In the Madison airport bookstore/gift shop, I saw a three-dimensional Sudoku puzzle. It was a Rubik's cube, with six each of nine numbers instead of nine each of six colors.
I may have been somewhat fuzzy, it being after a four-day convention, but not too fuzzy to remember that I've never been any good at Rubik's cubes, nor gotten into Sudoku.
My first guess would have been that for any face, if you popped it off and "unfolded" the remaining five faces to form a Greek cross, then it would follow the Sudoku rules. But the pic that rosefox provided wouldn't follow that at all. It looks more like just making sure that there are nine different numbers on each face that are all oriented in the same direction.
If you click through to the more detail page it says "Make sure each number 1 through 9 appears only once on each side of the cube. Challenge your friends and see how quickly you can solve the puzzle."
Hmmm. Make it a 4x4x4 cube with sixteen letters where the rule is that you can't repeat a letter on a face or on a slice, and I'll endorse it as a Rubik/Sudoku hybrid.
I bought one of those in the Tucson airport a couple of weeks ago. As far as I can tell, it probably doesn't resemble the standard sudoku in having a unique solution; it also seems to have more possible solutions than a regular Rubik's cube, so from a mathematical point of view it is probably less interesting than either. I haven't unscrambled mine yet, mind.
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I may have been somewhat fuzzy, it being after a four-day convention, but not too fuzzy to remember that I've never been any good at Rubik's cubes, nor gotten into Sudoku.
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I finally found the Sudoku cube at Spilsbury, which is probably where I should have looked first.
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