I can't do it. And people have tried and tried to explain it to me and I Just Don't Understand. My brain doesn't compute how it works. I'm great at crosswords and Scrabble though.

It takes practice, but I think anyone can do at least the simple ones. I was horrible at first but now regularly kick the boyfriends butt when we do sudoku races. I think you have to want to learn it too.

This is the best sudoku solver I've ever seen. All of the links on the right hand side explain different strategies for solving them. I use it to figure out the next step in really, really hard puzzles and have learned from it.

If you have an android phone, I recommend Andoku. It's the best sudoku app I've found. I do prefer the first version over Andoku 2.

My sister and her daughter are sudoku fanatics, and their math capabilities are zilch. They started with the dead simple ones and worked their way up.

I'm not that much into Sudoku, but I don't think it's really all that mathy. The numbers might as well be letters or cartoon characters for all it really matters. It's more about reasoning "It can't be Mickey Mouse in this square, because there's already for sure another Mickey in that row" and such.

Take heart in that I, a definite math type person, struggled with it until I saw how my sister, a not-esp math person, went about thinking about it.

One of the killer tips was to jot down in each square all the possible things it could be in pencil, and gradually eliminate them as you got more and more info from filling things. You start with the squares that look like they have the fewest possibilities for what they could be, and work from there.

Like anything, learning to read say, at first it's a struggle, but then you start to pick up the patterns and it goes a lot easier.

See, I don't even understand what you have to do. When people have tried to explain it to me, they might as well have been speaking Swahili for all the sense it makes to me. And I'm not stupid, and I work in finance. I just don't have the type of brain that can do that type of puzzle.

"It's more about reasoning"

It's the trivial case of the pigeon-hole problem which is the basis for combinatorics. It is very much about math, as opposed to finance which is more about arithmetic. Math and arithmetic are two completely different skill sets. A consequence of my first stroke was losing my ability to do simple addition, yet I can still manipulate differential equations like I was still in college.

Sudoku is just lame. It can be solved algorithmically. At least crossword puzzles stretch your brain a little bit.

Maybe there's a mathy way of doing it but I do the simple "can't have the same number across, down and in the square" rule, which makes it more crossword like. I do fairly well on the books I buy and on my smartphone program. I taught my mom the same way of doing it and she's pretty good at it and per ardiril's distinction, while she's great at arithmetic, she never learned advance math.

but sudoku has nothing to do with math? The numbers are just arbitrary placeholders. It could be pictures of 1 through 9 different types of bunnies for all it matters.

Oh, I see philipy pointed that out. Heh.

But yes, it's just a process of elimination type of logic puzzle.

I just don't have the type of brain that can do that type of puzzle.

I'd be surprised if that really turned out to be the case. At bottom it really is not that different to the kind of thinking you'd do in tic tac toe. Except there's more of it so you need to keep track of it somehow, like by writing on the puzzle.

But it's easy to zone out when you first see something like that and it looks daunting. And when you react that way to something it's hard to take anything in afterwards.

Plus maybe it's just not been explained in the right way for you.

I'm wondering, is it important to you to learn? For me, it's the kind of thing that would probably never sink in until there was some reason to care.

I like logic puzzles (and love the NYT crossword and tricky word games) but I find sudoku terminally boring. The thinking is . . . repetitive. I like youngergirl44's racing suggestion though . . . maybe trying to improve times would make the sudokus more fun to do.

I went through a Sudoku phase several years ago. At the time, there was a program that taught you how to solve them. It's still around, evidently.

I'm wondering, is it important to you to learn?

Not in the least. But people at work love it and many have tried, but all have failed, to explain it to me in away I can understand. (It's not them, it's me.)

I'm with Eid and prefer a good NY Times crossword. Sudoku was a little challenging when I first tried them, but once you got the hang of them , it was kinda the same every time after that

Sudoku is a mystery to me, as well. Truthfully, math puzzles of all sorts intimidate the hell out of me and cause terminal brain-freeze. I just can't do 'em.

Thanks for the links. I looked up "four square Sudoku" and found a site for kids to learn Sudoku. I managed to do one of those in a couple minutes, so maybe there's hope.

I understand Sudoku but I don't like it. It reminds me of the logic games on the LSAT but even less interesting.
Plus it's stressful to me to keep all those possibilities in play! It;s too much like work.
I much prefer word games.

I'm not all that interested in Sudoku itself, but I'm very interested in how people learn or fail to learn anything.

As a parallel, there was a thread on Mefi recently about how a lot of people decided sports weren't for them at a young age, they were no good at sports, would never be any good, etc etc. But much later they discovered otherwise. (I didn't comment in the thread, but I would be an example of such a person too. Can't find the thread just now.)

Whether it's sports, math, music or Sudoku, what people really excel at is writing themselves off, writing the activity off, and writing other people off.

