The Latin Square Puzzle
A Latin square of order n is an arrangement of n x n cells in which every row and every column holds numbers 1 to n –other symbols may be used provided they are all different.Latin squares are well known objects and the base of Sudoku. They are so named because 18th century Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler used Latin letters as symbols in his paper De Quadratis Magicis. Latin squares have a long and rich history. They are mentioned in relation to magic squares as early as the 17th century, although they seem to have been used much earlier in amulets.
We can remove symbols from a Latin square to obtain a partial square that is completable to just the original one. The challenge to complete this partial square is an instance of the Latin Square Puzzle. There are many other puzzles with additional arithmetic or geometric constraints whose solutions are also Latin squares. French newspapers featured puzzles very similar to Sudoku in the 19th century.
Sudoku first became popular in Japan, after the company Nikoli started publishing it in the eighties. It spread later to the rest of the world after The Times of London featured it in 2004. It was later discovered by Will Shortz –the crossword puzzle editor for The New York Times– that the Puzzle's author was actually American architect Howard Garns, whose puzzles first appeared in the Dell Pencil Puzzles and Word Games magazine in 1979 with the name Number Place.
In his articles Latin Polytopes (2014) and Latin Puzzles (2016), Palomo formalized some ideas on board shape, and proposed a generalization for both Latin squares and the Latin square Puzzle. These articles contained new puzzles with tetrahedral, cubic, octahedral, dodecahedral and icosahedral boards among others, that were later presented in lectures about Latin polytopes and the evolution of Sudoku.
We can remove symbols from a Latin square to obtain a partial square that is completable to just the original one. The challenge to complete this partial square is an instance of the Latin Square Puzzle. There are many other puzzles with additional arithmetic or geometric constraints whose solutions are also Latin squares. French newspapers featured puzzles very similar to Sudoku in the 19th century.
The Sudoku Puzzle
Sudoku is played on a square board holding 81 cells and 27 regions (9 rows, 9 columns and 9 3x3 subsquares) with 9 cells each. A set of 9 different symbols (usually numbers 1 to 9) must be placed on every region. A completed Sudoku is clearly a Latin square.Sudoku first became popular in Japan, after the company Nikoli started publishing it in the eighties. It spread later to the rest of the world after The Times of London featured it in 2004. It was later discovered by Will Shortz –the crossword puzzle editor for The New York Times– that the Puzzle's author was actually American architect Howard Garns, whose puzzles first appeared in the Dell Pencil Puzzles and Word Games magazine in 1979 with the name Number Place.
Latin Puzzles: puzzles with symbols that do not repeat
After creating puzzles Moshaiku (2010) and Konseku (2011) Spanish engineer and songwriter Miguel G. Palomo investigated the possibility of using triangular and hexagonal boards for puzzles similar to Sudoku. This first such puzzles were Canario (2012) –inspired by the Pintaderas found in the Spanish Canary Islands–, Monthai (2013) –inspired by the namesake Thai pillow– and Douze France (2013). The puzzles had split regions, a characteristic shared by Tartan (2013) on a square board. Helios (2013) on the other hand had a star-shaped board. The main characteristic shared by these puzzles was that their solutions were not Latin squares.In his articles Latin Polytopes (2014) and Latin Puzzles (2016), Palomo formalized some ideas on board shape, and proposed a generalization for both Latin squares and the Latin square Puzzle. These articles contained new puzzles with tetrahedral, cubic, octahedral, dodecahedral and icosahedral boards among others, that were later presented in lectures about Latin polytopes and the evolution of Sudoku.
Frequency Puzzles: puzzles with repeated symbols
Frequency squares generalize Latin squares in the sense that numbers may repeat in each row and column. Inspired by them, later experiments in 2014 produced puzzles with symbols repeated, like Sudoku Ripeto (played with numbers) and Custom Sudoku (with letters that may form words in the board). They marked yet another departure from Sudoku.Las Matemáticas del Sudoku Ripeto, Semana de la Ciencia y la Innovación 2021
Sudoku Ripeto: A variant of Sudoku with repeated symbols, ICGA Journal, vol. 43, no. 1, pp. 26-49, 2021
The Sudoku Ripeto Family, 13th Gathering for Gardner Conference, Atlanta, 2018
Sudoku Ripeto and Custom Sudoku, MOVES Conference, New York, 2017
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