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From ancient Magic Squares to the Rubik's Cube of the 21st century

Sudoku are easy to learn yet highly addictive language-independent logic puzzles which have recently taken the whole world by storm. Using pure logic and requiring no math to solve, these fascinating puzzles offer endless fun and intellectual entertainment to puzzle fans of all skills and ages.

It's hard, perhaps impossible, to pinpoint the exact time and place in which the original concept of Sudoku (Japanese: 数独, sūdoku) began, but it seems to be related to the appearance of the first Magic Squares. According to the on-line magazine Convergence, as cited in the article Magic Squares by Pat Ballew, the idea of the magic square was transmitted to the Arabs from the Chinese, probably through India, in the eighth century. It is discussed by Thabit ibn Qurra, known for his formula for amicable numbers, in the early ninth. A list of squares of all orders from 3 to 9 is displayed in The Encyclopedia, compiled about 990 by a group of Arabic scholars known as the Ikhwan al-safa (English: brethren of purity). No general constructive methods appeared by that time.

This article uses material from the Wikipedia article Sudoku and is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License, which means that you can copy and modify it as long as the entire work (including additions) remains under this license.

In 1225, according to the above citation, Ahmed al-Buni showed how to construct Magic Squares using a simple bordering technique, but he may not have discovered the method himself. Biggs, referring to a paper by Camman, suggests that the methods explained by Moschopoulos may have been of Persian origin and be linked to those expounded by al-Buni. Camman indeed claims that the two methods given by Moschopoulos for constructing odd magic squares were known to the Persians, citing an anonymous Persian manuscript (Garrett Collection no. 1057, Princeton University). Even so, this document contains examples and not explicit methods.

Magic Squares in Islamic literature

According to Islamic Medical Manuscripts at the National Library of Medicine first appearance of the Magic Square (known in Arabic as wafq) in Islamic literature occur in the Jabirean Corpus - a group of writings attributed to Jabir ibn Hayyan (known in Europe as Geber), and generally thought to have been compiled at the end of the 9th or early 10th century A.D. The Jabirean Corpus suggested Magic Squares as charms for easing childbirth. These squares consisted of nine cells with the numbers 1 to 9 arranged with 5 in the center so that the contents of each row, column and the two diagonals added up to 15. The numbers were written in the abjad letter-numerals, and because the four corners of this square contained the letters ba', dal, waw [or u], and ha', this particular square became known as the buduh square.

By that time, the Magic Square concept became so popular that the name buduh itself was assigned talismanic properties. In subsequent years Islamic writers developed a variety of methods for forming larger Magic Squares, in which no numeral was repeated and the sums of each row and each column and the two diagonals were the same. Magic Squares with cells 4x4 or 6x6 or 7x7 were particularly popular, with 10x10 squares being produced by the 13th century.

According to the on-line magazine Convergence, as cited by Ballew, it also appears that Magic Squares may have introduced to Europe through Spain by Abraham Ben Meir ibn Ezra (c. 1090-1167), a Hispano-Jewish philosopher and astrologer. Ben Meir ibn Ezra translated many Arabic works into Hebrew and had a deep interest in Magic Squares and numerology in general. He traveled widely throughout Italy and beyond, and may have been the one of the people responsible for the introduction of Magic Squares into Europe.

From Magic Squares to Latin and Graeco-Latin Squares

The concept of Latin Squares has been known since at least medieval times. Arabic Manuscripts from the 13th Century sometimes seem to feature the first Latin Squares, often given mystical of Kabblahlic significance. A Latin square, known in Arabic as wafq majazi, is a square containing cells in which each row and each column have the same set of symbols in distinction from a magic square in which there is no repetition.

This chain of events continues with the Swiss mathematician and physicist Leonhard Euler (1707-1783). According to The Euler Archive, in his paper De quadratis magicis (On magic squares), presented to the St. Petersburg Academy on October 17, 1776, Euler showed how to construct Magic Squares with a certain number of cells, in particular 9, 16, 25, and 36. In this document Euler starts with Graeco-Latin Squares and puts constraints on the values of the variables so that the result is a magic square. The name Latin Squares, however, only came up in a later paper from Euler about Latin Squares titled Recherches sur une nouvelle espece de quarre magique (English: Investigations on A New Species of Magic Square). Euler put Latin letters into a grid, and called it a Latin square. Later, when he added Greek letters, he called it a Greco-Latin square.

Spending the last years of his life dealing with the different possibilities of Magic Squares, Euler was faced with the special problem to combine two sets of n symbols each so that neither in a row nor in a line a pair of symbols occurred twice. He demonstrated methods for constructing Graeco-Latin Squares where n is odd or a multiple of 4. Observing that no order-2 square exists and unable to construct an order-6 square, he conjectured that none exist when n ≡ 2 (mod 4). Indeed, the non-existence of order-6 squares was definitely confirmed in 1901 by the French mathematician Gaston Tarry through exhaustive enumeration of all possible arrangements of symbols.

It was only 58 years later, in 1959 and with the help of computers, when two American mathematicians named Bose and Shrikhande, found some counterexamples to Euler's conjecture. At the same year, Parker found a counterexample of order 10. In 1960, Parker, Bose and Shrikhande showed Euler's conjecture to be false for all n ≥ 10. Thus, Graeco-Latin Squares exist for all orders n ≥ 3 except n = 6.

The birth of Sudoku as we know it

Sudoku puzzles are actually a special case of Latin Squares; any solution to a Sudoku puzzle is a Latin Square. Yet, classic 9x9 Sudoku impose the additional restriction that 3×3 subgroups must also contain the digits 1-9.