Also a lot of the time when people are saying to themselves "I can't do that", what's going on underneath is: "I don't want to do that". And sometimes when they're saying "I don't want to do that", underneath it's "I can't do that". But people aren't hugely self-aware when it comes to these things, so it all seems very real to them.

My best guess is there is nothing innate that stops most anyone from being able to do something like Sudoku at least competently. It doesn't matter much with Sudoku, but the same probably applies to a lot of things that people are convinced they can't do.

I found the Mefi thread:

...Most of our standing impressions are probably based on a single experience — one instance of unpleasantness or disappointment that turned you off of entire categories of recreational activities, lifestyles and creative pursuits, forever...

philipy, I have the same block with some card games. I've tried learning poker and euchre (aka hillbilly bridge) and find them baffling. I'm ok with Blackjack.

It's hard for me, and I get frustrated easily, but I do it with my mother and she's been helping me understand it.

There are certainly people with different aptitudes and people with different frustration tolerance and who feel differing levels of motivation.

I actually am a bit weird, I think . . . I love learning a new activity, physical or otherwise, provided I can fail in private when I start doing it. I really do hate being bad at things when others are watching. I still hope before I'm through to learn to

play bridge, tennis and squash
ski (downhill and cross country)
knit a nice sweater for myself
do nice looking digital photo editing
solve calculus problems
play decent blues guitar

among other things I've tried in the past or simply would like to do.

I run an one of 4 or 5 algorithms to solve sudoku, they all go from easiest to hardest. Once an easy one fails, I move on to the next harder to do. Once I gain ground with a hard one, I step back to the next easiest. Repeat until solved.

I actually have a fair bit of practice at coaching people (incl myself) to do things they thought they couldn't ever do.

There are few things about people that are really as fixed as they imagine. Let's take this...

I really do hate being bad at things when others are watching

Is this a fixed and unalterable quality? Actually it could turn out to be quite easily alterable. One of the eye-opening things about doing a beginners tennis class is you discover that all beginners are really woeful, just like you. In fact you can have fun with that, and laugh about how bad you all are, and feel ok about the way your shots go hopelessly all over the place because you see that everyone else is doing it too. That can actually be one of the the most enjoyable things about starting to learn tennis.

But for that to kick in, you first have to get enough out of your self-conscious preoccupation with yourself, how you're doing, how you look, to even notice that it's the same for everyone. And maybe you have to help them notice that too, relax about it, and all make a fun thing out of it.

This is one way the right coach can be a big help, because they can make people at ease, keep it lighthearted when people might have been inclined to beat themselves up about how they're doing, etc.

But... while people can learn to be competent at all kinds of things, I'm not saying it's necessarily easy or quick. Often one of the things that prevents people getting there is they radically underestimate what it will take, they want to run before they can walk, they then get to feeling it's hopeless, not for them, and they give up.

Some articles about this stuff:

If You’re Open to Growth, You Tend to Grow
The Mindset of a Champion
How to be an expert

I don't necessarily agree with everything in those articles, but there are some good insights there.

What stops people being able to do Sudoku or calculus or tennis probably isn't going to be something that has much specifically to do with Sudoku, calculus or tennis. More often the difference between people who take to those things easily and those that seem to get stuck might turn out to be in some skill or mental habit that some people happened to pick up at age seven (say) and some didn't. If you could figure out what exactly that is, you could most likely still develop it as an adult. Albeit, you may never have the same fluency or mastery as someone that picked it up age seven, and kept using it all their life.

A personal example... When I was looking at what kinds of physical activities I seemed to have trouble with, I eventually noticed that one element was that I seemed to not have a good sense of balance. Then I thought about what exactly does it mean to have a good sense of balance, and how did anyone ever acquire one? (We were all toddlers once after all, and none of us had much sense of balance then!)

One thing that a "a good sense of balance" means when you get right down to it is that when you have only one foot on the ground, you don't wobble too much, and you don't topple over. It turns out you can actually improve your sense of balance quite a lot by practicing standing on one leg. Who knows, maybe people that seem to have an innate sense of balance just happened to play a lot of games that involved hopping when they were five. In any case, if you're willing to be absurd enough to practice hopping and standing on one leg as an adult, you can certainly get better balance. And that might be what you really need to be able to ski, or to play tennis.

Does this all sound silly?

Here' a clip of a full grown math professor learning to walk a circus tightrope. He did manage to do it in the end, but that video doesn't seem to be anywhere online.

Btw, in the description of my thinking about balance, there are examples of mental habits that are very important for "being good at math", but appear to have nothing specifically to do with math. One is: "Question all assumptions, and question them hard". Another is: "Before you try to do anything else, work out precisely what the heck things mean."

But by the same token, people who have those ingrained mental habits can flounder in fields where they don't work too well, and a whole different set of habits are important instead.