By Eliza Ridgeway
 lisa walton/special to the Town Crier Blach student Juliana Walton competes in the San Francisco Exploratorium’s Sudoku Tournament. |
Los Altos gained a champion last week when Blach eighth-grader Juliana Walton outsmarted a field of adult competitors in the San Francisco Exploratorium’s Sudoku Tournament. Winning the event landed Juliana an Exploratorium family membership and other swag, but equally exciting was besting the San Francisco Chronicle’s scrabble puzzler.
“To be honest, I really didn’t think I’d make it that far,” Juliana said. She drowned out the pressure of competition by singing songs in her head as she worked through the puzzles, including some very appropriate material from the Disney movie “Mulan II” (”Like an oak/You must stand firm…Think fast/Unafraid!”).
In the final round, Juliana had 30 minutes to complete three puzzles, and she won the audience over with a feat of sheer audacity in the final minutes, according to her mother Lisa. Realizing she had made a mistake, Juliana erased the entire puzzle board and began again, with the clock ticking.
Juliana credits an inspiring Blach math teacher, Marcia Chron, with introducing her to Sudoku last September and encouraging her class to enjoy brain-teaser games and strategies.
Sudoku, a game of spaces and symbols, requires neither great knowledge of the world nor esoteric mathematical stratagems. The brain-teaser presents a grid of 81 squares, divided into 9 boxes. A player must place the same 9 symbols (for instance, the numbers 1 through 9) in each box, each row and each line of the grid. Place one symbol in the wrong place, and the entire game descends into a snarl. For each puzzle, there is only one correct solution - a single arrangement of characters throughout the boxes.
This is not a good game in which to guess - it requires clearheaded, careful reasoning to plot out the consequences of each character’s placement but no technical mathematical ability. Juliana said her skills in math made it more comfortable to gaze at the grid and use spatial reasoning to “see” which characters needed to go where, but she also said her excellent memory helped, too.
Not surprisingly, Juliana said she is interested in going into engineering or psychology, or both. But before then, she said she has an interest in some shorter-term work as a Disney princess - Pocahontas, preferably, or, if she’s typecast as a blond, Aurora, the Sleeping Beauty.
