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Did you know: In 1783, the legendary Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler developed the concept of an n x n grid where every symbol appears exactly once in each row and column? These "Latin Squares" as he called them were the grandfather of modern "Sudoku" puzzles, only lacking the modern 3x3 subgrid requirement. The modern puzzle was developed in 1979 by Howard Garns, a 74 year old retired architect who called it "Number Place" for Dell Pencil Puzzles and Word Games. In 1984, Japanese puzzle company Nikoli renamed it "Sudoku", short for "Sūji wa dokushin ni kagiru" ("the digits must be single"), but it didn't become a global craze until 2004 when Wayne Gould from New Zealand developed a computer program for The Times Newspaper in London that could generate them on the fly. There are 6,670,903,752,021,072,936,960 (thats 6.67 sextillion, or 6.67e21) possible combinations of grids which result in valid Sudoku solutions, however if you remove all of the "rotated" and "mirror copies", that number reduces to 5,472,730,538 (5.47 billion) unique solutions. The number of games is therefore then ultimately determined by which numbers get removed to make the puzzle. While there are only an astronomically limited number of possible puzzle grids, the minimum number of clues required to make a Sudoku puzzle that has only one unique solution is 17. If a puzzle has only 16 clues, it is mathematically impossible for it to have a single unique answer (proven in 2012 by Gary McGuire and his team in Ireland. It took about 7 million CPU hours to prove that no 16-clue Sudoku exists with a unique solution).
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