The US Sudoku Championships will be held in Pennsylvania this weekend and World Champ Thomas Snyder will be competing.

Some 700 people, about the same as the number of contestants for ththis year's American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, will compete for $10,000 and a trip to the 2008 World Sudoku Championship in India as a member of the U.S. Sudoku Team.

Sudoku's origin is said to be a game called Number Place, made by Howard Garnes and published in the late 1970s by Dell Puzzle Magazines. 

A Japanese company, Nikoli Inc., brought it to Japan in the 1980s and it became a hit.

A Kiwi, Wayne Gould, saw the game in Japan and created a computer sudoku game.

The US craze began after the Conway Daily Sun in New Hampshire started printing sudoku puzzles in 2004.

Logic, not smarts is all that is needed to finish a sudoku puzzle.

It's a puzzle for non-puzzle solvers.

Do you like sudoku?