Surviving Sudoku

August 2, 2006 6:53 AM

Surviving Sudoku. Matt Gaffney, a crossword puzzle designer, examines the crossword community's ambivalent relationship with the phenomenally successful number puzzle. Meanwhile, it's high time to resurrect Done in Pen: The Poems of New York Times Puzzle Editor Will Shortz.
posted by staggernation (38 comments total)

Sudoku puzzles lack the creativity of a well done crossword puzzle. Sure, they can be made fiendishly difficult, but you do not get the creative wordplay that you do with a good crossword puzzle.
posted by caddis at 7:16 AM on August 2, 2006

I love a good crossword puzzle where I'm tempted to cheat but don't give in. Sodoku, I just don't get, because I'll get halfway though an easy one and realize I screwed up badly somewhere half an hour before. In a crossword, it's easy to know you've goofed without continuing to accumulate screwups.
posted by pax digita at 7:25 AM on August 2, 2006

Apples and oranges. I think they appeal to different types of people for different reasons. Me, I like sudoku for the simple reason that it is the only thing I can do on a break where the work portion of my brain shuts down completely.
posted by Razzle Bathbone at 7:28 AM on August 2, 2006

I don't enjoy doing crossword puzzles and not for lack of trying them. I don't like Scrabble either. I must not have that kind of brain. I absolutely love Sudoku though and have since the very first game I tried. I think that they are very different kinds of puzzles that happen to both be represented by a grid in newspapers.
posted by n9 at 7:33 AM on August 2, 2006

By and large, people who are shifting wholesale from crossword puzzles to Sudoku were never strong fans of crosswords anyway, just fans of killing time with a puzzle. Obviously, that audience is the great majority of the crossword audience, but they probably do not receive much pleasure from the challenge of crosswords, meaning that they're probably not doing top-tier crosswords. Put another way, I doubt a lot of NYT crossword devotees have "left" for Sudoku, especially relative to the proportion of United Feature Syndicate solvers. (Gaffney will be happy to know that our local alt weekly runs no Sudoku but just started running Jonesin', which he co-writes.)

Meanwhile, the true epitome of the crossword form, cryptic crosswords, continues to languish and were dealt a terrible blow when the Atlantic discontinued publication of Emily Cox and Henry Rathvon's Puzzler, the world's best cryptic. The puzzle is still available on their website (albeit only to subscribers), but of Cox and Rathvon can't keep a print berth in the Atlantic, where they have ruled the roost for decades, then apparently cryptics peaked while we aficionados and constructors were trying to push them up the hill.
posted by blueshammer at 7:37 AM on August 2, 2006

Sudoku takes no special knowledge other than how to count from zero to nine and teaches you to repetitively apply a finite number of techniques to a grid.
posted by clearlynuts at 7:40 AM on August 2, 2006

If you happen to have a Nintendo DS the Sudoku puzzles in Brain Age are very well designed and the interface is tops. You can play in a mode that notifies you of an incorrect entry with a limit of 5 errors and a time penalty for each one.

Frankly I'm really looking forward to a whole slew of new puzzle types as described in the article. I hope that there are more products for the DS, too. It is a perfect form factor for the subway, the line at the grocery store, etc. Sorry to sound like an advertisement.
posted by n9 at 7:40 AM on August 2, 2006

Actually, you don't need to know how to count, just recognize 1..9 as different symbols.
posted by signal at 7:42 AM on August 2, 2006

You're right, signal. ESPN the magazine does sudoku that uses the nine positions on a babeball team.

You can tell how long sudoku lasted in my rotation. It is one to nine, not zero to nine.
posted by clearlynuts at 7:44 AM on August 2, 2006

hey THANKS for the pointers to the Cryptic Crossword. I *really* like these and had never understood what was going on before.
posted by n9 at 7:45 AM on August 2, 2006

Forgot about these additional Will Shortz poems by Kevin Guilfoile.

