On

The Importance
of Sudoku
@TPNSudokuReview
Contents
Overview ....................................................................................................................................................... 3
Background & Context .................................................................................................................................. 4
Key Reasons for Inclusion in TPN .................................................................................................................. 5
Sudoku in an Academic Setting................................................................................................................. 6
A Business Argument ................................................................................................................................ 7
Details & Logistics ......................................................................................................................................... 8
Finding its place(ment) ............................................................................................................................. 8
Returning to Difficulty ............................................................................................................................... 9
Conclusion ..................................................................................................................................................... 9
References .................................................................................................................................................. 10

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Overview

Sudoku is an essential part of the daily newspaper. I work hard all day, go to class, and
when I pick up a newspaper on my daily commute, I expect to turn to the last page and find a
sudoku puzzle. I expect to look at the bottom of the page (hopefully nested in a corner) and find
that glorious 9x9 grid with just enough of the numbers already filled in to give me a challenge.
Coming out of a three-hour lecture, nothing can calm my mind but 81 squares summing to 405 to
be solved like a jigsaw puzzle. The sudoku is an elegant puzzle, the perfect mix of art and science,
personality and form. After a long day of academics, a well-crafted sudoku is the perfect way to
unwind and I refuse to be denied that opportunity.
The Sudoku puzzle is thousands of years old, and there are more possibilities than you
could ever possibly complete by hand, yet the rules are simple enough to explain in once sentence,
and practice is all the information needed for someone to go from beginner to expert when it comes
to solving them. This puts the sudoku in a class of its own before we even start to talk about all of
the other reasons it stands out from the crowd.
@TPNSudokuReview was created to address the steadily decreasing percentage of sudoku
puzzles in the daily Pitt News newspaper. At its most active, it had been successful, showing a
near doubling of inclusion rates in the period after versus before creation. I’m not writing this
paper because I’m upset with The Pitt News or their paper, I’m just disappointed in the frequency
of sudoku puzzles in my campus newspaper and want to make the case for it to increase. In this
essay, I’ll explore the reasons why a sudoku puzzle is an essential piece of the daily newspaper,
including its many benefits that make it perfectly tailored for college students. I’ll also discuss
why it makes sense from a business point of view to regularly include a sudoku puzzle, and give
some general advice about logistics of where it
should be placed on the page and how difficult it
should be.

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Background & Context

In order to grasp the full magnitude of the sudoku puzzle and its importance in a daily
newspaper, it’s key for us to look first at its history. Some of the oldest puzzles humanity has
created to amuse ourselves were based around numbers. Ancient mathematicians often served as
puzzlemasters and created systems we still use to challenge ourselves today. The “Magic
Squares” puzzle is believed to have originated in China some 2000 years ago and is the earliest
known precursor to the modern sudoku puzzle. It was very similar to a sudoku puzzle, but could
vary in size, and imposed the requirement that the sum of the diagonals equal that of each of the
rows and columns. The magic square puzzles were a major phenomenon at the time, believed to
have mystical properties, and were widely studied by philosophers and alchemists alike. It
underwent several permutations over the years, branching into other puzzles and taking different
forms. The famous mathematician Euler, the same man that discovered the role of π in circles
and laid the groundwork for research in imaginary numbers, reinvented the magic squares
puzzle, with his first published work on the subject in 1782. Euler removed the restriction on
diagonals, greatly increasing the number of possible puzzles and renamed it to Græco-Roman
Squares (Euler). In 1979, the puzzle finally arrives in America! Published as Number Place in
Dell Puzzle Magazines by Howard Garnes, it imposed two additional restrictions: that each of
the 3x3 grids within the greater 9x9 puzzle must also have the same sum, and no number may be
repeated within a square, row, or column. Here, we finally have the modern sudoku puzzle, but
the history is not complete just yet. Number Place made its way to Japan, where the name was
translated to “Suuji wa dokushin ni kagiru”, and later abbreviated to Sudoku.
In contrast, the first crossword puzzle was published in 1913, with its earliest precursor
only in the 19th century. This is the first of many times where we’ll see the Sudoku puzzle being
richer and more interesting than a crossword.
Returning from our brief dive into the history of the puzzle, let us continue to look at its
structure. Part of the beauty in a sudoku is the simplicity in its form, but complexity in the
number of puzzles that can arise. Simply, a standard form sudoku is a 9x9 set of squares, divided
into 9 3x3 blocks. Each row, column, and block must contain the numbers 1-9 with no repeats.
From this, we can derive the following statements as equivalents, only looking at the standard-
form puzzle:
1. Each row must sum to exactly 45
2. Each column must sum to exactly 45
3. Each 3x3 block must sum to exactly 45
4. The total sum of the Sudoku board must be exactly 405
5. There must be exactly 9 of each number on the board
Even after defining these additional rules, it seems simple enough. What we don’t immediately
see here is the number of possibilities created from such a simple set of rules. That number of
possibilities turns out to be 6670903752021072936960, or about 7 sextillion possible grids.
(Felgenhauer & Frazer, 2006)

