“Sudoku is like a crossword puzzle for people who can only count to nine.”
I can’t remember which of my friends said this, but it’s a line too good to not steal. Apparently my friend isn’t the only crossword puzzle fan irked by the Sudoku fad :
There are two reasons why Sudoku drives so many crossword experts to drink. First, the artistic reason: Some puzzle writers view Sudoku as too boring, a mindless game you can practically brute-force a solution out of any time you want, like a word search. This criticism isn’t entirely fair, though, since Sudoku, like crosswords, can be calibrated to very high levels of solving difficulty, and there is a certain mathematical elegance in the deep logic required to unravel key areas of a well-made, tough Sudoku.The deeper reason for the backlash is sheer resentment: Many of us have spent serious chunks of our lives honing the craft of crossword-puzzle writing, and along comes this computer-generated fad that’s winning the hearts and minds of the masses. If everyone loves Sudoku so much, who needs us anymore? With one click of his mouse, Gould — who provides his puzzles free to 400 papers around the world as a marketing plan to sell his Sudoku-generating program — quite possibly entertains more people than all the crossword writers in the United States combined. And because Sudoku isn’t language-specific, Gould’s reach is international to a much greater degree than ours is. Hence, the hurt feelings — and the hostility. Pity the successful; they pay for it somehow.
Then again, I haven’t seen any one-size-fits-all strategies for beating crossword puzzles. Kinda reminds me of those people who used to memorize patterns and play Pac-Man for hours at a time on one quarter. Now that you’ve figured out how simple the game is, how can it still be any fun?
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Sudoku and crosswords work on fundamentally different levels. I don’t understand why they’re considered to be in competition with each other.
Sudoku is a logic puzzle. The criticism that it can be brute forced applies to a huge variety of puzzles in pure logic. Sudoku puzzles become interesting when the player has to apply multiple observations to uncover a single cell.
Crosswords are essentially vocabulary trivia. Their interest level is usually a function of how well written the clues are — the pinnacle of cleverness being Cryptic Crosswords — combined with the sense that the answers are knowable (for instance, I’d rather do a TV Guide crossword than a NASCAR-themed one, because I don’t know anything about car racing).
It seems to me that the two puzzles will be attractive to different people, or to the same person for different reasons. Someone who loves puzzles can enjoy doing both of them. Why aren’t the crossword puzzle makers all pissed off that newspapers run Jumble or cryptograms?
The problem I have with both Sudoku and crosswords is that when you’re done, all you have is a grid full of numbers or letters. The final solution generally doesn’t have any extra payoff, and so both of them tend to get boring after you reach a certain point. I find Paint By Numbers logic puzzles much more enjoyable than Sudoku, and Acrostics more enjoyable than crosswords, because both of them give you a little prize at the end (a picture for the former, a quotation for the latter).
Comment by Cris — August 9, 2006 @ 8:04 am
The “one-size-fits-all” that you linked to does not, in fact, fit all. It works for easy-level sudokus; the more difficult ones require a more sophisticated bag of tricks and can actually give you a little twinge of satisfaction when you crack them. That being said, at least you can occasionally learn a little something from crosswords (like, the sash around a kimono is called an “obi”).
I can usually kill most of my daily commute by doing the crossword, the sudoko, and God help me, the Jumble.
Comment by Andy — August 9, 2006 @ 8:26 am
That ‘one-size-fits-all’ strategy actually doesn’t work for any but the most basic Sudoku puzzles.
Comment by Misplaced Patriot — August 9, 2006 @ 8:27 am
My 7-year-old loves Sudoku, but still struggles with anything beyond 2 syllables when playing Scrabble, and couldn’t begin to work our local newspaper’s crossword puzzle; he lacks exposure to the thousands of bits of ephemera that can be referenced in just a week of NYT puzzles. One requires a basic level of logic, the other logic, linguistics and cultural awareness/education; they can’t really be compared.
(It also happens that Sudoku gives me a headache, while crossword puzzles give me satisfaction.)
Comment by slim — August 9, 2006 @ 10:46 am
Heh. My friend and I have had this discussion before. She’s a crossword fan, I enjoy Sudoku and other type of logic puzzles. What I find appealing about Sudoku (and kakuro, hashi (Bridges), hanjie (pixel puzzles), etc) is that all the information you need for a solution is contained within the puzzle. For crosswords, as Chris alluded to, if you simply don’t know a particular piece of triva that’s the answer to one of the clues you have no way of completing the puzzle without going to an outside source (google, crossword dictionary , whatever). Of course, my friend would jump in and say that’s part of the beauty of crosswords for her - the opportunity to expand her horizons. :-)
Personally I actually enjoy creating crossword puzzles more than playing them.
Comment by FooBar — August 9, 2006 @ 10:58 am
The Onion sums it up best:
Commuter Playing Some Sort Of Alphabet Sudoku
I have loved logic puzzles for years. Sudoku is the NASCAR of logic puzzles.
Comment by Joshua — August 9, 2006 @ 12:00 pm
That all-purpose solution is ridiculous. In the time it would take you to fill and erase all of those numbers, you could have a good chunk of the puzzle solved.
Comment by Tom — August 15, 2006 @ 10:53 am