Editing Sudoku (section)

===Predecessors===
Number puzzles appeared in newspapers in the late 19th century, when French puzzle setters began experimenting with removing numbers from [[magic square]]s. ''[[Le Siècle]]'', a Paris daily, published a partially completed 9×9 magic square with 3×3 subsquares on November 19, 1892.<ref name="Le_Siècle_185672">{{cite journal
|last=Boyer
|first=Christian
|date=May 2006
|title=Supplément de l'article "Les ancêtres français du sudoku"
|journal=Pour la Science
|pages=1–6
|url=http://cboyer.club.fr/multimagie/SupplAncetresSudoku.pdf
|access-date=August 3, 2009
|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20061210103525/http://cboyer.club.fr/multimagie/SupplAncetresSudoku.pdf
|archive-date=December 10, 2006
|language=fr
}}</ref> It was not a Sudoku because it contained double-digit numbers and required arithmetic rather than logic to solve, but it shared key characteristics: each row, column, and subsquare added up to the same number.

On July 6, 1895, ''Le Siècle''{{'s}} rival, ''[[La France (French newspaper)|La France]]'', refined the puzzle so that it was almost a modern Sudoku and named it {{lang|fr|carré magique diabolique}} ('diabolical magic square'). It simplified the 9×9 magic square puzzle so that each row, column, and [[broken diagonal]]s contained only the numbers 1–9, but did not mark the subsquares. Although they were unmarked, each 3×3 subsquare did indeed comprise the numbers 1–9, and the additional constraint on the broken diagonals led to only one solution.<ref>{{cite web|access-date=August 3, 2009|archive-date=October 10, 2007|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20071010081626/http://cboyer.club.fr/multimagie/English/SudokuAncestors.htm|first=Christian|language=fr|last=Boyer|publisher=(personal webpage)|title=Sudoku's French ancestors|url=http://cboyer.club.fr/multimagie//English/SudokuAncestors.htm|year=2007}}</ref>

These weekly puzzles were a feature of French newspapers such as ''[[L'Écho de Paris]]'' for about a decade, but disappeared about the time of [[World War I]].<ref name=L>{{cite news |first=Jack |last=Malvern |title=Les fiendish French beat us to Su Doku |newspaper=[[The Times]]|date=June 3, 2006 |url=https://www.thetimes.com/article/les-fiendish-french-beat-us-to-su-doku-mrqqshlsjcg |access-date=2024-10-02}}</ref>