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 So, we have plenty of options, but what about difficulty? This is where the Sudoku
puzzle stands out from the crowd. Look first at the crossword puzzle: it can easily be broken
down and viewed as a set of one-word puzzles. It can be solved in any order that you’d like and
once you’ve done enough, it can be finished without even looking at the hints. It’s also worth
noting that filling in a crossword only requires simple recall, not any real thought put in. A
sudoku doesn’t fall victim to any of these issues. The entire premise is that you must view the
puzzle as a whole to be able to solve it, with rows playing off of columns and blocks alike, each
cell being dependent on a bare minimum of 20 others. It’s exactly this layout and mutual
codependence of cells that leads to the richness of a well-designed sudoku puzzle. At the
baseline, any cell depends on those 20 others in the sense that they cannot share the same value.
Building upon this brings us to the strategy and critical thinking that makes Sudoku exciting. It
spawns special cases and dependence relations that bring real difficulty. Such relationships
include: Naked Pairs (2 cells), Hidden Pairs (2 cells), X-Wing (4 Cells), Two out of Three rule
(3-7 cells), and even more complex methods. I won’t dive into the details of how or why each of
these work, but each relies on the solver analytically evaluating the puzzle in front of them to
find their own clues, rather than remembering an unusual synonym for a word. Of course, just
looking at a puzzle, no one will know what kind of solving methods you’ll need, so there must be
some better way to judge difficulty. There is! Looking at a puzzle, it’s usually easy to predict
how difficult it will be based on the number of given digits. At minimum, 17 cells must be filled
in for the puzzle to have a unique solution (McGuire, Tugemann, & Civario, 2012). There are 81
cells total, so we can simply represent the difficulty as an equation of the following form: 𝐷 =
(𝑛 − 16)−0.25, where higher D values represent a higher difficulty, and n is the number of
givens1. Unsurprisingly, there’s been a lot of research towards finding a more accurate way to
describe the difficulty of these puzzles. In The Chaos Within Sudoku, Mária Ercsey-Ravasz and
Zoltán Toroczkai fully explore several such methods, and show the depth of thinking needed to
solve a sudoku. Interested readers are encouraged to read that paper to get a better understanding
of the level of complexity in a sudoku puzzle.

