Two-time Sudoku world champion Thomas Snyder talks exactly like he solves Sudoku — quickly and eagerly. And once he starts, he doesn’t stop.
“It’s not a very famous thing to be,” Snyder said, describing his claim to fame. Except for the occasional cash prize, PlayStation Portable or set of bartending tools — to which Snyder laughed, “the people who come to these sorts of tournaments aren’t exactly lushes” — “pretty much all you get is your name on a Wikipedia entry.”
Sudoku, the mathematical equivalent of a crossword puzzle, has become an international phenomenon in recent years. Originating in Japan and making a splash in the U.S. in the 1970s, it means “single number” in Japanese. The square puzzle consists of a nine-by-nine grid in which players try to fill each row, column and three-by-three sub-grid with the numbers one through nine. Requiring less factual knowledge than a crossword puzzle, for many Sudoku is the perfect brainteaser.
“I describe it as my morning coffee routine,” Snyder said, seeming in no evident need of a caffeine pick-me-up. “I can do two puzzles in six minutes, feel that my brain has woken up and then go to work.”
By day, 30-year-old Snyder works on postdoctoral research in Stanford’s bioengineering program. His job involves using DNA sequencing to monitor patients receiving heart and lung transplants.
“Instead of trying to treat disease, we’re trying to prevent it,” said Snyder, who envisions a future in diagnostic medicine.
A native of Buffalo, N.Y., Snyder moved across the country to double-major in chemistry and economics at Caltech. He went on to graduate school at Harvard, and it was there that he tried out Sudoku.
“They were putting Sudoku on the front page of the newspaper, above what Tony Blair had done that day,” Snyder recalled. “And, if you went to an airport bookstore, you’d see a whole wall of Sudoku books. An airport bookstore is the most compressed place to sell anything, so to get a whole wall must mean it’s pretty special.”
It was, and Snyder was hooked. Although a busy work schedule these days limits Snyder to a couple of Sudoku puzzles per week, back in graduate school he says he was solving about a hundred every month. That was when he had a revelation.
“It turns out there are such things as Sudoku competitions!” he said.
Snyder decided to showcase his skills in the professional arena. He took and passed the online qualifications for the American Sudoku team — nowadays, qualifications aren’t done online due to the availability of computerized solvers — earning himself a spot in the first ever World Sudoku Championship.
Snyder described the playoffs at the 2006 competition in Lucca, Italy as “a weird game of Survivor.”
“There were nine people who all got a puzzle, and whoever did the worst in it, now we’ve got eight, now we have seven, now we have six,” he said.
“Of course we get to the last puzzle, and I said I come from Buffalo, N.Y., and if you think of our sports teams, we always choke in the last round,” he continued. “I choked in the last puzzle, and for a whole year that nagged at me.”
By the next year’s world championship in Prague, he had practiced enough and was determined to win. He clinched the championship in Prague and took the top spot again at the 2008 championship in India.
Snyder described the 2009 championship as “messy,” stressing that “the Slovakian organizers had made puzzles that you couldn’t solve without guessing, and even with guessing you’d have to guess luckily. The puzzles themselves weren’t selecting great solvers necessarily.”
This year, the U.S. is hosting the Sudoku World Championship, giving Snyder a chance to actually write puzzles for the tournament. Snyder hopes to create Sudoku puzzles that have some sort of soulful or aesthetic element to them — in other words, puzzles that he himself would enjoy solving.
“As much as there is a title and a winner, the sense of being the fastest in the world is not as important as giving back to the world of puzzles and defining what a Sudoku should be,” he said.
He in fact prefers handcrafted Sudoku puzzles, as opposed to those generated by computers. He likes to think that an artfully crafted puzzle allows the solver to communicate with the creator, who has left behind “a trail of breadcrumbs.”
And for Snyder —as for the millions of Sudoku solvers worldwide — that sense of completion, plus the puzzle’s downright addictiveness, keeps him coming back to the game.
“It’s that sort of ‘look, I can do it’ feeling,” Snyder said. “It’s a form of self-reinforcement. You feel like you’re learning. There aren’t many things you can do where you can feel your investment of time giving back a reward.”