According to a research done by Will Shortz and quoted by Dr Jean-Paul Delahaye in his Scientific American June 2006 story " The Science of Sudoku", the first modern shaped Sudoku puzzle was created by an American architect named Howard Garns after he retired from the Daggett architecture firm in Indianapolis. Garns took Euler's Latin Square concept and applied it to a 9x9 grid with the addition of nine 3x3 sub-grids, or boxes, each containing all numbers from 1 to 9. The first puzzles by Garns appeared in the May 1979 edition of Dell Pencil Puzzles and Word Games under the name Number Place, as they are still called by this company until today. Even though Dell did not publish Garns' name on the puzzle, according to Shortz's research it appeared in the list of contributors at the front of the magazine whenever Number Place appeared, and was absent from all other editions.

There are also other references indicating Howard Garns was the first modern Sudoku creator. According to a Wikipedia article dedicated to Garns, a draftsman for the Daggett architecture firm named George Wiley told Indianapolis Monthly: "We had two extra drawing boards and one day Howard was sitting over there. I walked over and asked what he was working on and he said, 'Oh, a game'. It looked like a crossword puzzle but it had numbers. It had little squares. I walked around on his side and he covered it up. It was a secret." Another co-worker at the firm named Robert Hindman corroborated the story testifying he saw "sketches" of what he thought was a crossword puzzle. "I wasn't really interested in it" Hindman said, "But it was his thing. He just loved doing it." Garns died of cancer on October 6, 1989 and is buried in Crown Hill Cemetery, Indianapolis.

So, the Sudoku concept was not invented in Japan as many people may believe, but the name Sudoku was. In 1984 Nikoli, Japan's leading puzzle creating company, discovered Dell's Number Place and decided to present them to their Japanese puzzle fans. The puzzles, which were first named Suuji Wa Dokushin Ni Kagiru, ("the numbers must be single" or "the numbers must occur only once") quickly became popular.

In 1986, after some important improvements were added, mainly by making symmetrical patterns and reducing the number of given clues, Sudoku became one of the best selling puzzles in Japan. Realizing that the only problem with the Sudoku puzzles was their long name, Kaji Maki, the president of Nikoli abbreviated it to Sudoku - (Su = number, digit; Doku = single, unmarried). Today there are more than 600,000 copies of Sudoku magazines published solely in Japan every month.

In contrast to the above, during all that time hardly anyone in Europe knew or paid any attention to the Sudoku puzzles.

Slowing the progression of Alzheimer

At the end of 2004 Wayne Gould, a retired Hong Kong judge as well as a puzzle fan and a computer programmer, visited London trying to convince the editors of The Times to publish Sudoku puzzles. Gould, that had written a computer program which generates Sudoku puzzles of different difficulty levels, demanded no money for the puzzles. The Times decided to give it a try and on November 12, 2004 launched their first Sudoku puzzle.

The publishing of Sudoku in the London Times was just the beginning of an enormous phenomenon which swiftly spread all over Britain and its affiliate countries of Australia and New Zealand. Three days later The Daily Mail began publishing Sudoku puzzles titled as "Codenumber". The Daily Telegraph of Sydney followed on 20 May 2005. By the end of May 2005 the puzzle was regularly published in many national newspapers in the UK, including The Daily Telegraph, The Independent, The Guardian, The Sun and The Daily Mirror.

But that was not it. In July 2005 Channel 4 included a daily Sudoku game in their Teletext service and Sky One launched the world's largest Sudoku puzzle - a 275 foot (84 meter) square puzzle, carved in the side of a hill in Chipping Sodbury, near Bristol. The BBC Radio 4's Today began reading numbers aloud in the first Sudoku radio version. Famous British celebrities as Big Brother's Jade Goody and Carol Vorderman, that her book How to do Sudoku is the best-selling book in the country, have testified to its benefits as a mental workout. Even the Teachers magazine which is backed by the government recommended Sudoku as brain exercise in classrooms and suggestions have been made that Sudoku solving is capable of slowing the progression of brain disorder conditions such as Alzheimer's.

Back to Manhattan

In April 2005 Sudoku completed a full circle and arrived back to Manhattan as a regular feature in the New York Post. On Monday, July 11, the Sudoku craze spread to other parts of the USA when both The Daily News and USA Today launched Sudoku puzzles on the same day. In both cases the Sudoku puzzles were instead of traditional crosswords and bridge columns.

By 2006 the Sudoku boom sprouted hundreds of puzzle books and magazines, Sudoku clubs, chat rooms, strategy books, videos, mobile phone games, card games, board games, calendars, merchandising products and even a Sudoku TV game show. Sudoku has also sprung up in thousands of daily newspapers all over the world and is commonly described in the world media as "the Rubik's cube of the 21st century" and as the "fastest growing puzzle in the world".

The Sudoku boom also sprouted a huge range of variants including smaller and larger grids, multiple overlayed grids, grids with diagonals and odd or even cells, grids with irregular shaped boxes, and many more. Some of these variants are very interesting and sophisticated, maintaining Sudoku's position as the most popular logic puzzle in the world.

In March 2006, the first World Sudoku Championship (WSC) organized by the World Puzzle Federation (WPF) was held in Lucca, Italy. After solving 45 Sudoku puzzles including Classic Sudoku, Mini Sudoku, Diagonal Sudoku, Irregular Sudoku, Sum Sudoku, Multi Sudoku, OddEven and a dozen other variations during two days, the tournament was won by Jana Tylova, a 31-year-old economist from Czech Republic. Thomas Snyder, 26, a Harvard University graduate student, came second while Wei-Hwa Huang, 30, a software engineer from California working for Google was the third winner.

Today, dedicated and mixed puzzle magazines with Sudoku and Sudoku variants by Conceptis are published regularly in over 35 countries including USA, Japan, the UK, Germany, Netherlands, Canada, France, Russia, Poland, Finland, Denmark, Israel, Hungary, Austria, Spain, Norway, Sweden, Greece, Switzerland, Belgium, Italy, Australia, New Zealand, Czech Republic, Brazil, Turkey, Korea, Thailand, Romania, Philippines, Estonia, Latvia, Peru and more.

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Sudoku are easy to learn yet highly addictive language-independent logic puzzles which have recently taken the whole world by storm. Using pure logic and requiring no math to solve, these fascinating puzzles offer endless fun and intellectual entertainment to puzzle fans of all skills and ages.

