The Godfather of Sudoku 47
circletimessquare writes "The New York Times profiles 55 year old Maki Kaji who runs Nikoli, in its article Inside Japan's Puzzle Palace. Nikoli is a puzzle publisher that prides itself on 'a kind of democratization of puzzle invention. The company itself does not actually create many new puzzles — an American invented an earlier version of sudoku, for example. Instead, Nikoli provides a forum for testing and perfecting them.' Also notable is how Mr. Kaji describes how he did not get the trademark for Sudoku in the United States before it was too late. But reminiscent of a theme many Slashdotters will find familiar about intellectual property: 'In hindsight, though, he now thinks that oversight was a brilliant mistake. The fact that no one controlled sudoku's intellectual property rights let the game's popularity grow unfettered, Mr. Kaji says.' Will Nikoli be the source of the next big puzzle fad after Sudoku?"
nikoli.com (Score:3, Insightful)
A better choice is Nikoli's online puzzle site [nikoli.com], which is linked from their site mentioned above, but it might be easy to miss as it's not featured very well in that uncharacteristically ugly site design. There they publish 3-4 puzzles per day out of 7 different types, sizes, and varying levels of difficulty, for a monthly subscription of around $4. Nonsubscribers can play a few of each type to try out the solving interfaces, which use Flash and are far better than the ones in the NYT article. They support pencil markings, "try" modes, unlimited undo steps, partial checking, etc. What's not obvious from the nonsubscriber page is that it saves your solving histories and times for each puzzle, and you can see how you stack up to all the other subscribers. Also, you can replay your solve (with speedup/step options) to watch how you did it, or more interestingly, watch how other people did it, to expand your arsenal of techniques. You can write comments for each puzzle and read through others', but unfortunately for me most comments are in Japanese, I'm hoping the gaijin population there continues to grow..
The variety of constructing styles and solving methods possible in puzzles like Slitherlink, Nurikabe, and Heyawake is far greater than in Sudoku, where it's often impossible to discern whether a puzzle was human-generated (i.e. Nikoli) or computer-generated (i.e. almost everything in newspapers and those bookshelves stuffed with books crapped out by every publisher trying to cash in). So for those who may have tired of relatively repetitive Sudoku solving, I recommend giving these other more elegant and interesting puzzle types a spin.
I'm not affiliated with Nikoli, just an addicted subscriber for several years, and purchaser of many of their books. Trying to spread the word, as on one hand I'm happy to see logic puzzles like Sudoku increasing in popularity, but on the other hand I worry about high-quality puzzles getting buried by all the cash-in crud..
Re:Nikoli didn't make Sudoku. (Score:3, Insightful)