Key Reasons for Inclusion in TPN

Having covered the background of how sudoku puzzles came to be and their essential
components, we can start to look at why exactly they’re so essential to the daily newspaper. Print
news has a special kind of feeling to it. There’s something charming about getting your news
from an oversized piece of paper, delivered early in the morning to a stand around the city.
Additionally, being able to flip through and see all of the top stories at a glance, rather than
having to scroll in an app and find stories for yourself. At the same time, the fact that each of
those stories are written, compiled, and placed together ahead of time puts a sense of urgency on
it. “Here’s what’s happening and everything you need to know about it”. In a time of push
notifications and clickbait titles, it’s nice to know that there’s people putting thought & time into
pulling together all the pieces of a newspaper. It takes our little campus community, wraps it all

1
The exponent here was chosen to give a qualitative representation of the difficulty, and was not derived

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up and puts a bow on it, ready to be found in a blue box, 4 days per week. A newspaper
represents its community, and for a college campus, no novelty better represents a community of
academics than a sudoku. Between classes, clubs, relationships, and work, there’s a lot of
pressure on college students to be at the top of their game. This is where the sudoku comes in,
after taking a break to read through the newspaper, it gives students the perfect opportunity to
not only relax but hone their critical thinking at the same time.
Sudoku in an Academic Setting
A lot of research has been done regarding games and their impact on our problem-solving
abilities. It’s widely agreed that different games can aid the learning process of children and
adults alike, and games like sudoku that have a focus on individual problem-solving and
deduction can point to “a measured improvement in this skill” (McDonald, 2017). On the
surface, this may not seem that helpful. After all, sudoku is a game based around numbers and
definite methods of finding a solution. Seeing this, it’s only natural to assume that the benefits
from a sudoku puzzle would be naturally tailored towards someone studying math or a related
subject, with very limited practical application. In fact, the numbers in sudoku don’t matter at all.
They can be replaced with letters, shapes, Greek symbols (as Euler did when he re-designed the
puzzle), or anything else (Euler). A normal sudoku doesn’t actually rely on the values of the
numbers at all, just their positions and symbolic representation. Because of this, the
psychological benefits aren’t limited to mathematical thinking, but the whole range of problem-
solving and critical thinking. In fact, research has shown that as people solve more sudoku
puzzles and begin to get better, they naturally develop keener methods and develop skills around
symbolic logic and deductive reasoning (Lee, Goodwin, & Johnson-Laird, 2008). It’s easy to see
how much of a boon this could be to a college student, a quick game on the back of their daily
newspaper that could help them in their classes. The most remarkable aspect of this is that it
doesn’t feel like learning. Few people will look at a sudoku grid as anything more than a fun
challenge to kill some time with. Behind the scenes, this brilliant little device is subtly pushing
them towards a higher grade on their next exam. That’s an incredible opportunity that is, quite
frankly, being wasted.
Sudoku puzzles, and casual games in general, have the added bonus of being a stress-
reliever (Russoniello, O'Brien, & Parks, 2009). It’s not a point of debate that college students are
stressed. Everywhere you look on a college campus, there are students staying up through the
night studying, plans are abandoned in favor of a few more hours of study time, and binge
drinking ends up being a go-to escape from the pressures of being a student. Anxiety among
college students has been on the rise over the past decade (Center for Collegiate Mental Health,
2019). Steadily, college students are becoming more concerned with the obligations they need to
juggle, and any healthy outlet to relieve stress should be leveraged and praised as a
transformative tool. Sudoku does just this, acting as an accessible, healthy outlet that can be
readily distributed and promoted through daily inclusion in the newspaper. Sudoku isn’t a
particularly challenging puzzle, all things considered. We already looked at how simple the rules
are, and the fact that it doesn’t require any math skills makes it a great opportunity for your

