Making the numbers count

By Du Qiongfang Source:Global Times Published: 2012-8-9 17:55:03

A competitor erases a bad guess during the 6th World Sudoku Championship held last year in Eger, Hungary. Photo: CFP
A competitor erases a bad guess during the 6th World Sudoku Championship held last year in Eger, Hungary. Photo: CFP

Sudoku is a simple puzzle involving numbers. Sudoku enthusiasts grab a puzzle grid and have to fill in the missing numbers in boxes so that each of the nine boxes has the digits one to nine. The puzzles are graded from very easy to very difficult. For most people they are just a daily indulgence, a pastime. But for some Sudoku has become a career. The ongoing Chinese Sudoku Championship saw 135 Shanghai competitors, aged from 9 to 74, battling for honors.

The organizer of this year's competition is Chen Cen from the Beijing Media Network. The 27-year-old has been fascinated by numbers, mathematics and logic all her life.

She first learned about Sudoku through Playstation games. "The game was well designed and was beautifully illustrated and I could follow the instructions easily. Then as well as finding the game online, a few newspapers started to publish the game, like the Legal Mirror and the Beijing Evening News back in 2005. But young people don't usually read newspapers so I didn't get to learn about the game through newspapers."

Young players

"In the earlier Sudoku competitions in China, most of the outstanding participants were university students and people in their 30s. But in recent years there is a trend with more junior or senior high school students or even primary school students becoming good players," Chen Cen said. "Last year at the Chinese Sudoku Championship, we had two university students and two junior high school students make it to the finals. And this year, the top three in the preliminaries are all Grade 8 students. They have completely overwhelmed their adult competitors. They are so much faster than the adults. 

Chen Nuo, from the Huayu Middle School in Shanghai, was one of the top three contestants in this year's Chinese Sudoku Championship' preliminaries. He learned about the game from the newspaper his mother reads.

Chen Nuo's mother, Lu Weiqin, 46, works at a bank and started to play the game four years ago and then introduced her son to the game.

"When my son saw that I was working on the puzzles, he became interested. What's interesting is that I have never advanced much since then, but my son has become really enthusiastic and has been progressing. Nowadays I am far behind him. Playing this game is much better for him than playing video games," Lu said.

This mother has always been good with figures. She and her colleagues at the bank play newspaper Sudoku on their breaks - "It helps us calculate quickly."

Ying Changfeng is a professional Sudoku player. The 48-year-old Shanghai man works at the Four Seasons Education training school and trains people in how to do Sudoku as well as creating puzzles himself. He got to know the game from a book five years ago. "I was totally absorbed when I first saw the game. Few people knew about it at that time."

As early as in the late 19th century, number puzzles appeared in newspapers when French puzzle setters began experimenting with removing numbers from magic squares. The puzzle was popularized in 1986 by a Japanese company under the name Sudoku, meaning single number. But only in recent years has the game become so popular in China, according to Ying.

Chen Cen is one of the few who have made a career of this simple puzzle. In 2010 she got to the seventh place in the World Sudoku Championship (WSC) organized by the World Puzzle Federation (WPF) - the highest rank ever achieved by a Chinese competitor.

Left her job

Chen Cen originally worked for a foreign trade company. When she discovered the joys of Sudoku she began attending competitions organized by the Beijing Evening News before going to the WSC. The domestic competitions involved up to hundreds of participants and she often traveled to them on weekends, practicing with thousands of puzzles by herself after work every day. Because she was working she missed the chance to attend a WSC in India in 2008 although she had been named in the national team. Soon afterwards she resigned from her job and went to an international contest in Slovakia in 2009.

"I was kind of tired of my job and wanted to go out of the country to see the contests outside China while I was still young and energetic. And I wanted to learn how Sudoku was developing overseas," Chen Cen said.

"I didn't do well in that competition because that was the first time I had played in an international competition. The time difference and language barrier affected my performance. I thought I didn't show my potential then. But after the experience in international competitions and talking to foreign competitors, I thought I could improve. After I returned from that competition, I spent one year training myself at home. I was lucky that my family didn't push me to earn money," Chen Cen said.

