Sudoku, Problem-Solving, and Medical School: CI MED’s Tyler Chen on Puzzles in Medicine

Carle Illinois College of Medicine student Tyler Chen is very good at pattern recognition. His talents earned him a spot on the American team in the 2025 World Sudoku Championship. Now a rising third-year student at the world’s first engineering-based college of medicine, Chen leverages those same skills to solve clinical problems as an aspiring clinician.

• How and when did you get started with Sudoku, and what keeps you engaged?

  

My mother taught me how to play Sudoku at seven years old, but I really got into this world in 2020. I was about to graduate high school. Then when COVID onset, and I had a lot of time at home to do Sudoku! I got better and better to the point where I qualified to be on the U.S. national Sudoku team. I've had the opportunity to both attend and host different Sudoku competitions, and have met many great friends along the way, which has continuously fueled my interest and engagement in Sudoku. I've also begun writing more puzzles, and that has kept me creatively stimulated throughout as well. 

• What Sudoku competition results are you most proud of?

My best performance at the World Sudoku Championship was 21^st in 2023, but I think my proudest competition result was the US Sudoku Qualifying Contest in 2025. This was a contest to see who would qualify to be on the American "A" team for the World Sudoku Championship, and I actually got 1^st in this competition! It was my first time getting 1^st place in anything for Sudoku, and [it] is the result I am most proud of. 

• What makes a good Sudoku player?

I would say a good Sudoku player is one who can be flexible and switch between different approaches easily. When looking at a puzzle, it can be difficult to sift through useful and distracting digits, and being able to efficiently identify the important bits of information that lead to progress is key to being good at Sudoku. Being able to pivot away from strategies that haven't been as helpful on a particular puzzle is also important to quickly make progress as well. 

• How do these reasoning skills translate to your work as a medical student?

I think that there are a few strategies for approaching Sudoku puzzles that are also relevant for approaching medicine. Sudoku ends up being a lot of A leads to B leads to C, and having that downstream, cascading thinking has been helpful in terms of thinking about how to approach medical problems in the clinic and the hospital. Making progress in Sudoku is also about sifting through information to find the most useful details to help progress through the puzzle, and I definitely find that to be helpful in medicine as well. There can often be many distracting symptoms and details, and being able to identify the relevant ones in a case is an important skill that I'm still developing alongside Sudoku.

• How does your educational background inform both of these pursuits – medicine and Sudoku?

Before coming to CI MED, I studied math at Dartmouth, and I feel that to be very relevant to both medicine and Sudoku. I think that being able to recognize and identify patterns is very important in both medicine and Sudoku, and is definitely something I got better at in studying math. Additionally, I encountered many difficult problems throughout my math classes, and the trial-and-error process of approaching these problems in different ways definitely lends itself towards Sudoku and medicine. Sometimes there is a really hard Sudoku puzzle, and experimenting with different approaches helps uncover a path forward. Sometimes in medicine, there is a vague case, and being able to keep an open mind is important to have a clear plan forward. 

• What healthcare problems are you working on solving now at CI MED?

Some of my medical interests coming into CI MED focus on language and immunology. I'm helping run workshops for Chinese speakers focusing on nutrition and healthy lifestyle habits, overcoming the linguistic barrier in healthcare. I'm also focused on using mathematical tools to help answer questions within allergy/immunology. 

• What are your future goals as a serious puzzle gamer and as a Physician Innovator in training?

One of my future goals is to release a first book containing puzzles I have written. I've slowly but surely begun accumulating a portfolio of different Sudoku puzzles that I'm proud of, and plan on releasing a puzzle book containing them. I've done a lot of solving in the past few years, and writing is something I really want to embrace further, and creating this collection is something I really wish to accomplish. As for my future goals as a physician, I would love, if the powers are willing, to be an allergist.