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average college student to relax and focus on something other than their studies. Even a more
difficult puzzle is approachable for someone with less experience. Of course, it may take them a
bit longer, but that’s exactly the kind of educational distraction that makes it perfect for a college
campus.
The research done in Russoniello, O’Brien, & Parks compares mood and other key
markers through brainwave activity and heartrate variance. Their research uses four groups, a
control, and three others, each playing one of the following games: Bookworm Adventures,
Bejeweled II, and Peggle. These choices are quite important to the subject of this paper:
Bookworm Adventures mirrors crossword puzzles with a goal of each being forming words from
letter clues, and Peggle resembles a sudoku in its problem-solving, forward-thinking nature. The
connections aren’t perfect, but the data should correspond between these to some degree. In the
data, Peggle showed a statistically significant reduction in markers for tension, depression2,
anger, fatigue, and confusion. Of these same markers, Bookworm Adventures only had a
significant impact on Confusion, to a lesser degree than Peggle had (Russoniello, O'Brien, &
Parks, 2009). It’s difficult to draw any concrete conclusions from this data regarding sudoku and
crossword puzzles, but generally speaking, it seems that casual games with a focus on problem-
solving and forward thinking, like is present in both sudoku and Peggle, has a greater positive
impact on key mood markers than word-based “fill-in-the-blank” style games, such as
crosswords and Bookworm Adventures. If this is to be used as any indication, sudoku presents a
clear case as a better stress-relief tool for college students.
Between their benefits as de-stressor and a mental stimulant outside of the classroom,
sudoku puzzles present a compelling basis of justification for being a staple of any college
campus, and where better than the campus newspaper to be highlighted?

A Business Argument
Talking about the many benefits to readers is, of course, a key piece of why the sudoku
puzzle is so important, but perhaps more so is the business appeal. After all, if it’s not feasible
from the business side of things, the argument for the readers’ benefits is moot. Fortunately, this
isn’t the case. If anything, the sudoku is very appealing when it comes to pushing papers3. First
and foremost, a sudoku puzzle keeps eyes on the page. I’m sure it’s no coincidence that the
puzzle normally ends up among the classifieds, so as the reader sits and thinks about their next
move, wandering eyes might just catch an interesting ad. Suddenly, sudoku isn’t there just for the
benefit of the reader, but it’s also making your ad space more valuable.
In addition to being advertiser-friendly, including a sudoku puzzle on a regular basis may
just help newspaper disappearance rates. Anyone that looks forward to filling out the sudoku or
knows that they’ll have a few minutes to spare later in the day will be that much more likely to
pick up a paper because they expect to find a sudoku inside. To this end, the sudoku doesn’t
even need to be every day so long as it’s consistent. In a perfect world, people would be picking

2
The impact on depression was only significant under secondary analysis (Russoniello, O'Brien, & Parks, 2009)
3
No pun intended!

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up the paper regardless, but if the front page isn’t interesting, odds are the rest won’t be either.
When it comes down to it, on a slow day, the sudoku may be the biggest driver in readership if
people know to expect it.
There comes another issue with including a puzzle in the paper: finding one. In contrast
with a crossword, it’s incredibly easy to get a source of sudoku puzzles. Because sudoku only
relies on the placement of nine unique symbols, there’s an inexhaustibly large but finite number
of puzzles, as we saw earlier. This means that:
1. You could keep a couple hundred puzzles and simply cycle through them
2. It wouldn’t be hard to make your own puzzles as needed
3. There’s no need to rely on a feed of puzzles from someone else
It also means that the puzzles published in The Pitt News never need to be credited to another
website or group, because standard-form puzzles can be generated by a simple computer
program and don’t require any creative input.
Finally, a note on the ineffectiveness of the crossword. It’s a shame that TPN only
publishes in print 4 days per week, but it also presents a unique issue around the crossword
puzzle. A key feature of a crossword is that it’s published daily, and the answers to the previous
day’s puzzle is printed. This means that if a crossword truly is the preferred puzzle of TPN, a
conscious effort needs to be made to either publish one every day, and on Mondays, switch the
solutions with those from Friday, or simply admit that a crossword just isn’t a feasible choice
(maybe occasionally in addition to the sudoku).

Details & Logistics

Having a sudoku in the paper at all would be a tremendous benefit, but unfortunately,
circumstances also necessitate that I briefly discuss some of the finer details of the puzzle. There
are a few aspects of a puzzle, after it’s included, that could drastically change the experience of
solving.

