'Father of Sudoku' puzzles next move

    If you are hooked on Sudoku - the puzzle where you fill numbers in on a grid - the man you have to blame is a Japanese publisher who unleashed it on an unsuspecting world.
    Maki Kaji collects new puzzles and refines them with the help of thousands of Japanese subscribers to his quarterly puzzles magazine.Japan has many thousands of amateur puzzlers, but Kaji-san is in a different league.
He is the daddy of them all, a man whose business card says "Father of Sudoku" in case you were in any doubt of his importance. For Details

Gridlock: Creating A Sudoku Puzzle

Does a computer generate the Sudoku grid? How do you create crossword puzzles?

A: Computers do generate Sudoku number puzzles these days, says Mark Lagasse of Dell Puzzle Magazines in New York City. This company, which publishes more than 30 titles, introduced the puzzle we now call Sudoku way back in 1979.

"Unfortunately, there's no copyright in the puzzle world, so people can steal from you freely," Lagasse says. "We called the puzzle Number Place, and it has run for years. A guy in Japan saw the puzzle, and he adapted it, and then a guy in England saw that and adapted that."   For Details

New drinking game: Sudoku?

   We recently wrote about the high rate of human bite    wounds in Dublin,  Ireland, and noted that 82% of the injuries happened between 11 p.m. and 4 a.m., a time period when pub-goers stagger home after lord knows how many pints. What's more, 86% of these bite incidents involved the consumption of alcohol. But it need not be this way!
Scientists at the University of Kentucky have shown that   there's an easy way to   stop drunks picking fights.     Give them a challenging mental task to perform -- a jigsaw,     say, or a current affairs   quiz, perhaps a level 5    Sudoku puzzle? That'll calm 'em down, if they don't deck you first.
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