The last one is particularly clever.
posted by staggernation at 7:52 AM on August 2, 2006

mmm... babeball
posted by found missing at 7:55 AM on August 2, 2006

Is it wrong of me to enjoy both crosswords and sudoku? I'm better at the latter, though.

And like other people have said, they tickle different parts of my brain.
posted by slimepuppy at 8:08 AM on August 2, 2006

One odd advantage that Sudoku has in my household is that the puzzles are much more impersonal. I always feel a little bit bad about giving up on finishing a crossword puzzle, each of which has an identity and a personality. But I can abandon a Sudoku puzzle without any qualms.
posted by Slothrup at 8:24 AM on August 2, 2006

I think sudoku appeals to those of us that slightly OCD for precisely the reasons clearlynuts identifies: it's the repetitive application of a finite number of strategies to a bounded puzzle. I find it more relaxing than crossword puzzles, which just end up infuriating me.
posted by monju_bosatsu at 8:25 AM on August 2, 2006

This is kind of like in high school when the AV geeks started bad-mouthing the chess club geeks. Why do crossword puzzle designers have such low self-esteem that they feel threatened by sodoku?

News flash for crossword designers: you were never that popular to begin with.
posted by GuyZero at 8:26 AM on August 2, 2006 [1 favorite]

Some crossword puzzles get on my nerves for their smarmy smugness. Clues like 21 across -- They ride in these. Screw you.
posted by boo_radley at 8:46 AM on August 2, 2006

Give me crosswords, even better give me british crosswords or a Merle Regal puzzle. Sodokus I know I can solve if I spend enough time on it and, for me, that takes away from it.
posted by doctor_negative at 9:08 AM on August 2, 2006

I've just started getting into crosswords, but Soduku has never, ever appealed. So you know, cheer up crossword designers. I can't be the only one.
posted by dame at 9:46 AM on August 2, 2006

I like scrabble and I like words in general - both arcane words and commonplace words, I like sudoku puzzles, but I hate crossword puzzles. Particularly I hate the clues in crossword puzzles, not only because of the smarminess that boo_radley observes but because there's a body of arbitrary rules for interpreting clues that I have no interest in learning.

BTW, does anyone else remember sudoku once being called magic square puzzles?
posted by XMLicious at 9:52 AM on August 2, 2006

You know, you really shouldn't have to spend more than 20 minutes on a sudoku puzzle...
posted by clevershark at 9:58 AM on August 2, 2006

XMLicious, with magic square puzzles you actually have to make the numbers add up to a particular sum. With sudoku, all that matters is the distribution of the numbers to rows, columns, and squares. Which is why, as people mentioned above, there's no math involved—it could be played with a random set of symbols.
posted by staggernation at 9:58 AM on August 2, 2006

GAMES magazine has been running Sudoku puzzles for years, although not titled "Sudoku", and Dell puzzle magazines have had these puzzles for at least twenty years, under the title "Number Place".

I might do the sudokus in an issue of GAMES after finishing the three-star crossword puzzles and the double-crostic. Or I might not. They're just not all that interesting, and even the "difficult" puzzles aren't very hard once you've figured out the tricks.

(Oh, while I'm here: very classy, GuyZero.)

Where Sudoku gets difficult and interesting (to me) is when the puzzles don't use 3x3 subareas, but rather use other shapes made up of nine squares. Or toroidal sudoku, where the subareas wrap around the puzzle. As has been said before, every good crossword has a personality, but 9x9 sudokus with nine 3x3 subareas are all pretty much the same. They're boring.

And cryptic crosswords do nothing for me. If I work at it, I can solve them, but I get no satisfaction from it.
posted by solid-one-love at 10:04 AM on August 2, 2006

So, we're up to comment 24 on a thread about crosswords...

...and no one has mentioned the best, most talented and maddeningly fiendish crossword compiler the world has ever known?

I suggest everyone who loves crossword puzzles buys a copy of Monkey Puzzles by Auracaria. Of course, I can't guarantee said book won't send you absolutely insane in trying to figure them all out, but that's half the point of cryptic crosswords anyway.