Finding its place(ment)

When it comes to putting the sudoku on the page, the first
thing to consider is which page. This is the easiest choice to make, if
it can go on the back cover, great! If not, as close to the back as
possible. When it comes to placement on the page, it becomes more
complicated. The sudoku occupies about 1/9 of the total page, so 1/3
in each direction. To this end, I’ve included two figures to show the
best placements for a sudoku, broken down into 9 segments4. The
main goals of placement would be to make it easy to fold the paper
around the puzzle to improve portability and ease of writing, and if
needed, accessibility. Having the puzzle on the back page is a much
easier case, where the bottom right corner is preferred, top right is Figure 1: Back cover placement

4
Does this layout look familiar?

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slightly better, and the other two tie as next-best options. Having the
puzzle anywhere besides a corner is a huge negative, especially if
it’s sloppily off-center. Moving to the inside of the paper, it becomes
a bit trickier to place the puzzle well. The seam-adjacent areas
become significantly less valuable because they would require either
having the paper open (too big), or folding a page inside out (too
loud). Instead, the open edge becomes prime real estate, as it can be
easily accessed by just folding back part of a page, or even working
with the page mostly closed. Of course, the bottom corner is still
preferable for the simple reason that a puzzle in the top corner is just
uncomfortable. Figure 2: Inside page placement

Returning to Difficulty
As discussed earlier, the difficulty in a sudoku can very extremely, and while a somewhat
challenging puzzle is usually doable with more time from a less-experienced solver, a
remarkably easy puzzle isn’t helpful to anyone. It doesn’t help the beginner learn and is just
short of insulting to anyone with a reasonable amount of skill towards solving sudoku. Normally,
the puzzles featured in TPN sit somewhere in the middle, pretty good for both beginners and
experts. Unfortunately, when they veer to the extremes, it’s more often than it’s toward the easy
side. Using the metric of number of givens to determine difficulty, it shouldn’t be hard to find
puzzles that would appeal to a larger audience and would make the experience significantly more
enjoyable with just a little extra effort.

Conclusion
Having looked at its history, structure, mental benefits, and logistics, it should be clear
just how much there is to an everyday sudoku puzzle. It has incredible potential to soften the
mood of the campus population, boost academic performance, and it just makes sense from a
business point of view. All of these point to excellent reasons why it should be included far more
often in The Pitt News, but the most important is that they’re fun to solve, plain and simple.

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References
Baek, Y., Kim, B., Yun, S., & Cheong, D. (2008, October). Effects of Two Types of Sudoku Puzzles on
Students' Logical Thinking. 2nd European Conference on Games Based Learning. Academic
Publishing Limited Reading.

Center for Collegiate Mental Health. (2019). 2018 Annual Report.

Euler, L. (n.d.). INVESTIGATIONS ON A NEW TYPE OF MAGIC SQUARE. (A. Ho, & D. Klyve, Trans.)

Felgenhauer, B., & Frazer, J. (2006, January 25). Mathematics of Sudoku I.

Lee, N. L., Goodwin, G. P., & Johnson-Laird, P. N. (2008). The psychological puzzle of Sudoku. THINKING
& REASONING. Psychology Press.

McDonald, S. D. (2017). Enhanced critical thinking skills through problem-solving games in secondary
schools. Interdisciplinary Journal of e-Skills and Lifelong Learning.

McGuire, G., Tugemann, B., & Civario, G. (2012, January 1). There is no 16-Clue Sudoku: Solving the
Sudoku Minimum number of Clues Problem.

Royle, G. (n.d.). Minimum Sudoku. Retrieved 12 19, 2019, from Csse.uwa.edu.au:

http://www.csse.uwa.edu.au/~gordon/sudokumin.php

Russoniello, C. V., O'Brien, K., & Parks, J. M. (2009, Spring). THE EFFECTIVENESS OF CASUAL VIDEO
GAMES IN IMPROVING MOOD AND DECREASING STRESS. Journal of CyberTherapy &
Rehabilitation. Virtual Reality Medical Institute.

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