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The history of Sudoku dates back to an 18th Century Swiss mathematician's game called "Latin Squares" (according to this article from the Economist) and some of the first number puzzles to appear in newspapers were published in France in 1895. But the modern game of Sudoku as we recognize it today was invented by Howard Garns, a freelance puzzle inventor from Connersville, Indiana, USA in 1979 when it was published in Dell Pencil Puzzles and Word Games magazine. The puzzle was known as "Number Place," since it involved placing individual numbers into empty spots on a 9 x 9 grid.

The game first appeared in Japan in 1984 where it was given the name "Sudoku," which is short for a longer expression in Japanese - "Sūji wa dokushin ni kagiru" - which means, "the digits are limited to one occurrence." Sudoku continues to be highly popular in Japan, where people buy over 600,000 Sudoku magazines per month.

One reason that Sudoku puzzles are so beloved in Japan is because the Japanese language doesn't work very well for crossword puzzles - so a number puzzle was much more successful in Japanese culture. Also, Japan tends to love puzzles, since it is a country where millions of people make lengthy commutes by train or bus, and they need to kill time while waiting for the next stop.

The man who reintroduced Sudoku "back" to the Western world was a New Zealand judge named Wayne Gould, who was on vacation in Tokyo in March 1997 when he discovered Sudoku in a bookstore. He quickly became a devoted enthusiast of Sudoku and spent the next six years developing a computer program that could generate Sudoku puzzles.

The Times of London began publishing Sudoku puzzles in 2004, and the first U.S. newspaper to feature Sudoku was The Conway (New Hampshire) Daily Sun in 2004. Within the past 10 years, Sudoku has become a global phenomenon. The first World Sudoku Championship was hosted in Italy in 2006 and the 2013 World Sudoku Championship will be held in Beijing.

Why does Sudoku speak to us in today's fast-paced world? One possible reason is that it appeals to people's innate sense of order; there is something very satisfying about filling out those empty squares on the Sudoku grid. Another reason is that the rules are simple and easy to learn - people of all ages can play Sudoku and can often learn quickly how to approach the puzzle. As Sudoku's global popularity attests, the game is easy to share with friends all over the world, because it is numbers-based and so it does not require any translation.

As long as people love to test their brains with the fun and challenge of logic puzzles, Sudoku will be a popular and beloved part of millions of people's everyday lives around the world.

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The history of Sudoku dates back to an 18th Century Swiss mathematician's game called "Latin Squares" (according to this article from the Economist) and some of the first number puzzles to appear in newspapers were published in France in 1895.

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There are many interesting facts about crosswords. They really do have a fascinating history. Here is just a small selection of about these ever-popular puzzle games. Add these facts about crosswords to your general knowledge.

1. Crossword solvers are called "cruciverbalists".

2. People who write crosswords (and other puzzles) are called "enigmatologists".

3. The first crossword puzzle, as we know it, was written by Arthur Wynne, and was published in New York World in December 1913.

4. Crosswords were banned in Paris during the second World War in case they were used to pass secret messages to the enemy.

5. The Guinness Book of Records lists the largest ever crossword as 7′x7′ in size, 91,000 squares and 28,000 clues.

6. The Times Crossword puzzle was first published in 1930.

7. In the 1930s, an architect by the name of Alfred Mosher Butts decided to create a board game based on the principles of the crossword puzzle, which at the time was a very popular pastime. The game was called Scrabble.

8. The oldest crossword competition in the world is the Annual American Crossword Puzzle Tournament which began in 1978.

9. The Japanese crossword is called a nonogram and is also referred to as 'paint by numbers' and it does not involve filling in word clues.

10. The fastest completion time of a New York Times crossword was set in 1996 by Stanley Newman. he did it in 2 mins 14 secs.

11. Word square puzzles were found in the ruins of Pompeii.

12. Australian enigmatologist David Astle's Cluetopia (2013) documents the first 100 years of the crossword puzzle... a great read.

13. In the 2014 movie The Imitation Game, starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Keira Knightley, Bletchley Park codebreakers are selected based on their speed in solving a cryptic crossword!

14. National Crossword Day will be held on 21 December 2020.

We are sure there are more fascinating facts about crosswords out there. If you come across some, please let us know.

crosswords, history of crossword puzzles, improve your general knowledge, interesting facts about puzzles, make learning fun, puzzles

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Interesting Facts About Crosswords - Clue Detective Puzzle Agency

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There are many interesting facts about crosswords. They really do have a fascinating history. Here is just a small selection of about these ever-popular puzzle games. Add these facts about crosswords to your general knowledge. We are sure there are more fascinating facts about crosswords out there.

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A logic puzzle is a puzzle deriving from the mathematical field of deduction.

The logic puzzle was first produced by Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, who is better known under his pen name Lewis Carroll, the author of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. In his book The Game of Logic he introduced a game to solve problems such as confirming the conclusion "Some greyhounds are not fat" from the statements "No fat creatures run well" and "Some greyhounds run well". Puzzles like this, where we are given a list of premises and asked what can be deduced from them, are known as syllogisms.[citation needed ] Dodgson goes on to construct much more complex puzzles consisting of up to 8 premises.[citation needed ]

In the second half of the 20th century mathematician Raymond M. Smullyan continued and expanded the branch of logic puzzles with books such as The Lady or the Tiger?, To Mock a Mockingbird and Alice in Puzzle-Land. He popularized the " knights and knaves" puzzles, which involve knights, who always tell the truth, and knaves, who always lie.[citation needed ]

There are also logic puzzles that are completely non-verbal in nature. Some popular forms include Sudoku, which involves using deduction to correctly place numbers in a grid; the nonogram, also called "Paint by Numbers", which involves using deduction to correctly fill in a grid with black-and-white squares to produce a picture; and logic mazes, which involve using deduction to figure out the rules of a maze.[citation needed ]

Another form of logic puzzle, popular among puzzle enthusiasts and available in magazines dedicated to the subject, is a format in which the set-up to a scenario is given, as well as the object (for example, determine who brought what dog to a dog show, and what breed each dog was), certain clues are given ("neither Misty nor Rex is the German Shepherd"), and then the reader fills out a matrix with the clues and attempts to deduce the solution. These are often referred to as "logic grid" puzzles. The most famous example may be the so-called Zebra Puzzle, which asks the question Who Owned the Zebra?.

