Eighty-one squares, oh joy: the greatness of the new 'timewaster,' Sudoku.

There's a certain type of person who enjoys doing puzzles, crosswords, brainteasers, and high-school algebra. I'm not one of them. When confronted by a question like this--"If it were two hours later, it would be half as long until midnight as it would be if it were an hour later. What time is it now?"--I crumple, morally as well as mentally. (It's "9 P.M.," apparently.) That tricky devil came from a logic-chopping, number-crunching MENSA quiz on which I scored 19 out of 30, a result they snobbishly classed as "low." Little do they know 1 achieved even that rank only by some nifty guesswork and a talent for cheating. So much for MENSA members being so clever-clever.

My inability to grasp the simplest of quadratic equations notwithstanding, I, as a proud member of DENSA, am a Sudoku Genius--though I should add that my grandmaster status applies only to the "really easy" level. Anything higher than that up the intellectual ladder and my mediocrity stands naked and quivering in all its terrible majesty.

What is this "Sudoku" of which I speak? Answer: It is a newly popular timewaster requiring the application of pure logic to a problem without the need to call on one's sometimes limited reserves of erudition, patience, or brilliance. Think of it as a crossword, but using only the numbers one through nine, with just 81 squares. There's but one correct possible solution, no need for any of that tedious mathematical knowledge, and it takes maybe a minute to grasp the rules. And here they are: You have a 9x9 grid divided into nine boxes, or mini-grids, each measuring 3x3; all you have to do is fill in each vertical column and horizontal row with the digits one to nine in any order without repeating; each 3x3 box must also contain those nine numbers. That's it. The simpler the Sudoku, the more numbers have been pre-filled by the compiler, leaving you to deduce the rest. The number of possible 81-square combinations is 6,670,903,752,021,072,936,960, so that ought to keep you busy for a while.

Granted, messing about with numbers may not sound an overly engrossing pursuit, but Sudoku is already being talked up as this decade's Rubik's Cube (be still, beating heart), perhaps even as a worthy heir to the throne of Tetris. The cult's adherents claim to be hypnotized by the puzzle, and there is, to be sure, a mesmerizing Euclidean elegance to unraveling the solution square by square, clue by clue. Some fans lurch into Single White Female levels of obsession, buying computer programs to generate their own puzzles or subscribing to several of the dozens of newspapers now carrying the game. The British tabloids have dubbed the resulting, if made-up, phenomenon of commuters missing trains, parents forgetting to feed the kids, and so forth, "Compulsive Sudoku Syndrome." A pretentious argot--"X-Wing," "Swordfish," "bifurcation"--has developed to describe several of the more successful tactics used to reveal those infernal numbers.

Over here, more than half of America's leading papers now publish a daily version of the puzzle, and it's amazing to discover that it was only in April that the New York Post began importing Sudokus from the British press, which has been agog over the damn things since last November. Even the New York Times, home of that impossible--for me, at least--Sunday crossword, may be getting in on the game: Will Shortz, the paper's puzzle editor, is a backer, and he's produced two books of Sudokus in the last couple of months. Indeed, right now Publishers Weekly is listing no fewer than three Sudoku compendiums in its list of the top 15 paperback bestsellers, while in Britain the "International Sudoku Organisation" has been established to regulate and adjudicate the growing number of competitions.

The rapid and inexorable rise of Sudoku mirrors that of the great crossword craze of the 1920s and 1930s. Like Sudoku--whose creator, the late Howard Garns of Indianapolis, published one known as "Number Place" in a cheapie Dell Pencil Puzzles and Word Games volume in 1979--the crossword was invented over here (by Arthur Wynne of the New York World in 1913). Nobuhiko Kanamoto, a Japanese puzzle aficionado, brought "Number Place" to Nippon, where it was perfected and renamed Sudoku. "You can no more get bored of Sudoku than you can get bored of reading novels," Kanamoto recently told the Sunday Telegraph, which may be overstating matters a bit. Anyway, in the late '90s, Wayne Gould, a retired New Zealand lawyer, noticed the game in a Japanese Sudoku magazine, spent six years developing software capable of mass-generating the puzzles, and sold the concept to the Times of London, which began running them last November.

Though it wasn't the very first British rag to print a crossword (the dubious honor goes to Pearson's Magazine in 1922) the Times was far-sighted enough to buy the idea of a daily crossword in 1930. The Times crossword--and especially its diabolically cunning cryptic variant--soon became the pastime of the lordly Establishment class. One day--in the very same month as Gandhi's Empire-shaking Salt March and the collapse of the German government--the Times' entertained its readers with a crossword in Latin. "Care rides behind me," it tantalized--a clue to equitem, which appears in Ode 1, Line 40, Horace's Odes', third book of. As Britain's leaders competed to see who could finish the crossword the fastest, the non-classically educated Hitler propelled himself to power.

Though the rise of the Third Reich can't he ascribed to the arrival of the crossword, it's not entirely a coincidence that crosswords reached the height of their sophistication and popularity in an era of particularly violent political ferment and extremist agitation. For any gibbering fanatic of the One True Faith--whether it be Communism, fascism, socialism, capitalism, conservatism, Islamism, nationalism--his cause is incandescently pure, for it promises to cut through the muddle and messiness of everyday life, straighten the crooked timber of humanity, punish those in error, and provide a single, simple Solution to the Problem.

As do crosswords. In them, there can be only one answer: Which is why crosswords, like the narcotic ideologies of the 1930s, attracted many of the people who regarded themselves as intellectually nimble and gifted, yet fell catastrophically short on common sense, judgment, imagination, and analytical ability. The same might be said for those classic English detective stories that depend on the reader deducing the murderer from an array of hidden clues: These too hit the big time in the 1930s, the decade of Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile.

Personally, I'm at one with P. G. Wodehouse, who complained that he had once beat "his head against the wall for twenty minutes over a single anagram" in the Times' crossword before quitting them forever and going off to write about Bertie Wooster's scrapes and japes down at the Drones Club. We're all better off for it. Me, I suspect a lot of the ideological nutters we have pestering us nowadays would be happier if they, like Wodehouse, realized the silliness of wasting their time on politics, war, and religion, and instead belatedly realized that there's never an elegant, clever solution to anything. They should go off and tend their little gardens, like Candide.

Zounds, Alex! I hear you all cry, what has all that heavy stuff got to do with a little harmless Sudokuing? Well, I reply, is it really that harmless? Surely no one would deny that we too are living in a state of flux, at a time of ideological fervor and madness. And now--by a remarkable coincidence--we find ourselves in the midst of a Sudoku frenzy cheerled by individuals obsessed with filling in a bunch of squares multiple times a day. What else for, but to fulfill their megalomaniacal desire for certainty and order in this crazy, mixed-up world?

Er, sorry, I let myself go there a bit, but then, l can afford to, since my own ineptitude immunizes me against the blandishments offered by the ideology of Sudokuism. As this Sudoku madness engulfs us all, my advice is to be wary of those braggarts who become too good, too adept, too clever, too serious, at it. They're the people we need to watch, as there's clearly something inadequate and bossy about them, like the members of MENSA.