Can you complete The Times National Su Doku Championship puzzle in 58 minutes?

NUMERICAL advantage proved irrelevant for the male competitors who outnumbered their female rivals by three to one at the first Times National Su Doku Championship yesterday.

Nina Pell, 18, a university student from Wales, made easy work of a super-fiendish puzzle, leaving the men trailing in her wake.

Even by the time the 255 entrants had been whittled down to six for the grand final, women outnumbered men by two to one, and they took first, second and fourth places, demolishing the common belief that men are better than women at maths.

Just to rub it in, Hannah Cooper, 11, took the under-12s title. Only Matthew Funnell, 14, was able to salvage any male pride by winning the 12-16 category.

The Times National Su Doku Championship took place at the Cheltenham Ladies’ College, where the adult entrants faced the most difficult fiendish-rated puzzles ever set. They first had to compete in one of two preliminary contests before the fastest three from each went through to the grand final, for an even harder puzzle.

Miss Pell, studying maths at the University of Sheffield, sat at a desk in the Princess Hall for only 13 minutes and 48 seconds before completing her grid. She was followed by Naomi Cooper, 24, from London, in 14 minutes 57 seconds, and Hein van dem Wildeberg, from the Netherlands but working in London, in 19 minutes 17 seconds.

Afterwards Miss Pell, who was introduced to Su Doku by her older brother, Graham, and took home a cup and a £1,000 cheque, said: “It was the most challenging I’ve faced. I average six minutes for a fiendish.”

She said she had been a fan of The Times Su Doku puzzles virtually since their start last year but denied she was good at it because she was good at maths. “It’s not mathematical so much as being very logical,” she said. “It’s a process of elimination.”

Her parents, Carol, 47, an administrator, and Maurice, 52, an engineer, were delighted with their daughter’s victory but have mixed feelings about Su Doku. Mrs Pell is an ardent follower and often sits with her daughter to tackle the puzzles at the kitchen table. Her husband was less enthusiastic: “I’d rather play golf. I’ve never really seen the attraction.”

The times that the competitors took to complete the preliminary round and grand final grids astonished even Wayne Gould, the creator of Su Doku.

He told a packed audience at a Times discussion of Su Doku, variously described as addictive and torture, that the speed of the six finalists in the qualifying round was immensely impressive. “They are getting times of under ten minutes for particularly hard fiendish puzzles,” he said. “To get a winning time at that speed you are either going to have to guess and get very, very lucky, or more likely, you are going to have that kind of mind that can see the connections and the patterns of numbers.”

He, too, maintained that despite numbers being involved in the puzzle it was more of a test of logic than of maths, though he admitted: “I’ve had many professors of maths write to me saying that, at the higher levels, maths and logic are the same, which is of course true.”

He added that he was working on creating a new type of puzzle that would be even harder than Su Doku when it appeared in three years.

The Times National Su Doku Championship attracted 85 children, the youngest being six years old, who battled it out in two age groups. The 12-16 group sat a difficult-rated grid while the younger children were given a moderate-rated one. Winning children, who won book tokens for themselves and their schools, in both categories said that they had enjoyed the day but were unanimous in saying the tests were too easy.

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