Common in logic puzzle magazines are derivatives of the logic grid puzzle called "table puzzles" that are deduced in the same manner as grid puzzles, but lack the grid either because a grid would be too large, or because some other visual aid is provided. For example, a map of a town might be present in lieu of a grid in a puzzle about the location of different shops.

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A logic puzzle is a puzzle deriving from the mathematical field of deduction. The logic puzzle was first produced by Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, who is better known under his pen name Lewis Carroll, the author of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland .

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Rebus, representation of a word or syllable by a picture of an object the name of which resembles in sound the represented word or syllable. Several rebuses may be combined-in a single device or successively-to make a phrase or sentence. Literary rebuses use letters, numbers, musical notes, or specially placed words to make sentences. Complex rebuses combine pictures and letters. Rebuses may convey direct meanings, especially to inform or instruct illiterate people; or they may deliberately conceal meanings, to inform only the initiated or to puzzle and amuse.

An early form of rebus occurs in picture writings, where abstract words, difficult to portray, were represented by pictures of objects pronounced the same way. These are common in Egyptian hieroglyphs and early Chinese pictographs. Rebus pictures were used to convey names of towns on Greek and Roman coins or names of families in medieval heraldry and for instructional symbols in religious art and architecture. In the Far East, especially in China and Korea, rebus symbols were commonly employed to carry auspicious wishes.

In Europe, literary rebuses often appeared on family mottoes, personal seals, ciphers, bookplates, and ultimately in games or riddles. A familiar English rebus is the debtor's "IOU," for "I owe you."

Popular in the United States after the mid-19th century were rebus picture puzzles in which the indicated addition or subtraction of letters in illustrated words produced another word or name. Such picture riddles have been widely used in advertising promotional contests.

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Rebus, representation of a word or syllable by a picture of an object the name of which resembles in sound the represented word or syllable. Several rebuses may be combined-in a single device or successively-to make a phrase or sentence. Literary rebuses use letters, numbers, musical notes, or

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Hungarian design teacher and serious puzzler Erno Rubik assembled his first cube puzzle in 1974 and called it the Magic Cube. After a toy agent pitched the puzzle to Ideal Toy & Novelty Company, it renamed the puzzle Rubik's Cube and began putting it in stores in 1980. Soon puzzlers all over the world wanted to solve the cube. Within two years they bought one hundred million of them, making Rubik's Cube the title of most popular puzzle in history. Its success fostered hundreds of spin-off products, from best-selling books on how to solve it to patent-infringing look-alikes by other manufacturers.

Though media first circulated a story about Rubik designing the cube to help teach students about three-dimensional objects, Rubik himself later acknowledged that he purposefully set out to design a puzzle based on geometry. The 27 tiny cubes called "cubies" produced a truly challenging puzzle. Each carried one of six colors, and when assembled they formed a square. Rubik's challenge was figuring a way to allow the cubies to slide and rotate alongside one another while holding together as a unit. His key insight lay in realizing that if the individual blocks hinged on a rounded core, they could move freely while maintaining the shape of a cube.

Young puzzlers, known as "cubers," are attracted to the seeming simplicity of the puzzle, and are often skilled at spotting the patterns-cubers call them algorithms-necessary to solve the cube. Since 2003, cube-solving speed records, held by "speedcubers," have been governed by the World Cube Association. Devoted to fairness and fun, the Association maintains records for blindfolded, one-handed, and fewest moves to solve, among others.

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Hungarian design teacher and serious puzzler Erno Rubik assembled his first cube puzzle in 1974 and called it the Magic Cube. After a toy agent pitched the puzzle to Ideal Toy & Novelty Company, it renamed the puzzle Rubik's Cube and began putting it in stores in 1980.

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Himitsu-bako, or Japanese puzzle boxes, have a long and storied history. These beautifully crafted boxes are a delight to look at, but their appeal goes beyond their aesthetic appearance or even their functional purpose. What makes himitsu-bako so special is their unique puzzle mechanism. For over two hundred years, these intricate cases have entertained young and old.
The Beginnings of the Puzzle Box
The first himitsu-bako were designed for personal use and were small and relatively simple. But as their popularity grew, they became much more elaborate, and larger in size. Soon, they were being called "sikake-bako" and "tei-bako," which mean trick box and clever box, respectively. Their popularity also spread beyond the town of Hakone, where they were invented. Tourists to the area were soon buying their own himitsu-bako as souvenirs, expanding their popularity even more. Soon, himitsu-bako would make their ways to all of the corners of the globe.

These increasingly elaborate boxes were also being put to new uses. Instead of being used simply to keep sewing materials out of the hands of children, or to store a piece of jewelry in the home, they were being used by samurai and warlords to pass messages securely. Travelers also used them, to keep their valuables safe while on the road.

Demand for the himitsu-bako continued to grow, and three notable artisans began to create boxes using a special style of wooden mosaic that the region was known for. The woodworking style is known as yosegi-zaiku. These artisans were Takajiro Ohkawa, Tatsunosuke Okiyama, and Kikukawa. Their efforts led to the creation of the distinctive style that himitsu-bako are still known for today.
Visual Style
Before himitsu-bako were invented, the Hakone-Odawara region was already renowned for its uniquely talented woodworkers. One reason their work was so sought after was the abundance and variety of high-quality wood in the area. With access to wood of such beauty and diversity, many generations of artisans worked to create intricate ways to showcase the many different hues, textures, and grains in creative ways.

