1/25/2024 0 Comments Kenken puzzle maker![]() Common KenKen sizes range from 4 x 4 - 9 x 9. ![]() The difficulty in solving this puzzle comes from having to maintain the latin square properties while also satisfying the target numbers of each individual cage. If a cage of size 3 has 6+ (target number: 6, operation: addition) written, then the 3 numbers must add up to 6. ![]() However, instead of having 3x3 boxes, a KenKen puzzle has cages with operations and target numbers. A latin square is a square of size x that has the numbers 1 - x in each column and row exactly once. There is one property of a solved sudoku puzzle: it is a latin square. “A machine doesn’t have heart.Created December 2018 - February 2019 as a Group Project for AP Computer Science A. The Kenerator would never replace him, the sensei assures us. “Do you think that, eventually, computers will be able to make a puzzle that is more similar to your puzzles?” Chris Flaherty, one of the film’s producers, asks Miyamoto. “I feel nothing from this puzzle,” Miyamoto remarks when shown the fruits of the software. The KenKen puzzles in papers like the Times are produced by the Kenerator. In 2016, onstage at Google’s offices in New York, in an ill-fitting suit, Miyamoto described the purpose of his pedagogy in ancient Greek terms: the point is to secure eudaimonia, or, as he put it, the “happy life.” After he put the finishing touches on a KenKen puzzle that he made for the Googlers, Miyamoto kissed it: “My baby, how cute you are.” Most people never see his delicate creations. Miyamoto treats each of his puzzles as a life they are hand molded to tell a story in patterns of math. ![]() “This miracle,” he later said, recalling that day, “is something caused by the force of my problems.” As aftershocks rattled his classroom, his students-deep inside the grid-did not lift their heads. By 2011, in the aftermath of the Great Sendai earthquake, the game’s addictive power was evident. KenKen began to appear in the Times in 2009. Three years later, he published his first book of puzzles in Japan. In 2003, he had an Archimedes moment, and KenKen came into being. Soon he began to craft his first crude puzzles as a way to get third graders to engage with arithmetic. (He recognizes the same plot at work in the lives of others, too.) In 1993, after years of cobbling together teaching jobs, he started his own school. “It’s also about simplicity, an intense focus.” Miyamoto began to see himself as being at the center of his own story, the better to reimagine the disappointments in his life as the first act in a kind of comeback narrative. Miyamoto’s philosophy, of life and KenKen, is “not just about nervousness,” Sullivan told me. “If you think of yourself as just one by seven billion,” he says, “it can make you want to die.” The trick, he discovered, was not to quell his nervous energy but to redirect it, in an almost Thoreauvian way. He felt lonely and overwhelmed at the thought that he was just one number in a sea of billions of interchangeable human beings. Through charming animation, Sullivan reveals how Miyamoto’s feelings about his creations emerged from the story he tells about himself: at fourteen, Miyamoto placed into what he calls “a low-level high school,” got bored, and dropped out. He intends his mathematical challenges to unfold as stories. KenKen puzzles resembling the ones Miyamoto crafts by hand are regularly produced for mass consumption by a piece of software called the Kenerator-but Miyamoto says these computer-generated specimens lack a crucial narrative quality. The puzzle’s distributors refer to it as “sudoku on steroids” in Japanese, “ken” means “wisdom” or “cleverness,” so Miyamoto prefers to translate KenKen, with algebraic panache, as “cleverness squared.” As in sudoku, the player fills a grid with numbers, and none of the digits in a row or column can repeat, but, within the grid, there are also sets of boxes that must amount to a particular total, whether by addition, subtraction, division, or multiplication. The film’s director, Daniel Sullivan, a high-school instructor, first learned of Miyamoto after his wife started competing in KenKen championships. He is also the subject of “Miyamoto and the Machine,” a new documentary about the way the rise of KenKen, an international phenomenon, has been at odds with the meaning its creator hoped to embed in its numerical patterns. “I enjoy nervous air.” The teacher, Tetsuya Miyamoto, is the inventor of KenKen, the puzzle that his students are laboring over. “Nervous air is necessary,” the teacher says. We see the teacher refuse to meet the gaze of one young pupil when he hands back his puzzle, the grid all filled in. All around him, tiny students with pencils in hand struggle over puzzles at their desks. An elementary-school math teacher silently paces his classroom in a pin-striped stockbroker shirt, his mouth full of braces.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |