Will We Ever Run Out of Sudoku Puzzles?
Realistically, no! There are 6,670,903,752,021,072,936,960 possible solvable Sudoku grids that yield a unique result. That's way more than the number of stars in the universe. Think of it this way: if each of the approximately 7.3 billion people on Earth solved one Sudoku puzzle every second, they wouldn’t get through all of them until about the year 30,992. Combinatorics is a field of math concerned with problems of selection, arrangement, and operation within a finite or discrete system. A Latin square is an n-by-n grid filled with n distinct symbols in such a way that each symbol appears only once in each row and column. A solved Sudoku grid is a Latin Square of order nine, meaning n=9. So it is a finite system on which combinatorics can be applied. Using combinatorics, we can take any one Sudoku grid and, with various simple tricks, create enough unique grids for you to do one each day for the next century. Simply by transposing and rotating the grid or interchanging columns an...