US student sudoku champ
Sunday, April 1, 2007
UNITED STATES Harvard University student Thomas Snyder become world sudoku champion in Prague yesterday when he beat Japan's Yuhei Kusui in the head-to-head final round.
Snyder, 27, who was runner up in the first world championships of the popular numerical logic game last year, scored 162 against Kusei's 135 points in the final session of the three-day event in which 141 of the world's best players took part.
"I was really disappointed not to have won last year," Snyder, who is also the reigning US world puzzle champion, said. "I do not think people were surprised to see me in the play-offs," he added.
Snyder, a chemistry student who expects to finish his post-graduate studies this year, said the secret of his success was playing "lots of logic puzzles, not just sudoku".
"I started doing mathematical and logic puzzles when I was four or five at the time between crawling and walking," he said, adding that the interest was nurtured by his mathematics teacher mother and his father, a university science professor.
Japan won the world team competition, which was held for the first time this year, with 4,490 points. The US took second place with 4,328 points, followed by the Czech Republic with 3,690 points.
Sudoku, a numerical crossword where contestants have to fill a nine by nine grid so that each column, each row and each of the nine three by three internal squares contains only the numbers from one to nine, was revived at the end of the 1980s and has recently enjoyed a worldwide popularity.AFP
Snyder, 27, who was runner up in the first world championships of the popular numerical logic game last year, scored 162 against Kusei's 135 points in the final session of the three-day event in which 141 of the world's best players took part.
"I was really disappointed not to have won last year," Snyder, who is also the reigning US world puzzle champion, said. "I do not think people were surprised to see me in the play-offs," he added.
Snyder, a chemistry student who expects to finish his post-graduate studies this year, said the secret of his success was playing "lots of logic puzzles, not just sudoku".
"I started doing mathematical and logic puzzles when I was four or five at the time between crawling and walking," he said, adding that the interest was nurtured by his mathematics teacher mother and his father, a university science professor.
Japan won the world team competition, which was held for the first time this year, with 4,490 points. The US took second place with 4,328 points, followed by the Czech Republic with 3,690 points.
Sudoku, a numerical crossword where contestants have to fill a nine by nine grid so that each column, each row and each of the nine three by three internal squares contains only the numbers from one to nine, was revived at the end of the 1980s and has recently enjoyed a worldwide popularity.AFP
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