Archive for the 'games' Category

An early crop of Sudoku

Friday, March 24th, 2006

The invention of the puzzle we now call Sudoku is generally credited to Howard Garns, an architect from Indianapolis. His first puzzles, which were known then as Number Place, were published in 1979. But now a curious precedent has turned up. More than 20 years earlier, in the 1950s, W. U. Behrens of Hannover, Germany, […]

First Bites

Friday, January 27th, 2006

In the game of Chomp, the player who moves first always has a guaranteed winning strategy. This fact might seem to take all the suspense out of the game, but it doesn’t. Except in the smallest and simplest games, no one knows which first move will lead to the guaranteed victory. For me, this situation […]