Numberlink puzzle
The Japanese company Nikoli is known throughout the world for its unique logic puzzles, which include Numberlink.
This game gained wide popularity in the 90s of the last century - after it was published in the pages of Puzzle Communication Nikoli, and has since been ported to mobile platforms, as well as desktop computers and laptops.
Today, users of all ages and nationalities spend their time playing Numberlink, although its final version, by the standards of history, was released quite recently - a little over 30 years ago.
Game history
The Numberlink puzzle became world famous at the end of the last century, but its origins go much deeper into history. Thus, the original version was published in The Brooklyn Daily Eagle at the end of the 19th century - in 1897. In the New York newspaper of the same name, this game, which did not yet have a name, was featured in Sam Lloyd's column.
A little later, in 1917, it was again published on the pages of a Western publication, this time in the book Amusements in Mathematics by Henry Ernest Dudeney. The puzzle received serial number 252, and quickly got lost among similar games regularly published in the USA and Great Britain.
And only at the turn of the 80s and 90s of the XX century, the Japanese publishing house Nikoli published on the pages of its magazine the final version of this long-forgotten game - already under its own name Arukone (アルファベットコネクション), and the Western (adapted) one - Alphabet Connection .
About the same time, another variation of the puzzle arose - Nanbarinku (ナンバートンイ). The only difference between Arukone and Nanbarinku was that the first used pairs of letters, and the second - pairs of numbers that had to be connected together by broken lines. As for the game rules, in both versions they were absolutely identical.
It was Nanbarinku (with numbers) that stood the test of time, and today it is it that is known in the world under the name Numberlink (without a space between words).
By 2006, the Nikoli publishing house had published three books entirely dedicated to this puzzle, and their own adapted versions of this game began to appear on digital platforms. It is noteworthy that, from a computational point of view, the solution to the Numberlink puzzle is NP-complete, even if zigzag lines are allowed between the digits.
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