LONDON — The rules are simple: "Fill in the grid so that every row, every column, and every 3-by-3 box contains the digits 1 through 9." But from that brief description, aggravation sets in.
Sudoku is a Japanese word that, roughly translated, means "unique number." In Britain, in little more than six months, it has gone from obscurity, to fad, to mania.
The innocuous-looking logic puzzles, first introduced in November by the Times of London and then taken up by almost every other major newspaper here, are causing commuters to miss their stops and students to skip their homework.
Their runaway popularity has stunned almost everyone involved. And the hero (or villain) who brought the game to Britain is an unlikely figure: a longtime judge in Hong Kong who was looking for an interesting diversion in his retirement.
Wayne Gould, 59, a New Zealander, who had given up his seat on the criminal court bench when the territory was handed back by Britain to China eight years ago, picked up a copy of a Sudoku magazine during a vacation in Japan. Even though he could not read the language, he was curious about the puzzle book he said was flying off Japanese store shelves.
The puzzle is composed of a 9-by-9-square grid, divided into nine smaller grids with nine squares in each. Some of the squares are already filled, providing the only clues to solving the puzzle. Depending on the generosity or the paucity of the clues, the puzzles can be easy, challenging or mind-numbingly difficult.
Gould figured out how to work the puzzles by comparing them to the solutions printed in the back of his Japanese book. And after that, he was hooked enough that he used his hobbyist skills in computer programming to write a program that would generate a lifetime's worth of puzzles.
From there, he set out to sell Sudoku to a skeptical world.
"I had two objectives," he recounted in a telephone interview this week from New Zealand. "One was to spread the word about the puzzle.
"I thought it was astonishing that it was so popular in Japan and yet the rest of the world didn't seem to know anything about it," he said.
"The second objective was arising from the amusement of the fact that a judge could possibly sell a commercial computer program, and earn a little bit of money from doing it. You don't normally associate judges with being computer programmers."
Gould, who frequently travels to Britain, set his sights on the Times of London, but he knew it was going to be hard.
