An engrossing primer on sudoku as seen from the creator’s side.
Readers tired of solving sudoku puzzles can try creating them with this fun debut how-to manual.
Zheng’s doctoral research at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 2011 involved programming computers to make sudoku puzzles. In this book, she distills the craft into step-by-step procedures that readers can use to make the familiar grids. In a sudoku game, each of the numbers one through nine appears once in each row, column, and three-by-three “box.” The author’s simple process starts with a top row of randomly arranged numbers; readers can then create subsequent rows by “shifting” numbers from the previous row in particular ways. (The procedure also allows readers to build the grid by using columns or boxes instead of rows.) Zheng then provides other rules to help readers make the grid more random. She doesn’t go into the mathematics behind her procedures; she just lays them out as a practical recipe, with lucid, illustrative examples that make the process so easy that complete novices will be able to make sudoku grids in a few minutes. Then comes the hard part—figuring out which squares to erase so that the grid becomes a challenging but still solvable puzzle. Erase too few and the puzzle is too easy; erase too many and it lacks a single, unique solution. To that end, Zheng prescribes methods for deciding which squares to omit, using two elementary tests to determine whether players will be able to deduce the numbers from the remaining squares. The author notes that the procedure amounts to solving the puzzle in reverse. Creating a puzzle is therefore as difficult as solving one, perhaps more so, because there’s no gratifying endpoint—one simply erases squares until the puzzle becomes hard to figure out. Thus, while sudoku-solving climaxes in a triumphant solution, sudoku-making simply grinds to a halt. Still, Zheng’s guide offers readers a vigorous mental workout.
An engrossing primer on sudoku as seen from the creator’s side.Pub Date: June 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9962042-0-0
Page Count: 132
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Dec. 2, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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