One of the most popular forms of woodworking in Hakone, therefore, became yosegi-zaiku. Craftsmen used different shades of wood in careful inlays to create astonishingly intricate and beautiful geometric designs. Woodworkers then, and today, are proud of the fact that the wood used in traditional yosegi-zaiku is not painted, stained, or otherwise artificially colored. Each piece of wood must be carefully sought and selected to contribute to the overall effect of the design.

Many of these designs have special names that describe the design or honor the craftsman who invented or perfected it. Ichimatsu, for example, means "checkered" and describes a multicolored pattern of small squares arranged in cascading diagonal stripes. Koyosegi combines many different patterns arranged artistically. Kuroasa means "dark morning," or "dark sunrise," and consists of interlocking star shaped patterns made with a dark wood.

These designs actually form only a thin layer on the exterior of the box. The patterns are crafted in very thin sheets, which can then be cut and applied to puzzle boxes (or other items) for decorative purposes.

Another style of wood inlay, zougan, is also used to decorate puzzle boxes. Zougan inlay, instead of focusing on interwoven geometric patterns, creates a representative image. Often this image is inspired by traditional Japanese art.

When these designs were combined with the himitsu-bako, a truly enchanting artform was born. While not all himitsu-bako are adorned with yosegi-zaiku, those that remain cherished for representing this treasured part of Japan's cultural history.
What Makes Himitsu-Bako So Special?
Himitsu-bako are beautiful, but it's their puzzles that have long captivated everyone who has had the opportunity to examine one. Not only must one find identify their moving parts, which can be difficult in itself due to the usual mosaic style, but one must also know the correct order in which to move each part.

This sequence can be relatively easy and require only a few moves, in the simplest of himitsu-bako. However, the more advanced boxes can require dozens of moves. Each tile must be slid in a particular direction, in a particular order, or the contents of the box cannot be retrieved. Some boxes may require fifty moves or even more!

Unopened, a well-crafted himitsu-bako reveals nothing about its opening mechanism or its contents. In most cases, it's impossible to even identify which panel functions as the lid until every part of the opening sequence has been completed.

This is what made himitsu-bako so valuable as a security measure when they were initially invented. One could be certain that, for example, a message placed inside would be retrieved only by someone who knew the sequence. Think of it as an early method of "encrypting" data.

Today, of course, we have other ways of passing messages securely. But himitsu-bako are still beloved for their beauty and cleverness, and still, provide a safe and secure way to contain valuable trinkets.
Himitsu-Bako Today
Today, himitsu-bako are still crafted using the same traditional methods that have been passed down for generations, in Hakone. There's still a community of about 100 people who are keeping the traditions of yosegi-zaiku, zougan, and himitsu-bako alive in their purest forms. Usually, the craftsmen who produce the boxes themselves do not produce the mosaic designs used to cover them. Instead, each craftsman spends a lifetime perfecting his own particular skills, and perhaps passing them on to an apprentice.

Of course, their popularity over the past two centuries has also inspired other cultures and artisans to create their own puzzle boxes. The legacy of himitsu-bako is one that is going to stretch far into the future.

If you had a secret puzzle box, what would you keep in it?

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japanese secret trick puzzle box himitsu bako

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The History of the Japanese Puzzle Box | Kubiya Games

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Himitsu-bako, or Japanese puzzle boxes, have a long and storied history. These beautifully crafted boxes are a delight to look at, but their appeal goes beyond their aesthetic appearance or even their functional purpose. What makes himitsu-bako so special is their unique puzzle mechanism.

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Today's Dragon Tip

Need Help?
You can submit a puzzle to a web site forum to get help directly from within the program.
Read More

The long and interesting history of the Sudoku is quite a puzzle in itself.

The name Sudoku or more correctly 数独 comes from Japan and consists of the Japanese characters Su (meaning 'number') and Doku (meaning 'single') but the was not invented in Japan. Sudoku originated in Switzerland and then traveled to Japan by way of America.

Sudoku has its deep roots in ancient number puzzles. For many centuries people have been interested in creating and solving them. Puzzles continue to stimulate new development in mathematics, as you can see in the film A Beautiful Mind ➚ .

Magic Squares

Magic Square puzzles which involve the ordering of consecutive numbers into a square, comes to us from the mists of history.

The Magic square ➚ is first documented in China two thousand years ago. The puzzle is both a numerical and positional problem, as all the rows, columns and diagonal lines through the grid must add up to the same number. Just as in Sudoku a number can only be used once in the grid. The aim of the puzzle is to try to devise a new ordering of the numbers to complete the puzzle starting from scratch. Solutions were considered to have mystical properties and became part of the Chinese I Ching (Book of Changes) ➚ method of telling the future.

The 3x3 solution shown is called the Lo Shu diagram ➚ . It was regarded as the gift of the turtle from the River Lo ➚ (the turtle had the magic square inscribed on its back). This image was first printed in the first or second century CE. The magic square reached Europe from China by way of the Arabs who brought news of many of the Chinese inventions with them along the Silk Road ➚ . Thabit ibn Qurrah ➚ (ninth century CE) is credited with introducing the magic square to the Western World.

See also: Devising Magic squares ➚ ; The Arabian connection ➚

In Europe the first unequivocal appearance of the square is in "Albrecht Dürer's" ➚ engraving called 'Melancholia' ➚ in 1514 where a 4x4 magic square is clearly shown with an arrangement of the first sixteen numbers gives a sum of 34 in all rows, columns and both diagonals. Any philosopher of the renaissance age would know and understand the properties of magic squares.

See also: Alchemy and Dürer ➚

Dürer's Magic Square: All rows, columns and diagonals add up to 34

Chinese Puzzle

It is worth mentioning in passing the Chinese Puzzle ➚ that may well be familiar to you, it consists of a 9x9 grid of squares with one square missing.

The squares are scrambled and have to be shifted one at a time to form an ascending numerical sequence 1 to 8. The early versions used the digits 1 to 8 with the 9 missing but modern ones have pictures (which comes to the same thing). Like Sudoku it is a matter of finding a strategy to put the squares into a particular order.

