The Largest Sudoku Ever!
A while ago, one of our visitors – Mike – posted a message asking for this:
I’m really looking forward to our special xmas day insane banzai samurai bushido Honda pachinko sushi killer.
Well, I never posted such a puzzle, but this one that I’m posting right now could go under that name.
It’s a Butterfly Samurai puzzle! It consists of 20 (twenty) classic 9×9 Sudoku sub-puzzles. I’ve heard of 11-puzzle and 13-puzzle arrangements, but I haven’t heard of a 20-puzzle arrangement. So, in that sense, this is arguably (?) The Largest Sudoku puzzle Ever!
There are 5 groups of 4 puzzles. Each group of 4 is arranged Butterfly-style, and those5 groups are arranged Samurai-style.
Please make sure you understand how the puzzles are arranged before attempting to solve the puzzle.
Download the puzzle by clicking on this thumbnail:
Enjoy!
February 7th, 2006 at 2:15 pm
Fascinating – looks worth a go…
BUT…
Hmmm…. Largest Sudoku ever?
I think youi’ll find that my Sudok42 (solved by only 2 people so far – and that includes me!) over at :http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/brunel/A5475431?s_fromedit=1 is bigger, and, generally, more Scary….
The Times also claimed to have published the largest Sudoku ever the other week….
Argon0
February 7th, 2006 at 3:13 pm
ArgonO, well done for your 42×42 puzzle.
I said that this puzzle is arguably the largest ever in terms of the number of overlapping puzzles inside.
Your puzzle surely has more numbers to fill in, but it is not an overlapping puzzle.
So those two can’t be compared in terms of size, I think. They are both “the largest”, but in two different categories
.
February 7th, 2006 at 4:29 pm
yup – you are right there!
February 7th, 2006 at 11:21 pm
Oh my god! it’s very little
February 8th, 2006 at 8:26 am
Largest Sudoku ever? What about:
http://www.takana.info/numberquest/htm/e_number_200.htm
Thank you for your great site!
February 8th, 2006 at 6:19 pm
Surely the next step is the same but in killer mode
February 9th, 2006 at 3:05 pm
I’ll give you that one Otto!
February 13th, 2006 at 9:18 pm
In reply to comment 1…The Times can eat my socks. In reply to this puzzle: no, it is NOT the biggest puzzle ever. If you head over to the Conceptis Puzzles forums, you’ll find I recreated a puzzle that was originally scanned from a Japanese Number Place (Sudoku) mag., which contains 41 (yes, FORTY-ONE) Sudokus – more than twice as many as this puzzle – all arranged in a linked (symmetric, too!) formation. I look forward to tackling this one once I finish some cutting and pasting of my resulting printout. As for the puzzle above…I do admire the Butterfly format (BTW DJape, as I wrote via e-mail, I did tell another Sudoku developer and I think he’s going to try it too…I told him to credit you for the idea, we’ll see what happens), and in terms of the Butterfly puzzles, this can be called the biggest Butterfly Sudoku yet known to man.
March 28th, 2006 at 1:37 pm
[...] Here is another of our unique Butterfly Samurai puzzles! It consists of 20 (twenty) classic 9×9 Sudoku sub-puzzles. This one is somewhat more difficult than the previous one, so be warned! [...]
June 7th, 2006 at 4:20 am
It would be nice if people took a few days to do some research before making hyperbolic claims. Sudoku has been published in *dozens* of Japanese magazines for *decades*. I have half a dozen mags purchased over a 5 year period — all before the recent Sudoku fad reached England, the US and rest of the world. Each and every one features one or more overlapping puzzles larger than your “largest ever”. The largest one I have has 57 overlapping 3x3s. Most of these magazines are monthly — so it would be conservative to estimate that at least 200 puzzles *per year* are published in Japanese magazines that are much larger than your “largest in the world”.
January 28th, 2010 at 6:15 am
[...] http://www.djape.net/sudoku/wp/index.php/2006/02/06/the-largest-sudoku-ever/References : [...]
January 30th, 2010 at 9:05 pm
[...] http://www.djape.net/sudoku/wp/index.php/2006/02/06/the-largest-sudoku-ever/References : [...]
June 20th, 2010 at 6:15 pm
Ha! This 144×144 is much bigger
http://sudokugeant.cabanova.fr/assets/download/G144_022D.pdf