Sudoku
I too have become a shameless addict.
I've been at home from university for the last week or so due to a sudden family bereavement, and in between late-night TV (the joys! Nip/Tuck returns, as do nightly reruns of SATC across the Channel Four platforms), daydreaming, and wandering the town centre, this has been keeping me occupied.
My curiosity was aroused last week in the SU pub, having a few after handing in our essays and therefore completing my second year studies, much to the envy of our exam-burdened friends. On the notoriously sticky and littered tables there was a copy of our campus newspaper with a page devoted to the number grids that are Sudoku. My friend pointed it out but I didn't hold out much hope of ever being initiated into the craze, what with being an English student and Mathematics being the total opposite to how my brain works. I simply peeled it away from the T2 supplement it was glued to by means of our spilled nacho sauce and did the word puzzles instead, before another friend scribbled the itinery of a pub crawl overt the top of my hard work, which then came to no fruition. And so my interest temporarily died; I'd always meant to Google it up one boring moment in my now lecture-free hours, but there were boat-cruises and the discovery of a potential soul-mate (more about that in another post...) to distract me.
So, arriving home on Saturday to discover that due to the family bereavement I was staying until the middle of next week, I decided to finally Google up Sudoku, and perhaps teach myself how to play, in order to occupy what were even emptier hours. The rules surprised me, there was no need for A Level mathematical knowledge and logic, merely the abilty to fill in all the numbers in accordance with the only rule-that each little box on the grid contain the numbers one to nine. With that I was on an online quest for puzzles, finding the Telegraph, Times and Guardian back-catalogues of puzzles and printing nine to the dozen. Within ten minutes I had completed my very first puzzle, which was 100% correct. Encouragement like that is only bad news for me, this being no exception. My house is now littered with scraps of number filled paper, I'm refusing to discard the trophies of my new found talent, albeit one that only allows me to do the easiest puzzles at the moment. This week I've spent many an evening with late-night TV and my nightly grid to ponder away at. It really is bliss. And now I've done all the easy puzzles the back-catalogues of the papers can throw at me, I've gone and bought every sudoku book on the market (ok, that isn't as bad as it sounds, there's only three out at the moment. And they are reasonably priced.). I've yet to mark the fragrant pages with my pencilled scribblings; I love admiring past sudoku puzzles of mine, with their artful scrawlings and the reek of biro. Perhaps I should frame them.
It's not long into my addiciton and I'm already trafficking, distributing puzzles amongst my family slumped in front of the TV, who couldn't seem to figure them out, or took longer than me doign so. Which is also a bad sort of encouragement for me, I can now bathe in the glory of family Sudoku Genius. Seriously though, go try it, it's so easy to get hooked on, and in the words of the critics "a cerebral workout". I'm ammending my BlogRoll to accommodate the joys of Sudoku as we speak...
I've been at home from university for the last week or so due to a sudden family bereavement, and in between late-night TV (the joys! Nip/Tuck returns, as do nightly reruns of SATC across the Channel Four platforms), daydreaming, and wandering the town centre, this has been keeping me occupied.
My curiosity was aroused last week in the SU pub, having a few after handing in our essays and therefore completing my second year studies, much to the envy of our exam-burdened friends. On the notoriously sticky and littered tables there was a copy of our campus newspaper with a page devoted to the number grids that are Sudoku. My friend pointed it out but I didn't hold out much hope of ever being initiated into the craze, what with being an English student and Mathematics being the total opposite to how my brain works. I simply peeled it away from the T2 supplement it was glued to by means of our spilled nacho sauce and did the word puzzles instead, before another friend scribbled the itinery of a pub crawl overt the top of my hard work, which then came to no fruition. And so my interest temporarily died; I'd always meant to Google it up one boring moment in my now lecture-free hours, but there were boat-cruises and the discovery of a potential soul-mate (more about that in another post...) to distract me.
So, arriving home on Saturday to discover that due to the family bereavement I was staying until the middle of next week, I decided to finally Google up Sudoku, and perhaps teach myself how to play, in order to occupy what were even emptier hours. The rules surprised me, there was no need for A Level mathematical knowledge and logic, merely the abilty to fill in all the numbers in accordance with the only rule-that each little box on the grid contain the numbers one to nine. With that I was on an online quest for puzzles, finding the Telegraph, Times and Guardian back-catalogues of puzzles and printing nine to the dozen. Within ten minutes I had completed my very first puzzle, which was 100% correct. Encouragement like that is only bad news for me, this being no exception. My house is now littered with scraps of number filled paper, I'm refusing to discard the trophies of my new found talent, albeit one that only allows me to do the easiest puzzles at the moment. This week I've spent many an evening with late-night TV and my nightly grid to ponder away at. It really is bliss. And now I've done all the easy puzzles the back-catalogues of the papers can throw at me, I've gone and bought every sudoku book on the market (ok, that isn't as bad as it sounds, there's only three out at the moment. And they are reasonably priced.). I've yet to mark the fragrant pages with my pencilled scribblings; I love admiring past sudoku puzzles of mine, with their artful scrawlings and the reek of biro. Perhaps I should frame them.
It's not long into my addiciton and I'm already trafficking, distributing puzzles amongst my family slumped in front of the TV, who couldn't seem to figure them out, or took longer than me doign so. Which is also a bad sort of encouragement for me, I can now bathe in the glory of family Sudoku Genius. Seriously though, go try it, it's so easy to get hooked on, and in the words of the critics "a cerebral workout". I'm ammending my BlogRoll to accommodate the joys of Sudoku as we speak...
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