Sudoku Square — a New Design in Field

Sudoku is a game with incremental intelligence and is popularizing in many countries of Asia, Europe, and America. Its most common pattern is to fill the digits 1 through 9 into a square with 9 rows by 9 columns and subdivided 9 boxes, so that each digit appears once, and only once, in every row, column, and box. In this article, the basic properties of k × k Sudoku squares are investigated in the general sense, and then the Sudoku square is made into a new design applied to field experiment. This design can make a layout of k treatment with k replications, and control the 3-way (row, column, and box) soil-environment variation. Thus, the mean of the treatment should be more precise, with a smaller error than that in the Latin square design. The construction and design procedure of Sudoku squares, and the mathematical model and statistical method of data from a Sudoku square design, are presented here