{"id":9471,"date":"2006-06-29T11:09:35","date_gmt":"2006-06-29T18:09:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp\/2006\/06\/29\/sudoku-vs-cross-words.html"},"modified":"2006-06-29T11:09:35","modified_gmt":"2006-06-29T18:09:35","slug":"sudoku_vs_cross","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2006\/06\/29\/sudoku_vs_cross.html","title":{"rendered":"Sudoku vs. Cross-words"},"content":{"rendered":"

Interesting New York Magazine article<\/a> on the modern evolution of cross-word puzzles — and the challenge they face, popularity-wise, from newcomer numeric Sudoku puzzles.<\/p>\n

I’m not a heavy-duty cross-worder — maybe one or two a month, usually in a flight magazine or something — but I enjoy them. I’ve tried Sudoku, and it just doesn’t do it for me (though I used to be quite the number puzzle kind of guy). It is interesting, though, the shift in popularity. Is it a matter of novelty, a change in thinking patterns (numeric vs lexical), or what?<\/p>\n

What precisely is the allure? Shortz argues that Sudoku has a secret psychological hook. While solving them, you tend to get bogged down midway\u2014then suddenly break through, fill in the last bunch of empty boxes in a row, bang bang bang. \u201cIt gives you a satisfying feeling to be rushing at those squares,\u201d Shortz says. \u201cAnd immediately you want to do another one. That\u2019s the key to why they are so addictive.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yet it is also, in a way, a total negation of crossword culture. Sudoku requires no knowledge of trivia or history, no literary bent. Sudoku doesn\u2019t care what you know, smarty-pants; it just wants you to act like a logic cruncher, a Pentium chip. \u201cIt\u2019s not what you know\u2014it\u2019s how you think. That\u2019s what Sudoku tests,\u201d says Gould. Its nonlinguistic nature is precisely why it has spanned the globe so quickly: A puzzle created in the U.S. can be sold to China or Germany with no translation necessary, and American immigrants who don\u2019t speak good English can happily solve Sudokus.<\/p>\n

Less charitably, one could regard Sudoku as the lowest common denominator\u2014 a puzzle for a nation whose citizens no longer presume to have any culture in common. \u201cI don\u2019t want to call it a dumbing down of society,\u201d Abby Taylor, Dell\u2019s editor-in-chief, says delicately, but she has noticed that nonlanguage puzzles like Sudoku\u2014or nondemanding ones like word searches\u2014have been steadily increasing in sales, while sales of difficult crosswords remain flat.<\/p>\n

So as you\u2019d imagine, many crossword fanatics regard Sudoku with the disdain a jazz purist might have for American Idol. \u201cIt interests me about one-tenth as much as the crossword,\u201d Rosenthal says with a shrug. For crossword constructors, Sudoku represents a robotic outsourcing of the puzzle trade. Sudoku requires no individual artistry, no exquisite handcrafting; the puzzles are simply cranked out by computers, the Coca-Cola of conundrums.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It would be interesting to look ahead five or ten years and see what’s going on then.<\/p>\n

(via GeekPress<\/a>)<\/small><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Interesting New York Magazine article on the modern evolution of cross-word puzzles — and the challenge they face, popularity-wise, from newcomer numeric Sudoku puzzles. I’m not a heavy-duty cross-worder –…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9471","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gaming"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":28924,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2012\/08\/10\/this-ones-for-margie-4.html","url_meta":{"origin":9471,"position":0},"title":"This one's for Margie","author":"***Dave","date":"Fri 10-Aug-12 10:03pm","format":false,"excerpt":"Sudoku and Math. Over to you, my love.Reshared post from +Lucas Wiman Embedded Link Chaotic evaluation of Sudoku difficulty In my papers Nonrepetitive paths and cycles in graphs with application to Sudoku and Solving single-digit Sudoku subproblems I've argued (as have others) for judging the difficulty of Sudoku puzzles by\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "~PlusPosts"","block_context":{"text":"~PlusPosts","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/blogging\/plusposts"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":9415,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2006\/07\/11\/how_to_solve_yo.html","url_meta":{"origin":9471,"position":1},"title":"How to solve your Sudoku puzzle","author":"***Dave","date":"Tue 11-Jul-06 3:21pm","format":false,"excerpt":"Ho hum. In their own way, Sudokus are no more difficult than word searches crossed with those logic puzzles (\"Mary's dress is green; the girl with the blue dress is...","rel":"","context":"In "Gaming"","block_context":{"text":"Gaming","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/gaming"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":12057,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2007\/11\/29\/catalog_themes.html","url_meta":{"origin":9471,"position":2},"title":"Catalog themes","author":"***Dave","date":"Thu 29-Nov-07 12:16am","format":false,"excerpt":"Sifting through several pounds of catalogs for Christmas shopping, three themes I've observed: Lots of Sudoku-related gifts, none of which look at all attractive or practical for the one Sudoku...","rel":"","context":"In "Big Business"","block_context":{"text":"Big Business","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/big-business"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":9238,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2006\/08\/03\/puzzling_names.html","url_meta":{"origin":9471,"position":3},"title":"Puzzling names","author":"***Dave","date":"Thu 3-Aug-06 2:15pm","format":false,"excerpt":"Because in the world of puzzle publishing -- red hot in this era of Sudoku --it's all about marketing. A personal story about this marketing mania: Earlier this year, my...","rel":"","context":"In "Gaming"","block_context":{"text":"Gaming","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/gaming"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":16891,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2010\/03\/11\/happy-sudoku.html","url_meta":{"origin":9471,"position":4},"title":"Happy Sudoku","author":"***Dave","date":"Thu 11-Mar-10 3:37pm","format":false,"excerpt":"Always nice to have a victory and give myself a happy face at least once a day.","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":26112,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2012\/02\/06\/seventeen-its-a-magic-number.html","url_meta":{"origin":9471,"position":5},"title":""Seventeen … it's a magic number …"","author":"***Dave","date":"Mon 6-Feb-12 3:48pm","format":false,"excerpt":"This one's for Margie -- how mathematicians determined you need a minimum of 17 clues in order to make a Sudoku puzzle soluble. #ddtb","rel":"","context":"In "~PlusPosts"","block_context":{"text":"~PlusPosts","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/blogging\/plusposts"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9471","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9471"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9471\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9471"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9471"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9471"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}