Kakuro is the most recent puzzle to be described by the cliché "the latest craze in Japan is now sweeping the UK." It has similarities with sudoku as far as numbers have to be slotted into rows and columns based on which numbers occupy other squares, but there is one significant difference: kakuro does involve some maths.

Take a look at kakuro.info‘s daily puzzle to see what a whole puzzle looks like.

How it works

Given a grid, the aim is to ensure that every block adds up to the number at its beginning, using the digits 1-9 a maximum of once each. The numbers in the grid below indicate that the top row must add up to 4, the second row to 7, the first column must add up to 5, the second column to 3 and the third to 4.

The key with kakuro is to know some of the most common patterns of numbers that add up to certain targets. For example, 3, as in the second column of the grid, can only ever be the total of two digits: 1 and 2. Just knowing this tells us that the second column has a 1 and a 2, but we don’t yet know in which order.

more…

I dropped theguardian a line yesterday and today I’m on the obituaries page!

(The odd quotation marks in the first paragraph aren’t mine although the slightly garbled first sentence of the second paragraph is.)

From Popbitch:

Tom Chaplin from Keane, on the train going to his parents’ house last weekend, drinking Ribena, doing the Daily Telegraph Book of Sudoku. Rock’n roll.

And where does that elusive 9 go? Somewhere only we knooooow…

A particularly good episode of Lost (“Raised by Another”) on E4 last night. Lot’s of spooky an exciting bits.

There was a certain amount of Christ sub-text, I thought: Claire conceives despite being on the pill, and a medium tells her the baby is important/dangerous. Then a man who (we’re to assume) wasn’t on the plane, apparently wants to prevent the birth – some anti-Christ plot here?

Some niggles, though, with the logbook bits. They agree that by removing the names of the dead from the plane’s manifest, they’ll be left with the names of the survivors. But the aeroplane broke into pieces and the survivors (and the deceased they survivors know about) have come from one section only, so many of the people on the manifest will be unaccounted for. Also, we established last two episodes back that Sawyer isn’t using his real name. If Sawyer isn’t the name on his passport (which it could be if he legally changed it), he’ll be the one who doesn’t appear in the logbook.

Still, what with Mira Furlan last week and a crazed madman this, it’s certainly picking up the pace.

I am, for the record, in the camp that doesn’t expect a decent explanation at the very end…