Crosswords that Count

The Los Angeles Times last week introduced a fiendishly addictive puzzle that in recent months has been stumping players from Taiwan to Tbilisi. Sudoku, which loosely translates to "single number" in Japanese, is a deceptively simple game of logic that consists of a nine-by-nine-square grid, broken into three-by-three-square cells. The object: fill each square with a number from 1 to 9 so that every number appears only once in each row, column and cell. Long popular in Japan, sudoku is based on 18th century mathematician Leonhard Euler's Latin Square, and first appeared in U.S. puzzle books in the 1970s under the scintillating title Number Puzzle. The Western craze didn't take off until last fall when an enterprising New Zealander used the Japanese name to pitch his puzzle-generating program to the London Times. Sudoku has since been picked up by nearly 60 newspapers, including the New York Post and several others in the U.S., all willing to inflict sudoku elbow on new generations of fans.