Seduced by Sudoku
Introducing the hottest new pastime since the crossword. Best of all, our version was designed by a puzzle fiend from our own back yard.
By COLETTE BANCROFT
Published January 2, 2006
TAMPA - Merl Reagle is puzzled.
He jabs at the folded newspaper on his table in a Carrollwood Starbucks, frowning at a half-finished Sudoku puzzle.
"This is not a medium puzzle," he says, despite its label. "For some reason, I just cannot solve it."
The grid is more than half filled with numbers, but a scattering of empty cells challenges him. At the bottom of each one, Reagle has written as many as five tiny digits, the "possibles" for that cell, leaving the center blank for the eventual solution.
He has been hooked on Sudoku - soo-DOH-koo - since he began filling in the nine-by-nine-cell grids last summer, he says, often solving four or five a day.
He's not just doing them for fun anymore. Reagle put his frustrations to work to come up with his own version of the wildly popular game. Starting today, Reagle's Eraser-Free Sudoku will appear daily inside Floridian as well as the Wednesday Taste section.
Even for a puzzlemaker, Sudoku can be devilishly hard to solve - and impossible to ignore, he says. "It would be nice to know what it is about Sudoku that does this to me, when they don't even have any personality."
Reagle, 55, knows a little something about puzzles with personality. He is one of the stars of the crossword constructing trade, the man who makes Sunday crosswords for the Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Philadelphia Inquirer and Hartford Courant among others.
Between self-syndicating his puzzles to newspapers and magazines and publishing them in books, Reagle and his longtime partner Marie Haley, who handles the business end of the operation, make a six-figure income creating crosswords - usually a notoriously low-paying art.
Reagle started building crosswords at the age of 6 and sold his first puzzle to the New York Times at 16.
Along with his friend Will Shortz, the New York Times puzzle editor, and other puzzle stars, Reagle is featured in the new documentary Wordplay. It focuses on the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament (for which he is a judge and commentator). The movie has been nominated for an award at the Sundance Film Festival, which Reagle will attend this month.
What makes a Reagle puzzle recognizable to his multitude of fans is a wickedly witty style that gleans words and clues from culture high and low and interlocks them around themes like "Opera for Dogs" or "Double Features I'd Like to See" (Driving Miss Daisy/Nuts).
" "Funny crossword' used to be an oxymoron," Reagle says. But when he started to seriously pursue puzzle construction a couple of decades ago, he brought to it a background that included not only a stint as a newspaper copy editor but experience as an actor, a rock musician and a standup comic. Making his puzzles, he says, "is like standup without the pressure."
"I always try ideas out on people who really hate crosswords. If it makes them laugh, it passes the gag rule."
No, he never met a pun he didn't like, or any other kind of play on words. Constructing puzzles "is about loving language. It's really a big playground."
So how did a big kid from the playground of language start making Sudoku, which is an exercise in what Reagle calls "pure logic"?
"It's a syndicator's dream," he says. "It's all computer-generated. You can turn the grid on its side and the same puzzle will stump you next week."
Invented by an American architect, Howard Garns, and first published in 1979 with the title Number Place in Dell's puzzle magazines, the game languished in obscurity until 1984.
It was introduced then in Japan under the name Sudoku, a shortened version of the Japanese phrase for "the numbers must occur only once."
The name sums up the game. The nine-by-nine-cell grid is divided into nine three-by-three boxes. Within each box, each horizontal row and each vertical column, the numbers 1 through 9 must occur only once.
Each puzzle has a number of cells filled in, called "givens." Solving the puzzle requires players to figure out what numbers go in the blank cells.
Japanese publishers came up with two innovations: limiting the number of givens to make solving more difficult, and making the givens' placement symmetrical.
The game took off like a rocket in Japan, but it didn't return to Western audiences until 2004, when it caught on in Britain and swiftly invaded the United States.
Although Sudoku uses numbers, Reagle says, it's not about mathematics. "You could use nine different shapes or colors or anything."
Instead, the puzzles require observation and an ability to recognize patterns. "I'm sort of glad to see a logical problem get popular," Reagle says.
