Wayne Gould: The Man Who Gave Sudoku Away

Most people who shaped modern culture took a salary to do it. Wayne Gould did not. He spent six years writing a computer program in his retirement, gave the output to newspapers for free, and ended up indirectly responsible for the publication of more than a billion puzzles. He still lives in New Zealand and Hong Kong, and gives interviews only occasionally.

He is the bridge between Japanese magazine culture and global newspaper culture. Without him, sudoku probably stays in Nikoli's catalogue another decade.

The Tokyo bookshop, 1997

Gould was a retired judge from New Zealand visiting Tokyo. He wandered into a bookshop, picked up a Japanese puzzle magazine, and noticed a logic puzzle he could understand without speaking the language. The digits were universal. The rules were clear at a glance. He bought the magazine, took it back to his hotel, and spent the evening solving.

The six-year project

Gould did not want to constructor puzzles by hand. He wanted a program that could produce a fresh sudoku at any difficulty on demand. The brief was simple to state and very hard to satisfy. Generating valid grids is the easy half. Generating grids that require exactly the right level of technique to solve, with exactly one solution and no shortcuts, is the hard half.

He wrote, rewrote, and debugged for six years. By 2003 the software, which he called "Pappocom Sudoku", could produce puzzles labelled gentle, moderate, tough and diabolical, with consistent difficulty within each band. That consistency mattered. Newspapers cannot run a "moderate" puzzle that solvers find impossible on Tuesday; they need predictability.

The pitch

Gould walked into newspaper offices with the laptop under his arm and proposed a deal that no newspaper had heard before. He would give them puzzles, free, in exchange for a small credit at the bottom that pointed to his website. The newspapers got daily puzzles for nothing. He got an audience for his solving software.

The Times of London took the deal first. The first sudoku appeared on 12 November 2004. Within six weeks the rest of Fleet Street had followed.

"I did not expect this. I expected to sell a few copies of the software. I did not expect to put a puzzle in every paper in the country."

The money

Gould did not get rich from giving puzzles away, but he did become comfortable from selling the software that solved and generated them. Pappocom Sudoku was downloaded millions of times. The book deals, branded packs and licensing arrangements that followed paid better than the judiciary ever had. He has said publicly that he regards the late 2000s as his "second career", more rewarding than the first.

He has also said, in his quiet way, that the project's biggest reward was being able to send fresh puzzles to newspapers every morning for free, and watching them get solved by readers he never met.

What he changed

Three things, durably. Newspapers learned that a recurring puzzle could be a daily ritual on par with the crossword. Generator software became standard infrastructure in puzzle publishing. And the gentle / moderate / tough / diabolical difficulty ladder, which Gould chose almost arbitrarily, became the default vocabulary for every sudoku that followed. The labels you see at the top of any newspaper grid, anywhere in the world, trace back to one New Zealand programmer's Saturday afternoon.

Where to read more

The single best account of the boom is in Wired magazine's 2006 feature on Gould and the global puzzle craze. For a tighter history, see the Times of London 2004, and for the Japanese side of the story, inside Nikoli.