Maki Kaji, a puzzle enthusiast and publisher who was known as the “Godfather of Sudoku” – the number puzzle played daily by millions around the world – has died, his company said. He was 69.
A university dropout who worked in a printing company before founding Japan’s first puzzle magazine, Kaji took hints from an existing number puzzle to create what he later named “sudoku” – a contraction of the Japanese for “every number must be single” – sometime in the mid-80s.
The logic puzzle challenges people to fill a grid of 9X9 blocks, with nine boxes in each block so that all columns, both vertical and horizontal, contain the numbers 1 to 9 without repetition. The number of filled-in figures for a grid at the start of the puzzle determines how difficult it is.