Constructing a crossword puzzle is a lengthy process. Reagle says he keeps "tons of little notebooks" filled with ideas. After he settles on a theme, he makes a list of 20 to 30 possible answers that tie into it, then culls them to the best eight or 10.
Constructing the grid for a Sunday puzzle takes an average of three hours, he says, and writing the clues three more.
He uses a computer to move words around, because it saves erasing. But he doesn't use a database for filling in short words in his crosswords, he says. "It's too easy. And it gets boring."
Sudoku puzzles, on the other hand, are entirely computer-generated. It takes Reagle's Mac G4 less than two minutes to spit most of them out.
So what makes a puzzle a Merl Reagle Sudoku?
"I'm the presenter. I'm the guy who put the little line at the bottom."
Reagle's innovation for Sudoku came from his frustration at not having room in most puzzles to jot down possibles as he was working them.
And forget about erasing. "People don't carry pencils around," he says. "If you're doing a Sudoku in Starbucks or on a plane, you only have a pen."
So he came up with Eraser-Free Sudoku, its grids a little bigger and each cell equipped with a light line near the bottom.
The idea is the player can note the possibles below the line, then perch the correct number atop it.
"I can't tell you how long it took us to decide how long to make that line, how far up it should go, how dark or light it should be," Reagle says.
He is also scrupulous about working the puzzles himself to be sure the difficulty level the computer awards them is correct.
Sudoku puzzles are rated easy, medium or hard based on the number of givens - the fewer numbers already filled in, the harder the puzzle will be.
"But you can't always go by that," Reagle says. "Sometimes a puzzle with 32, 33 givens, which should be easy, isn't. And this" he says, brandishing that puzzle that has him stalled, "is not a medium."
Test-solving each puzzle that goes under his Eraser-Free Sudoku brand is no problem, though. "One a day? I could do one a day if I cut down a lot," he says. "I'm a word guy, but I happen to be hooked on it.
"I figure before long there will be Sudoku rehab clinics. They'll have a nine-step program."
- Colette Bancroft can be reached at 727 893-8435 or bancroft@sptimes.com
HOW TO PLAYUsing the given numbers as guides, complete the puzzle so that each row, column, and three-by-three dark-framed box contains the numbers 1 through 9 exactly once. Sudoku is a game of pure logic - no guessing or math is involved. The numbers could just as easily be nine different objects.
In Eraser-Free Sudoku grids, each vacant square contains a "scratchpad" space (the area beneath the short line) for writing in possible answers, so erasing is optional. You can even solve in pen.
ADVANCED SOLVING TIPSHere are Merl Reagle's three strategies for solving Sudoku puzzles:
1. Box stripping: Check the top three dark-framed boxes -- which have the top three rows running through them - to see if there's a number that appears in two of the boxes but not in the remaining box. Since this number has to appear somewhere in the remaining box, note how the choices are limited to just three squares (because it can't appear in the two rows that already contain the number). The three squares may be further narrowed down if any are already occupied or have that number in a crossing column. (Tip: If this does not narrow the choices down to a single square, just move on to another number.) You can use this strategy with any three side-by-side boxes, across or down.
2. Finishing off: Pick a row, column, or box that's as close to being completed as possible, determine what the remaining numbers have to be, and start cross-checking. (Remember to check the box, too). If a square has several possible answers, write these possibles into the scratchpad space for further reference.
3. Twins and trios: Whenever you have two identical possibles (such as 4,5 and 4,5) in a single row, column, or box, they constitute a self-contained "twin." Therefore, both numbers can be ruled out from appearing anywhere else in that row, column, or box. Similarly, whenever you have three different numbers - say, 2, 6, and 9 - appearing as multiple possibles in exactly three squares (such as 2,6 and 2,6,9 and 6,9) in a single row, column, or box, they constitute a self-contained trio. Thus, all three numbers can be ruled out from appearing anywhere else in that row, column, or box. In this game, knowing where numbers can't go is just as important as knowing where they can go.