Sudoku

I haven't written many posts lately; though this doesn't mean that the ideas aren't slowly stacking up just that as the days approach their longest I can't bear to be stuck indoors. However, one of the many pieces of paper on what passes for my desk has a list of connected titles that I will get around to writing up before too long.

As a preamble to these here's a little confessional. I've acquired a mild Sudoku habit. Every day, after my morning tea, a cup of coffee and a quick glance at the rest of the paper (the Guardian for those who find guessing difficult) I do the Sudoku. It doesn't take very long, usually about 10 to 15 minutes and I'm more inclined to make mistakes with the easy or moderate ones than with hard ones. I suspect that this is because they don't involve quite as much cross checking.

When the game first became popular I refused to get involved in actually doing the puzzles. Instead I tried to go straight to Meta-Sudoku and think about things like the number of possible solutions and the different strategies that might be employed to solve them. I was particularly disdainful of Carol Vorderman's reported approach which was to pencil in into each square all the numbers that it could possibly be and then as these were eliminated rub them out to be left with the final solution. A fine approach for a machine to adopt, but a bit clumsy for a real alive analogue person.

The one problem that still eluded me, however, was coming up with an answer to the simply stated problem of how many possible distinct 9 x 9 puzzles can.there be. One approach to this was to think about simpler versions. Even our dog could solve the one by one puzzle since it's just a single square with the number 1 in it. On a flight from London to Tangier I figured out how many possible solutions there were to the 4 x 4 version (which just uses the numbers 1 to 4), though I have to admit I've forgotten the answer and can't be bothered to recreate the reasoning. Several times I've thought that I've figured an approach to the 9 x 9 version that would help but I've always run up against intractable problems. As for the hexadecimal version (with a 16 by 16 square and the symbols A, B, C, D, E, F and G in addition to the numerals 1 to 9) I'll leave that until I've sorted the 9 x 9.

Meanwhile, I started doing the actual puzzles and am now hooked. However, what this pursuit has in common with most of the other things that I do is that, whilst there is an element of personal challenge, it isn't something that I do in competition with anyone else. I might, for example, be thought to be the sort of person that would play chess but I don't. Not long after starting a game my attention wanders and I do something silly. I'm just not happy being in direct competition with someone else. Whether it's because I've no desire to win or am so afraid of losing that I avoid it by not really taking part, I just don't know and can't work out how to decide.

Whether this absence of a competitive streak, or reluctance to get drawn into competition, means that I've done less with my life than might have been the case then I can only say that yes it might. However, having declared this personal foible, I can't help but think that the metaphor of life as a competition has gone to far and that as long as our political class is dominated by the competitive, which for structural reasons is likely to be the case, then we're unlikely to come up with sensible solutions to the problem of maintaining civilized lives on a planet with finite resources.

To be continued....