Why do sudoku?

I've been a longtime afficionado of crossword puzzles. When I was younger I used to do the Sunday times with my mother, looking over her shoulder as she sat in her favorite chair in the living room. There was a wonderful sense of camaraderie as we worked together, complementing each other's knowledge so that we could usually complete a puzzle that neither of us could do alone. But for years I resisted the sudoku craze. There must have been multiple reasons: resisting the herd, preference for verbal not numeric puzzles for example. But for some unclear reason I recently tackled some easy ones in the local newspaper, and got hooked. From there it was an easy step to addicted. My stepson even bought me Sudoku for Dummies last Christmas. I've made my way through the sections from Easy to Tricky to Tough, but am currently stumped by Diabolical.

Sudoku is not really about math at all, it's pure logic - arbitrary symbols would work equally well though they would be much harder to track mentally. The harder puzzles involve longer chains of reasoning, or managing more alternatives in your head at once. But ultimately the satisfaction is probably the same as for other types of puzzles - the feeling of closure. In life, and certainly in the professional life of a research scientist, real closure comes infrequently and rarely with a definitive moment of "Aha!" Sudoku is to science as Woody Allen once said art is about life, we can make things come out better in one than they usually do in the other.

The photo has nothing to do with Sudoku, it's a selection of some of my exotic instruments from eastern and southern europe: turkish saz, oud, macedonian tambura, bulgarian tambura and dumbek. If I can figure out how to upload music I will hopefully add some samplers.