As a birthday gift Shiela's parents bought me an electronic Sudoku puzzle game. This little electronic device has 2,000,000 Sudoku puzzles in it and will provide me with hours and hours of entertainment. Little did I know just how frustrated I would become.
Now I didn't know how to play Sudoku but I had heard it was easy...all you had to do was fill in the squares so that every row and every column had the numbers 1-9 in them. I figured that was easy enough. I was kind of busy after I got the game and so Shiela ended up playing it first. She was addicted quickly and was finishing off games left right and centre. Finally, a couple weeks later, I finally found some time and picked it up to play.
WHOA! This was hard! I was working up a sweat trying to figure these things out. I'd look across the row to see if a number would fit and then along the column to make sure I didn't have that number yet and slowly work my way to the solution. And SLOWLY was definately the right word. It took me forever to finish the first one...40 minutes to be exact and I was only on Level 1..but I had to make a few guesses at the end to get it. While playing the game I was telling Shiela that this game was impossible and that you had to guess on a few of them in order to finish. She adamantly told me that you can't guess at all and there is always one number you can get.
I think it was at this point that I started to wonder just how smart I was. There was no way I could finish this puzzle without a couple guesses at the end. Yet I knew lots of people that played these games all the time and were finishing them easily. I started questioning my brain...for some reason my brain was not able to figure out these games! Maybe this prednisone I always take has cut off certain brain functions and so now I can't play Sodoku.
After finishing the first game I started on a new one (a few days later). After many days of playing on and off with a total time of 1 hour and 38 minutes I still couldn't finish the game. Shiela had offered to help me before but my pride wouldn't let her. I was sure that if everyone else could figure out these games so could I! But eventually I gave in and let her look at it.
Shiela took one look at it and then gave me a very confused look. "Why aren't you filling in these empty squares?" she asked me. "Well you can't," I explained, " because that could be an 8 or a 6 and there is no way to know because I can't get the other numbers until I know that one." Shiela looked at it a bit longer and then said "You do know that each 3x3 grid also has to have the numbers 1-9 in them, don't you?" I just stood there and stared at her. As I slowly got closer to her I took the game from her and looked at the screen. There on the screen were nine 3x3 squares. Nobody had told me that each 3x3 square also needed to have the numbers 1-9 in them. "Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!" I said as I quickly sat down to finish off the game. 1 minute and 17 seconds later I had finished it.
Now I'm a pro at these things. My record right now is 6 min 52 sec to finish a Level 2 puzzle. It sure does help when you know all the rules. And I also got my confidence back after realizing that I wasn't stupid after all and that maybe the prednisone isn't slowly killing me (ok, it is, but not in this case).
So go out and play the Sudoku puzzles...there is one in the paper every day or you can buy books of them at a Buck or Two. And once I'm finished all 2,000,000 puzzles in my game I will gladly let you borrow it too!
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