Swiss Genius

The great mathematician Leonhard Euler ➚ is the man chiefly credited with the creation of the puzzle that we now know as Sudoku. Born in Basle,Switzerland ➚ in 1707 just after the giant leap forward in mathematics pioneered by Isaac Newton ➚ and Gottfried Leibniz ➚ , he both consolidated and pioneered mathematical knowledge in many fruitful areas. He moved from Basle to St Petersburg, Russia to study medicine but by the chance happenings of fate he became the chief mathematician at the St Petersburg Academy ➚ . In 1741 he spent 25 years in Germany before returning to the Academy in Russia where he died at the grand age of 76. Even though blind for the last seventeen years of his life he still made important discoveries.

Euler turned his mind to all sorts of mathematical problems. Amongst other things he is responsible for the ratio of a circle's circumference and diameter pi ➚ being denoted by the familiar Greek letter π and also i to denote the square root of -1. His pioneering work on imaginary numbers ➚ using this new notation transformed key fields of mathematics.

Euler's Graeco-Latin squares.

May be only as a hobby, Euler developed the basics of 'Sudoku' which he termed 'Graeco-Roman Squares' or Latin Squares ➚ - he used letters as the grid square symbols rather than numbers. He mused on what would happen if you removed the rule for magic squares that the sum of the diagonals must add up to the same number as the rows and columns and turn it into a puzzle of permutations. His thoughts on the subject were first published in 1782 in Verhandelingen uitgegeven door het zeeuwsch Genootschap der Wetenschappen te Vlissingen 9, Middelburg pp. 85-239. This dissertation was probably first given as a lecture to the Academy on October 17th 1776.

The first four letters of the Greek alphabet α; β; γ and δ are combined with Latin alphabet a; b; c and d so that each occurs once in each row and column. In this case the Greek letters occur once in each region too.

See also: A biography of Euler ➚ ; Euler's original paper on Latin Squares ➚

French Interlude

Euler's immense legacy of pioneering research has been much used by mathematicians and scientists ever since but the obscure puzzle he created was not taken up by contemporaries, not even as a pastime.

A brief and localized version of 'Magic Squares' appeared as a newspaper puzzle between about 1890 and 1920 in France. Then a new variation was developed that removed some of the numbers from a Magic Square leaving the solver to work out what was missing. Because the puzzle required arithmetic rather than position it is rather different from ordinary Sudoku. This was further refined to use the numbers 1-9 (like Sudoku) but it did not catch on.

Journey to America

It took another fifty years before the puzzle was introduced by Howard Garnes ➚ in the American Dell magazine. As in every good story the puzzle took on an extra twist. Instead of requiring just rows and columns to be permutations, a new rule was introduced that split the grid into 9 regions of 3x3 squares and these regions must also have a unique occurrence of each number. This makes it a more challenging and interesting problem for people to solve. Howard Garnes called the puzzle Number Place when it was first published by Dell Puzzle Magazines ➚ , New York in 1979.

Over the Pacific to Japan

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It did not take long for the puzzle to move to Japan. Although the Japanese like brain teasers as much as anybody else, it is believed that it is the property of the Japanese language ➚ itself that caused Sudoku to undergo its final transformation.

The Japanese language is a little tricky for crosswords as it is symbolic rather than phonetic. It is not so easy to devise a grid of crossword letters ➚ in the same way as you can in English. So the Number Place puzzle in Dell Puzzle Magazine had great potential as a replacement for the familiar crossword puzzle in Japanese newspapers and magazines.

The American name Number Place was translated as Suuji wa dokushin ni kagiru meaning 'the numbers must occur once only', but quickly became abbreviated to 数独 or in Western script Su Doku 'number only' or 'number single'. In April 1984 it was first printed in Monthly Nikolist ➚ magazine and it soon became a very popular pastime.

The Japanese added another element to the Sudoku puzzle. They imposed the rule that the pattern of revealed squares had to be symmetric and not just random (for more on symmetry please read our Sudoku symmetry page). They also stipulated that at least 32 of the 81 initial squares in regular Sudoku should be revealed to give a reasonably tough level of difficulty. Although the first computer program to generate and solve it was developed to in 1989, the best puzzles are still reckoned to be devised by human skill and ingenuity.

A Worldwide phenomenon

Sudoku's journey has been traced from China, through Persia to Europe and then across the Atlantic to New York. After it jumped over to Japan it then became a great craze in the U.S. and Europe, being published in most newspapers and magazines with championships and conventions all over the world. It is one of the few puzzles that can claim to be truly international by nature. It has no cultural baggage and just needs a logical mind to solve it.

'Sudoku' Characters

If you know the Japanese language you may know that the Su Doku characters 数独 are actually ones that originated from Chinese. These two characters have the same meaning in China (number single) but in Mandarin Chinese (pinyin) would be pronounced shùdú. The written version of the characters tells a tale that goes back into the mists of history. The first character Shu ➚ is in two parts. The phonetic radical islou ➚ 娄 consists of the two characters 'middle' above 'woman' and denotes 'leisure' (possibly representing a woman in the middle of nothing). The second part of Shu has 夂 is 'strike' represented by a hand with a stick. These two parts together denote 'number' perhaps symbolizing counting by scratching marks on the ground. The second character 独 is the one for du ➚ or 'only'. It consists of two parts, the first symbol (radical) is for a dog 犭 that is used for many wild creatures and then 虫 which mean 'insect'. These two parts together represent 'only' or 'single'. It is the simplified form of 獨 'du'.

See also
Sudoku History ➚ An article tracing the history and development of the puzzle.
Wikipedia Entry ➚ A good guide to the puzzle and its history.
Puzzle Site ➚ - a background history for Sudoku.
Background ➚ news story about the rise of the puzzle.
Personal Site ➚ A Sudoku addict's view of the puzzle with some interesting background.

Please share your interest on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Tumblr or Mix using the buttons. Please visit our (secure) contact page to leave any comments you may have.

