I admit it, I'm an addict.

Yeah, like it's news that I have an addiction, huh? Well, this particular addiction isn't food related so shut up. I must admit when I saw the unbelievably brainy guy (Wayne, who sat across the cube wall from me at my last job) doing some number puzzle every morning, I immediately assumed it was math and that I would hate it. Just looking at him zipping through the puzzle made me feel dumb.

Given my history with numbers, that reaction isn't something you would need a psychic to predict. In 1980 I moved away from home to Provo, Utah to give it the ol' college try at BYU. I would never have imagined that 6 months later I would be the not-so-proud owner of a big fat "F" in beginning math. Oh no, this wasn't beginning COLLEGE math, this was the math they put you in if you're too stupid for college math. In my defense, two things sabotaged my success in the class. First, it was self-paced. Come on. Just out of high-school. Living away from home in a new city adjusting to a whole new life. What made them think I could do a self-paced math class that didn't actually have any, uh, CLASSES? It was up to you to go to the "math lab" and get help when you needed/wanted it and then take the tests on a regular basis to not fall behind. I didn't do either.

If the self-paced nature of the class weren't enough to seal my fate (which it probably was), about 2 weeks into the semester I went roller skating for the first time in my life with an old high school friend who was also going to BYU. Within 5 minutes I'd fallen down and broken my right arm. This put a serious crimp in my activities, starting with the Bowling physical ed class I'd signed up for and including driving the green Forest Service surplus truck my folks had bought and send me off to college with... yes, it had a manual shift transmission. Not so easy to do with your right arm in a cast up to your arm pit. Frankly, getting to the math lab was the last thing on my mind.

Even my eventual success (10 years later when I returned to college) at math hasn't dislodged the lip-curling aversion I have to anything math-like. Numbers just don't make sense to me in that way. Perhaps if they didn't mix the alphabet in with the numbers that would help. But it's too late now, my life as a mathematician just wasn't to be.

So, back to Wayne and his show-off math puzzle. Suddenly, I seemed to be surrounded by a world full of people who were apparent math experts. In every airport I was in, mall food court I ate at, or coffee shop I wandered into, there were brainiacs everywhere hunched over their "Sudoku" puzzle books completely oblivious to how they were making the rest of us non-math people feel.

And then it happened. I tried one. Just to prove to myself that they weren't any fun really. Immediately I realized the folly of my assumptions. There was no math required here! Could you count to nine? Then, hell, you too could be hunkered over your own totally addicting, time-wasting, eye-straining, brain boosting Sudoku puzzles! And now it's even MORE everywhere. Online, of course. The best site I've found is Count To Nine where you can select from 5 different levels of difficulty. But there's also sudoku for your mobile phone, a hand-held game kind of like those goofy poker things that make all the noise and flash a lot, and, of course, every bookstore has scads of the books filled with the brain-straining little grids.

The appeal is its simplicity. While harder puzzles require tremendous concentration and a fair bit of strategy, the basic "rules" of the game are stunningly simple. There are 9 squares ( 3 x 3) each accommodating 9 numbers. Each number ( 1 through 9) can be used only one time in each square and only 1 time in each 3-square puzzle-spanning row or column. That's it.

The difficulty of a puzzle is based on the relevance and the positioning of the "given" numbers (the numbers that are filled in when you start) rather than their quantity. Surprisingly, the number of givens does not always reflect a puzzle's difficulty. The complexity is often based on the number the solving techniques required.

By eliminating which number cannot go into a square, you eventually hit upon the number that can go into a square. Guessing is not part of this game. Logic and strategy (many different strategies are described in the Wikipedia description of Sudoku).

I guess there are worse things to be addicted to, right?