STRENGTH IN NUMBERS
The burgeoning popularity of Sudoku in China is not only improving youngsters’ logical thinking, but fueling success at international competitions, Xing Wen reports.
It’s Friday, and 500 primary school and junior high school students sit in a hall in Xianghe county, North China’s Hebei province, each using a pencil to fill in the empty squares of a grid that is divided into nine blocks of nine squares each.
These young finalists have been selected from the preliminary contests of this year’s national junior Sudoku competition which were held in Beijing, Shanghai, Hangzhou and 15 other cities across the country. Some of them are hoping to gain entry into the 2018 China Sudoku Championship on Saturday, where they will fight for the opportunity to represent the country at this year’s World Sudoku Championship in Prague, the capital of the Czech Republic.
The numerical puzzle, first created by a Swiss mathematician in the 1780s, is now gripping China.
The country boasts 20 million Sudoku lovers and, according to Xu Yan, deputy secretary general of the Beijing Sudoku Association, the craze can be traced back to 2007 when a Chinese squad debuted in the World Sudoku Championship after China was granted membership of World Puzzle Federation — the organizer of the competition.
Xu, being among the first group of Chinese participants in the WSC, says her experience at the international event gave her great confidence for the development of Sudoku in China, which she believes has a promising future.
“The intellectual pursuit was introduced relatively late in China,” says Xu. “I hope that, with a few years of systematic training, we can continue to send excellent players to compete on the global stage.”
In the years following the foundation of the Beijing Sudoku Association in 2012, Xu and other Sudoku lovers spared no effort in promoting the puzzle, delivering speeches in communities and schools, organizing events for various age groups and even designing Sudoku teaching materials and courses for different levels.
“Children are in need of an extra class that can improve their logical thinking skills. The puzzle is an alternative avenue for them,” says Xu, adding that further cooperation with schools is underway.
Will Shortz, chairman of World Puzzle Federation, says it was impressive to see China develop children from a very young age to solve Sudoku puzzles and become enthusiasts, especially given their outstanding performances in both team and individual events at the WSC in recent years.
“Our mission is to increase the interest of people around the world in intelligent puzzles and bring puzzle lovers together socially,” says the chairman. “That’s happening here, as this event has a much bigger base than any other country.”
“The players get younger,” Xu says, recalling that when she attended the WSC in 2007, she was 36 years old and the only juvenile player in the national team was 15 years old. Last year, however, the average age of the members of the national team was just 17.
“In many domestic Sudoku events, the under-8 group usually turns out to be the largest one,” Xu says.
Luan Xiaozhou, a Sudoku teacher from Dalian, says the main appeal of the intellectual game is that it is accessible to most people because it does not require any formal education or linguistic ability and needs only a small amount of mathematical skill.
“It’s a good pastime for the whole family,” he says. “What we gain from figuring out the fastest way to complete the puzzle is how to become better problem solvers.”
Luan encourages his followers to attend domestic and overseas Sudoku events, as these provide young Sudoku players a platform to flex their muscles, test themselves and learn from their role models.
Arguably, one such role model is 18-year-old Chen Shiyu, considering that she ranked fourth at the WSC in 2016 and received an offer to attend the Massachusetts Institute of Technology earlier this year.
Chen grew stronger with the puzzle’s burgeoning popularity in China, regularly attended Sudoku events held by the Beijing Sudoku Association since 2013 and, as a result, fought her way onto the national junior Sudoku team.
She says what appeals to her is the logic behind the digits and the variation of the question types in Sudoku.
As a soon-to-be applied math major at MIT, the Beijing native says the game helps her stay focused on study, because solving the puzzle requires 100 percent concentration and allows no room for error.
Ming Letian, who failed to get full marks in mathematics by just 0.5 point in his senior high school entrance examinations this summer, agrees that Sudoku is conducive to lifting academic ability.
As the winner of this year’s junior event, he says that Sudoku contests offer him an opportunity to position himself among his peers and communicate with Sudoku masters.
“I’m obsessed with the sense of achievement after I have worked out a solution,” says the rising star who also competed in Saturday’s China Sudoku Championship.
He has never concealed his ambition to be a Sudoku star, concluding: “I want to represent China on the international stage as a national team member.”