The Training and Development Agency for Schools in the UK has started using Sudoku as a recruitment tool for math teachers.  There will be a five day “roadshow” travelling around England that features a three meter Sudoku puzzle.  People who solve the Sudoku will be given information on becoming a math teacher and their names will be entered into a drawing to occur that afternoon, with the winner getting 500 pounds.  Now, I don’t know my currency conversions really well, but I think that’s more than the grandprize for the Sudoku Smackdown.

Sudoku will be making its primetime debut tomorrow night on the CBS drama Numb3rs. (Ok, I really don’t know if it’s Sudoku’s debut, but stick with me here.) Thanks to MathTrek for getting the scoop on this. CBS, in conjunction with Texas Instruments, sponsors a program called “We All Use Math Everyday.” One of the purposes of the program is to develop educational activities based on the show Numb3rs. For this week’s episode, they have put together a set of exercises based on Sudoku and Latin squares.

Slither Link is a nikoli puzzle sometimes called “Fences.” Slither Link puzzles consist of a field of points in a square grid with numbers inside some of the individual squares. The goal is to connect the points to form a single loop with the constraint that each number must be enclosed on as many sides as indicated by the number. There’s a nice flash tutorial for the puzzle on the nikoli site.

I bring this up because I just came across a great collection of Slither Link puzzles through Passion For Puzzles. Also, if you’re looking for an interesting variation on Slither Link, check out last year’s US Puzzle Championship test. There’s a puzzle called “False Field Fences.” Numbers inside the loop tell the correct number of enclosed sides, while numbers outside the loop indicate an incorrect number of enclosed sides. Of course, before you solve the puzzle, you don’t know which are on the inside and which are on the outside.

I come across articles on Sudoku every day, but none have been as entertaining as The Seattle Times story by Meghan Barr on the Sudoku Smackdown. The article notes early that the event, which was held in conjunction with the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, while called a “smackdown” involved neither smacking or downing. We’re then treated with fun facts about Sudoku:

Consider this: The sale of pencils in England went up 700 percent in the past six months. That’s a number commonly attributed to the rise of sudoku.

Now consider this: For safety reasons, British Airways recently ordered its 13,000 cabin crew members to refrain from working on sudoku puzzles during takeoff and landing.

For the uninitiated, everything is here, including how sudoku became such a big hit.

What I find particularly interesting though is that the article makes it appear as if sudoku is for the younguns. Most of those interviewed are college students. The winner, Byron Calver, is only 20–the same age that Tyler Hinman was when he became the youngest person to ever win the crossowrd tournament. To a degree this actually makes sense to me. Crossword may actually favor older players who have accumulated more knowledge.

I’ve added a new category for puzzle related products like t-shirts, etc. I’ve also shifted my posts around in other categories as well. In so doing, I’ve realized that there are some serious gray areas. First, the “website” category: Yes, all of my posts link to websites. The website category is reserved for posts whose central theme is a specific site. Second, there is some overlap when we’re talking about puzzles and games, and I have a category for both. Of course everything in the game category is a puzzle related game. The question really is what do I classify as a game.  For most things the distinction is easy: crossword-not a game; hapland-game; planarity-????

So here’s a question, if any care to respond.  What constitutes a puzzle game and how is that different from a normal puzzle?

Through the minimalist weblog on thinkythings.org: Rubik’s Sudoku now available from the UK Amazon site. After reading the product description, I don’t think that there will be any new or interesting twists in the Rubik’s version of Sudoku. The only advantage they’re plugging is different colors for each of the different digits. There doesn’t seem to be anything else that you can’t do just as easily with pencil and paper.

I mentioned a little flash puzzle game called Hapland last week. Well, Hapland 3 has just come out. (And, in case you’re wondering, yes there is a Hapland 2)

Through download squad, I came across Simon Tatham’s Portable Puzzles, a fantastic collection of little puzzle games for your computer. There are some that everyone will be familiar with: sudoku, minesweeper, mastermind, etc; along with some nikoli games like hashiwokakero (”bridges” in English) and some types of puzzles that I’ve never seen before. He even has a puzzle called “untangle” which seems to be identical to planarity.

Best of all, these games will most likely run on your computer regardless of your operating system. The puzzles are available for Windows, Mac OS and Unix based systems.

The blog flickerbulb links to a page on the Jonathan Fong Style site that has some home decor tips that a puzzler might be interested in. The site recommends putting a word puzzle above your fire place. You’d think that only hard core puzzlers would want to decorate this way, but the site gives arguments as to why anyone might want to do it. From the site:

Visitors to your home will love finding the hidden words that can be found up, down, zigzagging and backwards above your fireplace.

On top of that, it’s not a terribly expensive project either.

21-year-old Tyler Himan won the American Crossword Tournament. And just for the record, you can’t become the youngest person to do something a second time. Will Shortz predicts this as the beginning of a 75-year run.

Tyler did it all wearing his black Trogdor T-shirt which gives him extra coolness points in my book. And since the Courant did an extremely bad job of explaining Trogdor to the uninitiated, I’m providing this link. Enjoy!

It must be because of the Starbucks Crossword Challenge.  The best discussion of the final puzzle is going on over at Doug’s blog and I’ve added my thoughts to the fray.  So, if you’re here looking for hints, check out his blog.

Through a blog called Tease Tees, I found this new “Puzzler” t-shirt. The design consists of six blocks that each contain a pictogram to be solved. They’re cute little puzzles. I’ll be honest… I haven’t figured them all out. But I only looked at them very quickly. According to the blog, there should be solutions forthcoming.

DJApe has been posting a series of sudoku solving techniques. On the blog, the post are a little bit out of the order that I would recommend, so I’ve rearranged them a little bit. Here they are, 3 steps to mastering sudoku courtesy of DJApe.

1. Classic Techniques
2. X-Wing Technique
3. Swordfish Technique

Enjoy!

I blogged a while back about the alternative reality puzzle game Perplex City. Since alternative reality games can seem daunting to the uninitiated, I’m posting a link to this Perplex City Quick Start Guide that I came across though the blog Jarkolicious. Perplex City seems to have fairly low barriers for entry. And, of course, you can always just solve the puzzles and not get tied up in the alternate reality.

The American Crossword Puzzle Tournament starts tomorrow in Stamford, Connecticut. A local newspaper has run an article on the event and the documentary Wordplay which will be screened at the event tomorrow. Wordplay is about Will Shortz, who founded the event, and will feature some of the tournament participants along with many famous cruciverbalists including Bill Clinton, Bob Dole, Jon Stewart, and Mike Mussina. The tournament is apparently growing and turning into more of a general puzzle event. Jeopardy star Ken Jennings will be on hand to run a trivia game and a “Sudoku Smackdown” is also planned. So, I wonder… will the best cruciverbalists in the country be otherwise occupied when the final Starbucks puzzle come out?