Fergus Cassidy

Square bashing

WAYNE GOULD took a deep breath as he pushed through the front doors of The Times newspaper in London. Inside, he steadied his nerve and approached the sentry post at reception.

Getting to meet the features editor of a national newspaper without an appointment would be very hard. Perhaps even more difficult than one of the Sudoku puzzles nestling in Gould's briefcase.

The years spent practising law in New Zealand and Hong Kong might account for some of Gould's persuasive ability, but mostly it was his belief in Sudoku. That the numbers were on his side.

Reluctantly, features editor Mike Harvey met him and the two agreed a deal immediately. The Times started running the puzzle last December and it quickly swept on to the pages of many other newspapers.

The Times and The Daily Telegraph have both had Sudoku books on the bestsellers list. The Independent plans to hold a Sudoku grandmaster and The Guardian recently put a puzzle on every page of its G2 section.

Some commentators have attributed Sudoku's success to the latest round in the battle for newspaper circulation figures, a numbers game if ever there was one. But if the print media was relying solely on Sudoku as a weapon in the circulation wars, then the time has come to raise the white flag.

Sudoku is a success because readers really like it and want it. For the time being anyway.

In his 1976 book, 'The Selfish Gene', scientist Richard Dawkins described "a unit of cultural transmission" as a meme. As examples of memes he mentioned "tunes, ideas, catch-phrases and clothes fashions". Psychologist Susan Blackmore has described Sudoku as a "fantastic study in memetics. It is using our brains to propagate itself across the world like an infectious virus".

Sudoku's popularity has drawn more than a hint of schadenfreude from the online new media, which occasionally falls into the trap of assuming that the torch of rapid cultural transmission has been passed to it.

There is one aspect to Sudoku's rise which is worth filling in. Wayne Gould is believed to be on his way to earning $1m from the puzzle this year. And yet he doesn't own or control any copyrights, because there aren't any. He gave the puzzles he generated himself away for free, the magic word among newspaper accountants these days.

Gould spent six years developing a computer program which would generate an endless (and correct) supply of Sudoku grids. The success in newspapers and magazines has created a surge in demand for his software, which he sells online for $14.95 (Euro12.20). He's owns and runs sudoku.com, which comes up top of the big search engines.

Gould's company, Pappocom, is a member of the Association of Shareware Professionals, a global organisation which came into being because of the net. Shareware is 'try before you buy' software and is a relatively new way of doing business.

Gould's site offers a free trial download of his Sudoku grid generating software (Windows only - grrr). There's a 28-day expiration date and only a small number of grids can be printed out. Other than that, it gives people a chance to see what all the fuss is about before committing to buy.

Shareware, and its cousin freeware, use the net's reach and people's dread of buying a pig in a poke to leverage sales and income. It's a different business model, emerging slowly from technology's current abilities. Shareware is the direction that the music business refuses to go in.

Sudoku's success is also leading to some wrong conclusions about technology in general. Described as 'the puzzle for these times', the sentiment is that numeracy is becoming dominant over literacy. Number puzzles versus crosswords. The same outcome was expected of pocket calculators and computers were going to do away with writing skills.

The importance of numbers is not peculiar to this current 'age'. Leonhard Euler, a Swiss mathematician now considered among the greatest, invented his numerical magic squares in the 18th century.

In China, 4000 years earlier, legend has it that a huge flood broke out along the Lo river. While the inhabitants tried in vain to appease a river god, a turtle emerged from the swell and walked around the sacrifice. A child noticed the cluster of various circular markings on the turtle's shell and figured out the correct amount of sacrifice from it.

Magic squares appeared in India in the 4th century and in Baghdad about 983AD.

The interplay between numeracy and literacy can't be narrowed down to either/or binary solutions.

Those numbers just don't add up.

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PS: Free, printable Sudoku grids can be found here.