She was then one of the very first Chinese competitors in international Sudoku contests. There were no courses or schools offering training in Sudoku, and there weren't even foreign books or guides available. So she did it herself. She worked on small foreign online competitions and looked everywhere for new puzzles to solve.

"In the meantime more people became involved in the game and they started to ask me for help and training. I published a book of Sudoku puzzles and then the Beijing Media Network started this project and I joined to begin my professional career as a Sudoku promoter in China. I am now responsible for the domestic competitions and training and publishing," Chen Cen said.

Lu Weiqin sees Westerners and Japanese doing Sudoku on aircraft flights. "It's a very good way to kill time and relax during travel."

The international gap

The Beijing International Sudoku Tournament in May this year attracted 52 competitors from 14 countries and regions. The winner this year was a Japanese man. The leading Chinese competitor ranked 17th at this contest.

"In Western countries, there are groups of independent editors, who design the puzzles and compile them into books and supply these to publishing houses or newspapers. But it is rare that Sudoku puzzles are published in a book in China," said Chen Cen.

According to Chen, one of the main reasons preventing this is that there are many restrictions on publishing in China. "It is comparatively easy for companies to get books published abroad. In some overseas countries and regions, companies and people can write, produce and publish books by themselves as long as they acquire an International Standard Book Number. But on the Chinese mainland, only registered publishers can publish books. So the royalties for companies or compilers, as they have to work with publishers, are low. This is why there are very few professional companies publishing Sudoku books here."

In China, the Beijing Media Network is authorized by the WPF and handles Sudoku promotional work and arranges competitions throughout the country.  "In China, most of the Sudoku promotional work involves coaching students which schools and parents welcome and approve of because the game helps the students' intellectual development," Chen said.

Ying Changfeng's company is one of the very first Sudoku coaching schools in Shanghai. "From this semester, several high schools in Shanghai have invited us to give lectures on Sudoku to their students, including the Huayu Middle School and the Shanghai Foreign Language School Affiliated to the Shanghai International Studies University. Both the schools and students' parents think this is beneficial."

Chen Cen said more Chinese were learning about the game because it was appearing in so many platforms like newspapers, magazines, mobile phone apps, Playstation and the Internet. "But most people just want to play it for fun, not for professional competitions. They play it to kill time on the metro. The schools and coaches are more professional in their approach to the game and hold contests to choose the best players."

Chen Nuo, the student from Huayu Middle School, said he had taken part in many competitions for primary and high school students. "I have done well in the past but these days I am competing with adults. I do not have great expectations. If I fail, it means I am still not very good at it yet. If I succeed, I will be very happy. I think doing the game helps improve my mathematics."

Chen Nuo said that his school prizes Sudoku. "The school holds two major competitions every year and every week we get two puzzles to work on. The puzzles are getting progressively more difficult. Some of the teachers help coach us."

Yuan Jiayi is another student from Huayu Middle School who got into the semifinal of this year's Chinese championship.

"The difficulty levels for the puzzles change in each round of this competition. It usually takes about five minutes for me to finish a medium-level puzzle. We younger students can solve the easy puzzles faster than the adults because we think more quickly, but we cannot solve the difficult puzzles faster than the adults because these need disciplined thinking. I practice Sudoku for one or two hours every day during the summer vacations," said the student.

Hard to complete

Chen Cen said that in fact, most contestants in the international Sudoku competitions could not finish all the puzzles they were given.

"There are only 30 minutes to solve five or six puzzles. If you can finish all of them before the deadline, you get extra points. But most only finish three or four in the given period," Chen explained.

Both the semifinals and final of this year's Chinese Sudoku Championship will be held on August 11 in Beijing. The top 10 participants from the competition will form the national team and five of them will take part in next year's WSC in Croatia.

Student Chen Nuo feels that he would be satisfied if he could just play to his usual high standard in the competition.

But Yuan Jiayi is hoping to outperform the adult competitors in the game. Gu, Yuan's mother, said: "He became more and more interested in the game after he performed well in the competitions."



Posted in: Metro Shanghai

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