Any comments on this page? Click here to contribute.

Today's Quotation

"Peace rules the day, where reason rules the mind."

William Collins (Persian Eclogues) 1742

Copyright © 2005-2019 Sudoku Dragon

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Today's Dragon Tip Need Help? You can submit a puzzle to a web site forum to get help directly from within the program. Read More The long and interesting history of the Sudoku is quite a puzzle in itself.

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Love logic puzzles? Learn how to solve them and create them yourself with our quick and easy tutorial.

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JAPANESE PUZZLE BOX (Himitsu-Bako) | JAPANESE PUZZLE BOX AND YOSEGI ZAIKU - IZUMIYA ONLINE SHOPPING SITE -

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Japanese puzzle box (About Himitsu-Bako) The Japanese puzzle box is a traditional Personal Secret Box (Himitsu-Bako) that was designed over 150 years ago

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Rebus puzzle is a type of a French puzzle which consists of various parts such as little pictures, letters, numbers, symbols and geometric figures. Rebus puzzles made with these parts cryptically represent a word.

The first collection of rebus puzzles was published in 1582 by French poet Etienne Tabouro . After that rebus puzzles became popular in the neighboring countries: Germany, England and Italy.

In 1783 at Hodson's publishing house in London English illustrator Thomas Bewick released the Bible for children which represented the events of Holy Scripture in a form of rebus-puzzles. This Bible was called Hieroglyphic.

In 1788 American writer Isaiah Thomas produced hieroglyphic Bible in the USA.

Eventually rebus puzzles became very popular. For example English writer Lewis Carroll often resorted to hundreds of rebus puzzles in his letters. Rebus puzzle designs were printed on cards, plates, advertising boards.

Although the popularity of rebus puzzles has decreased as the result of the growing video games industry, puzzles are still very good instrument for the brain development.

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Rebus puzzle is a type of a French puzzle which consists of various parts such as little pictures, letters, numbers, symbols and geometric figures. Rebus puzzles made with these parts cryptically represent a word. The first collection of rebus puzzles was published in 1582 by French poet Etienne Tabouro .

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Before I talk about the benefits of wordsearches, let's acknowledge the haters.

Wordsearches get a bad rap. There's a lot to hate about wordsearches.

They look a lot like busywork. They look really low level. They look like everything wrong with a worksheet culture. They look ridiculous next to advanced products and activities. They can be frustrating, especially for students with a learning difference. I'm the first to admit, they're not for everything (but what single technique is?).

I'm going to share the benefits of wordsearches, and why I think you just may get converted!

They Help Develop Word Recognition

What looks obvious to an adult (find this word in a sea of words) is far more complicated to an emerging reader who is learning to tell the difference between a word that begins g-r-e-a- and a word that begins g-r-e-e.

They're a beginning, in other words.

They Assist in Learning Context Clues

There are several kinds of context clues that build fluency, some of which can be developed in wordsearches.

1. Semantic or Meaning Clues - When you read about cars, you expect to find words like road, steer, tire and windshield.

2. Picture Clues - Images can give us clues to words and their meanings. Teachers can create wordsearches that have pictures for clues, rather than the words themselves. This is especially effective if they are kept in families. For example, a science teacher could have pictures of types of cloud formations as clues, with the students searching for nimbus, etc. in the puzzle. While they are searching, they have the word and its image in their minds.

They Help Develop Pattern Recognition

Ah, the letter Q actually is followed by a U. I know because I searched for all of those Q words, and they all had a U after them as well. Oh! And T often has an H after it. And words that end with -a-m-e all rhyme!

This organic discovery of patterns, in combination with other strategies of course, is one step towards fluency.

They Introduce and Review Vocabulary

Academic vocabulary is a key to mastery of any discipline. Scholars know the vocabulary of their discipline, and the first step towards vocabulary is exposure to the word itself.

You can use wordsearches to do this, and you can use wordsearches for a self-test review. I see and find the word, and I highlight it if I can't define or use it.

S-P-E-L-L-I-N-G

Some of us are natural born spellers (Oh, how I love me a spelling bee), while others of us recite little ditties to remember the order of letters.

We've all seen the failings of spellcheck, and there is no ideal substitute for actually knowing how to spell. People with dyslexia understand the struggle this presents in everyday life, and would not dismiss it as simplistic or useless. It's easy to take lightly what comes easily.

Wordsearches can help students learn the basics of spelling by seeing the same word in the context of its word family.

They Are Fun

A lot of us actually like completing word searches. Don't believe me? Check out the magazine section of your local store. You'll see that people actually pay cold, hard cash for books of wordsearches. It's true.

They can be created around student interest, making them one of the most simple ways to differentiate for student interest in the known universe.

They work great for those small moments of time because they can be stopped and started easily, unlike some activities.

You Can Make Them Higher Level

Teachers can raise the thinking level of wordsearches in a couple of ways.

Have students create them by evaluating a text and having them create a wordsearch of a certain set of words (most important, inferential, adjectives, figurative language, adverbs, prepositions, descriptive, etc.).

Students can complete the wordsearch and then create words out of the remaining letters.

Give a wordsearch with no word bank and ask students to search for as many words as they can find related to a topic or story.

Wrap-Up

When I started my Teachers Pay Teachers store (you can read about that decision ), I decided that I was going to only put in quality things I could stand behind. I decided that both wordsearches and crossword puzzles would have a place in the store for all of the reasons I listed above.

Are they perfect for everyone all of the time? Absolutely not.

Are there other strategies that do all of these things? Yes.

Is there a place for them in the classroom? In many cases, I believe there is.

It's become common in contemporary pedagogy to dismiss certain things (wordsearches, posters, etc.) out of hand. That's throwing the baby out with the bath water. Virtually any technique can be made to be awesome in the right hands, and wordsearches are no different.

If you're interested in mine, you can find one on math vocabulary for 4th grade here.

