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
An extraordinary true tale of torment, retribution, and loyalty that's irresistibly readable in spite of its intrusively melodramatic prose. Starting out with calculated, movie-ready anecdotes about his boyhood gang, Carcaterra's memoir takes a hairpin turn into horror and then changes tack once more to relate grippingly what must be one of the most outrageous confidence schemes ever perpetrated. Growing up in New York's Hell's Kitchen in the 1960s, former New York Daily News reporter Carcaterra (A Safe Place, 1993) had three close friends with whom he played stickball, bedeviled nuns, and ran errands for the neighborhood Mob boss. All this is recalled through a dripping mist of nostalgia; the streetcorner banter is as stilted and coy as a late Bowery Boys film. But a third of the way in, the story suddenly takes off: In 1967 the four friends seriously injured a man when they more or less unintentionally rolled a hot-dog cart down the steps of a subway entrance. The boys, aged 11 to 14, were packed off to an upstate New York reformatory so brutal it makes Sing Sing sound like Sunnybrook Farm. The guards continually raped and beat them, at one point tossing all of them into solitary confinement, where rats gnawed at their wounds and the menu consisted of oatmeal soaked in urine. Two of Carcaterra's friends were dehumanized by their year upstate, eventually becoming prominent gangsters. In 1980, they happened upon the former guard who had been their principal torturer and shot him dead. The book's stunning denouement concerns the successful plot devised by the author and his third friend, now a Manhattan assistant DA, to free the two killers and to exact revenge against the remaining ex-guards who had scarred their lives so irrevocably. Carcaterra has run a moral and emotional gauntlet, and the resulting book, despite its flaws, is disturbing and hard to forget. (Film rights to Propaganda; author tour)
Pub Date: July 10, 1995
ISBN: 0-345-39606-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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