One caveat, all the spellings are English and as far as I remember the reference dictionary is Collins, not Merriam Webster or OED.
posted by davehat at 10:43 AM on August 2, 2006

(Oh, while I'm here: very classy, GuyZero.)

Thanks, I'm here all week - try the veal!

Seriously, I have actually become a sodoku addict as of late, although I always play it on a pocket PC because I find it easier than paper (and it flags the occasional error for me).

But snarks aside, I'm of two minds on this one: one, that there's no tension and that the tension and "backlash" has been concocted by some journalist to try to make a little bit of professional jealousy into a big deal. To me, that's probably it.

But I suppose that it could be number two, where the resentment is real. In which case my point stands: what exactly were these people thinking when they became professional crossword writers? That they'd be rich? Famous? Adored by the masses? And now they're jealous of the sodoku guy who does it all with a computer? Sheesh. If they're so bitter about other peoples' success, maybe they should find a new line of work. Apparently the old joke about academic politics applies to crossword writers as well: "The competition is so fierce because the stakes are so low."
posted by GuyZero at 10:45 AM on August 2, 2006

Crosswords take so much more work than sudoku. Shit, if it wasn't for crosswords, I wouldn't have to remember who the Cowardly Lion was played by.
posted by graventy at 11:00 AM on August 2, 2006

Until recently I had always been a cryptic crossword guy and never enjoyed American crosswords all too much, but in the last year or so I've come to better appreciate the art of a good crossword and have swapped teams.

The NY Sun puzzles are better than the NY Times ones. (Although last Thursday's NYT puzzle, with the black/white switcheroo, was excellent.)

Sudoku will always be at the bottom of the barrel. It's a glorified word search.
posted by painquale at 11:00 AM on August 2, 2006

I hadn't been in a book store for a month, but needed a new Crostic (AKA Acrostic) puzzle book-- in puzzles, as in life, I am always looking for the story-- and not one new crostic book to be found but an explosion of Sudoku... er.. stuff that wasn't there 3 weeks ago. Sudoku has expanded beyond its own section and has invaded the board games and gifts. I saw one sudoku game set being marketed for 5 year old. Everyone has rushed in to cash in on the latest craze, but I doubt the fever will last.
posted by Secret Life of Gravy at 11:55 AM on August 2, 2006

what exactly were these people thinking when they became professional crossword writers?

If you see the movie Wordplay, you'll get a number of answers to that question.

I am convinced that there are only like 10 of them that just keep getting reprinted over and over.

There was a previous MeFi post about this, and there's something like 5.5 billion distinctly different puzzles.
posted by solid-one-love at 11:58 AM on August 2, 2006

Ara Parseghian, Ernie Els, Teri Garr, if only I had a 3 or 4 letter name! I could have been famous in the xwords.
posted by Cranberry at 12:53 PM on August 2, 2006

Is it inevitable that this turns into another Israel-Palestine or PC-Mac style argument? I enjoy the occasional crossword, and especially British style, but I feel no allegiance to that form or to sudoku, which I also enjoy, as the "right" kind of puzzle. But now I have to play the "sudoko partisan" because I'm seeing a lot of crossword folks grasping at ways to dismiss sudoku as an inferior crossword-wannabe, which is absurd.

Just as one example, "teaches you to repetitively apply a finite number of techniques to a grid," while perhaps meant only as a troll, is a silly, pointless characterization. On the contrary I've learned a great deal about how I use logic and the strategic choices I make from playing Sudoku, specifically because of the "character-less" blank-slate nature of the game. To turn this around I could say that crosswords just teach you how much you think, or can think, like the puzzle-writer.

Also, although the techniques are certainly finite in theory, when stuck on a particularly fiendish one I have repeatedly come up with a new (to me) way of working something out - and there's an exhilaration to that that is completely absent in crosswords.

Of course, as has been said, it's silly to compare the two as they have very little in common except for components that cross each other in a grid.