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The Benefits of Wordsearches - Gifted Guru

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Before I talk about the benefits of wordsearches, let's acknowledge the haters. Wordsearches get a bad rap. There's a lot to hate about wordsearches. They look a lot like busywork. They look really low level. They look like everything wrong with a worksheet culture. They look ridiculous next to advanced products and activities.

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Logic puzzle, puzzle requiring the use of the process of logical deduction to solve.

Many challenging questions do not involve numerical or geometrical considerations but call for deductive inferences based chiefly on logical relationships. Such puzzles are not to be confounded with riddles, which frequently rely upon deliberately misleading or ambiguous statements, a play on words, or some other device intended to catch the unwary. Logical puzzles do not admit of a standard procedure or generalized pattern for their solution and are usually solved by some trial-and-error method. This is not to say that the guessing is haphazard; on the contrary, the given facts (generally minimal) suggest several hypotheses. These can be successively rejected if found inconsistent, until, by substitution and elimination, the solution is finally reached. The use of various techniques of logic may sometimes prove helpful, but in the last analysis, success depends largely upon that elusive capacity called ingenuity. For convenience, logic problems are arbitrarily grouped in the following categories.

The brakeman-fireman-engineer puzzle has become a classic. The following version of it appeared in Oswald Jacoby and William Benson's Mathematics for Pleasure (1962).

The names, not necessarily respectively, of the brakeman, fireman, and engineer of a certain train were Smith, Jones, and Robinson. Three passengers on the train happened to have the same names and, in order to distinguish them from the railway employees, will be referred to hereafter as Mr. Smith, Mr. Jones, and Mr. Robinson. Mr. Robinson lived in Detroit; the brakeman lived halfway between Chicago and Detroit; Mr. Jones earned exactly $2,000 per year; Smith beat the fireman at billiards; the brakeman's next-door neighbour, one of the passengers, earned exactly three times as much as the brakeman; and the passenger who lived in Chicago had the same name as the brakeman. What was the name of the engineer?

Overlapping groups

The following problem is typical of the overlapping-groups category. Among the members of a high-school language club, 21 were studying French; 20, German; 26, Spanish; 12, both French and Spanish; 10, both French and German; nine, both Spanish and German; and three, French, Spanish, and German. How many club members were there? How many members were studying only one language?

Another kind of logical inference puzzle concerns truths and lies. One variety is as follows: The natives of a certain island are known as knights or knaves, though they are indistinguishable in appearance. The knights always tell the truth, and the knaves always lie. A visitor to the island, meeting three natives, asks them whether they are knights or knaves. The first says something inaudible. The second, pointing to the first, says, "He says that he is a knight." The third, pointing to the second, says, "He lies." Knowing beforehand that only one is a knave, the visitor decides what each of the three is.

In a slightly different type, four men, one of whom was known to have committed a certain crime, made the following statements when questioned by the police:

Archie: Dave did it.

Dave: Tony did it.

Gus: I didn't do it.

Tony: Dave lied when he said I did it.

If only one of these four statements is true, who was the guilty man? On the other hand, if only one of these four statements is false, who was the guilty man? (From 101 Puzzles in Thought and Logic by C.R. Wylie, Jr.; Dover Publications, Inc., New York, 1957. Reprinted through the permission of the publisher.)

The problem of the smudged faces is another instance of pure logical deduction. Three travellers were aboard a train that had just emerged from a tunnel, leaving a smudge of soot on the forehead of each. While they were laughing at each other, and before they could look into a mirror, a neighbouring passenger suggested that although no one of the three knew whether he himself was smudged, there was a way of finding out without using a mirror. He suggested: "Each of the three of you look at the other two; if you see at least one whose forehead is smudged, raise your hand." Each raised his hand at once. "Now," said the neighbour, "as soon as one of you knows for sure whether his own forehead is smudged or not, he should drop his hand, but not before." After a moment or two, one of the men dropped his hand with a smile of satisfaction, saying: "I know." How did that man know that his forehead was smudged?

A final example might be the paradox of the unexpected hanging, a remarkable puzzle that first became known by word of mouth in the early 1940s. One form of the paradox is the following: A prisoner has been sentenced on Saturday. The judge announces that "the hanging will take place at noon on one of the seven days of next week, but you will not know which day it is until you are told on the morning of the day of the hanging." The prisoner, on mulling this over, decided that the judge's sentence could not possibly be carried out. "For example," said he, "I can't be hanged next Saturday, the last day of the week, because on Friday afternoon I'd still be alive and I'd know for sure that I'd be hanged on Saturday. But I'd known this before I was told about it on Saturday morning, and this would contradict the judge's statement." In the same way, he argued, they could not hang him on Friday, or Thursday, or Wednesday, Tuesday, or Monday. "And they can't hang me tomorrow," thought the prisoner, "because I know it today!"

Careful analysis reveals that this argument is false, and that the decree can be carried out. The paradox is a subtle one. The crucial point is that a statement about a future event can be known to be a true prediction by one person but not known to be true by another person until after the event has taken place.

William L. Hosch, Associate Editor.

Deduction, in logic, a rigorous proof, or derivation, of one statement (the conclusion) from one or more statements (the premises)- i.e., a chain of statements, each of which is either a premise or a consequence of a statement occurring earlier in the proof. This usage is a generalization of what the...

Logic, the study of correct reasoning, especially as it involves the drawing of inferences. This article discusses the basic elements and problems of contemporary logic and provides an overview of its different fields. For treatment of the historical development of logic, see logic, history of. For detailed discussion of specific fields,...

Crossword puzzle, popular form of word puzzle. A crossword puzzle consists of a diagram, usually rectangular, divided into blank (white) and cancelled (black, shaded, or crosshatched) squares. This diagram is accompanied by two lists of numbered definitions or clues, one for the horizontal and the...

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Logic puzzle, puzzle requiring the use of the process of logical deduction to solve. Many challenging questions do not involve numerical or geometrical considerations but call for deductive inferences based chiefly on logical relationships. Such puzzles are not to be confounded with riddles, which