: I’ve mostly designed paper-and-pencil puzzles, but have dreamed of new play modes for Sudoku that digital tools can offer. There is much to do here, including to better teach and grow Sudoku solving, and the goal is not really “new puzzles” but “new experiences”. Only someone who can design Sudoku well can make this happen with a team around them.
• Something Borrowed: I can’t go alone in this journey, and importantly I need to start opening my eyes beyond the controlled GMPuzzles scene to which authors are doing meaningful things right now with Sudoku. Most may not be interesting, but growing and supporting efforts that are amazing is core to the GMPuzzles mission and my own.
• Something Blue: A past post on puzzles and dopamine addiction introduced the concept of “Blue Sudoku“, but I also think of a Blue Dot program from when I worked at Google Life Sciences/Verily that was meant to provide a peer you could talk to if you needed mental health help. I consider it my responsibility, as a person living with being bipolar, to speak about my experience and help others where I can. It is not clear if it is the puzzles like last December, or more introspective posts / videos, or something else that will come under the category of blue, but it is a goal beyond “making puzzles for adults to enjoy solving” that will come up every once in awhile. Simply talking about the good and the bad of the Twelve Days of Sudoku might be blue enough for awhile — how to understand the creativity my brain can find when it is less inhibited but how that edge is not far from madness that has needed hospitalization in the past. Talking about puzzles, giving answer keys, describing when and how I was feeling as I was making things — I study Van Gogh’s paintings mostly from 1889 with an eye to his mental states and maybe there is something to learn from mine?

Sudoku and I still need to finalize the wedding party, so if you ever think you have something “interesting about Sudoku” or “interesting about Dr. Sudoku” to share, we’d be happy to have it sent our way. But for both of us, there is a great chance someone else has seen it or done it before so we’ll already know about it. So don’t be surprised if our bar for interesting is much different from your own.