Also: Macs rule!
posted by soyjoy at 12:56 PM on August 2, 2006

I hate Sudoku. Where did it come from? A few years ago I'd never heard of it, now there's like a metafilter post every month or so. It seems like the most boring game imagineable.
posted by delmoi at 2:29 PM on August 2, 2006

It's like comparing painting to printing. A computer can creat variations on all 1.whatever billion sudoku. A person has to build a crossword each one is a unique piece of art.

If a computer can make them, and a computer can solve them, whey should I get involved, just let the two fo them go at it
posted by Megafly at 2:58 PM on August 2, 2006

XMLicious writes "I hate crossword puzzles. Particularly I hate the clues in crossword puzzles, not only because of the smarminess that boo_radley observes but because there's a body of arbitrary rules for interpreting clues that I have no interest in learning."

Ditto. I don't mind learning system, I enjoy it, but I hate arbitrary systems.


monju_bosatsu writes "I find [Sudoku] more relaxing than crossword puzzles, which just end up infuriating me."

Try taking up SQL; it's relaxing in a way quite similar to Sudoku. Not so much table design, that's real work, but constructing queries and doing optimizations. You can really get into a good groove. (Some parts of assembly language coding are also relaxing in this way, in particular coming up with the right ARM conditionals.)
posted by orthogonality at 5:30 PM on August 2, 2006

And somehow nobody has mentioned that Sudoku is, in fact, and American in vention, and in Japan is known by the English name "Number Place."

I love both Sudoku and crosswords. I do a sudoku in the morning to wake up my brain, and then a crossword on the subway at night. I buy the Daily News (tagline: Not As Bad As The Post) because it has two crosswords for if the train gets stuck, and while it's not as difficult or as renowned as the Times, it allows me the pastime of doing them in my head and then filling them out from memory when I get home.

I understand crossword architects being pissed at sudoku, though, as it's stealing their thunder. Also, I understand people buying the sudoku books instead, which will generally be used on commutes, and require no obscure external body of knowledge in order to solve them. It sucks to be on a plane just trying to pass the time and getting stuck two-thirds of the way through a puzzle just because you don't know the name of a violin manufacturer, or small towns in Oklahoma (Enid and Ada tend to be popluar.)

All the same though, I could do the same sudoku twice in a rwo and maybe not notice.
posted by Navelgazer at 5:49 PM on August 2, 2006

I work with words for a living, and I find Sudoku to be a refreshing break in routine. I exercise my logic circuits, and force new synapses to spring into place, replacing some that had fallen into serious disuse through the years.

Crossword puzzles and Scrabble work one section of the brain, while Sudoku works an entirely different one (no conclusive proof here, other than the feeling of strain seems to move from one side to the other depending on which puzzle I'm attempting). Mental exercise, trying new things, can help combat the deterioration that comes with aging, disuse and, perhaps, Alzheimer's.

Yes, I have one of Will Shortz' Sudoku books. I also have Michael Rios' MENSA Sudoku -- purchased on a whim to see whether I could tough my way through it. So far, so good.

I get paid for working with words. I do numbers for the joy of it.

And I read MetaFilter for the company and sparkling conversation. Go figure.
posted by Seabird at 9:18 PM on August 2, 2006

While most sudoku puzzles are probably lacking a soul (guess where I fall on this one), let's not forget that crosswords--even 'decent' crosswords--can be generated by a computer program
(was this already covered here?)
posted by lester the unlikely at 9:59 PM on August 2, 2006

We sort of addressed this before. The New York Magazine interview with Shortz had the best take on Soduku: Shortz argues that Sudoku has a secret psychological hook. While solving them, you tend to get bogged down midway—then suddenly break through, fill in the last bunch of empty boxes in a row, bang bang bang. “It gives you a satisfying feeling to be rushing at those squares,” Shortz says. “And immediately you want to do another one. That’s the key to why they are so addictive.”
posted by caddis at 10:28 PM on August 2, 2006