Posts from — February 2010

On Friday, February 21, 2010, in Brooklyn, New York, Dan Feyer ended the 5-year winning streak of Tyler Hinman to become the A Division Champion at the 33rd annual American Crossword Puzzle Tournament (ACPT).

Click here to discuss the ACPT in the Puzzlehead forums.

Part 4 – Competition

In 1978, the director of marketing of the Marriott Hotel in Stamford, Connecticut, was searching for a way to sell the services of the brand new hotel during the winter – typically a slow season. He came up with the idea of running a crossword puzzle tournament using this logic: lots of people live in the Stamford area and commute to New York City by train, and many commuters like to solve crossword puzzles on the route, so a tournament might appeal to that crowd.

He called the then-editor of the New York Times crossword puzzle Eugene Maleska who suggested a constructor in Stamford might be interested in running it. That constructor also declined, but he recommended a 25-year-old puzzle whiz named Will Shortz who might be interested.

Shortz had restarted the National Puzzlers League (NPL) conventions just two years earlier, and jumped at the chance to create it, and with that the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament was born. In its first year, 149 contestants showed up and had such a great time solving and socializing that the tournament has become an annual event. The 2005 ACPT was documented in the motion picture Wordplay (which was selected for screening at the Sundance Film Festival) and was lucky to capture one of the most exciting conclusions to the tournament in ACPT history.

The tournament is a full weekend event. There are five divisions to the tournament that allow people to compete with others at approximately the same skill level (E Division is for beginners, A Division is for expert solvers). Six puzzles of varying size and difficulty are solved on Saturday (with Puzzle 5 being the most difficult), followed by one puzzle on Sunday morning. The top three finishers in each of C, B, and A divisons then compete head to head with each other on stage in front of the tournament audience. (Trophies are given for finishers in all divisions as well as age groups and geographic regions.)

You never know what kinds of puzzles will appear at the tournament – one puzzle had every single clue written as a spoonerism (if the answer is HUMERUS, the normal clue would be “Funny bone”, but the spoonerism clue was written as “Bunny phone”). Another featured a story with numbered blanks – you had to figure out the words that went in the blanks from the context of the story, then place those words into the corresponding places in the puzzle. Crazy stuff!

Dan Feyer, Winner of the 2010 American Crossword Puzzle Tournament

Tyler Hinman won the 2005 tournament and went on to win the next four in a row in an unprecedented streak of competetive solving. The question of who would unseat Hinman was wanswered this past weekend as Dan Feyer (who won C Division in 2008 and B Division in 2009) dominated the competition, finishing first in the points standing and first in the A Division final.

Even if you can’t get to New York City for the tournament, you can still play online. All of the puzzles from the past several years are available, and you can solve them while on the clock, just like the tournament players do in person. (I played along online this year and my score would have put me in 468th place if I was there in person.)

On Friday, February 19, 2010, in Brooklyn, New York, the registration desk for the 33rd annual American Crossword Puzzle Tournament (ACPT) will open for business, marking the commencement of one of the single largest gatherings of puzzleheads from across the country.

Click here to discuss the ACPT in the Puzzlehead forums.

Part 3 – Evolution

While crosswords became popular in the early 1920s, it was not until 1942 that The New York Times (which initially regarded crosswords as frivolous, calling them “a primitive form of mental exercise”) began running a crossword in its Sunday edition. The first puzzle, a Sunday, ran on February 15, 1942; the motivating impulse for the Times to finally run the puzzle (which took over 20 years despite the fact that its publisher, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, was a longtime crossword fan) appears to have been the bombing of Pearl Harbor: in a memo dated December 18, 1941, an editor conceded that the puzzle deserved space in the paper, considering what was happening elsewhere in the world and that readers might need something to occupy themselves during blackouts.

The puzzle proved popular, and Sulzberger himself would author a Times puzzle before the year was out. In 1950, the crossword became a daily feature. That first daily puzzle was published without an author line, and to this day the identity of the author of the first weekday Times crossword remains unknown.

There have been four editors of the puzzle: Margaret Farrar, who edited the puzzle from its inception until 1969, Will Weng, former head of the Times’s metropolitan copy desk, who edited the puzzle from 1969 to 1977, Eugene T. Maleska, who edited the puzzle until 1993, and the current editor, Will Shortz. Of the three former editors, Maleska alone held the position until his death.

In addition to editing the Times crosswords, Shortz founded and runs the annual American Crossword Puzzle Tournament as well as the World Puzzle Championship (where he remains captain of the US team), has published numerous books of crosswords, sudoku, and other puzzles, and serves as “Puzzlemaster” on the NPR show “Weekend Edition Sunday”.

The popularity of the puzzle has grown over the years, until it came to be considered the most prestigious of the widely circulated crosswords in America; its popularity is attested to by the numerous celebrities and public figures who’ve publicly proclaimed their liking for the puzzle, including opera singer Beverly Sills, author Norman Mailer, baseball pitcher Mike Mussina, former President Bill Clinton, conductor Leonard Bernstein, TV host Jon Stewart and music duo the Indigo Girls.

In addition to their appearance in the printed newspaper, the Times puzzles also appear online at the paper’s website, where they remain the only part of the paper’s content for which users need to pay for online access (unless they already subscribe to the printed version of the paper for home delivery). In 2007, Majesco released The New York Times Crosswords game, a video game adaptation for the Nintendo DS handheld. The game includes over 1,000 Times crosswords from all days of the week. Various other forms of merchandise featuring the puzzle have been created over the years, including dedicated electronic crossword handhelds that just contain Times crosswords, as well as cookie jars, baseballs, coasters, mousepads, and other items.

Will Shortz does not write the Times crossword himself. Instead the puzzles are submitted to him as the editor by a wide variety of contributors. Aside from the increasing difficulty throughout the week, the Monday-Thursday puzzles and the Sunday puzzle always contain a theme, some sort of connection between 3-5 long (usually Across) answers. The theme could consist of a similar type of pun in each theme entry, a similar type of letter substitution or alteration in each entry, or any of numerous other types.

Notable dates, e.g., holidays or anniversaries of famous events, are often celebrated with an appropriately themed puzzle, although only two holidays are currently commemorated on a routine annual basis: Christmas and April Fool’s Day. The Friday and Saturday puzzles, the most difficult in the paper, are routinely unthemed and are usually “wide-open”, with fewer black squares, and more long words.

Given the Times’s perception as a paper for a generally literate, well-read, and somewhat arty audience, puzzles frequently reference works of literature, art, or classical music, as well as modern TV, movies, or other touchstones of popular culture.

Next time – the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament

I just added a new link for a very interesting site I just discovered called PuzzleWiki. The site’s description is:

PuzzleWiki is a resource built for “paper-based” puzzle solvers and creators, especialy for participants in live puzzle hunt events. This site is built and maintained by the Microsoft Puzzle Hunt team Everyday Heroes.

This site sounds very cool, and given its Wiki-nature, it will only become more awesome.

On Friday, February 19, 2010, in Brooklyn, New York, the registration desk for the 33rd annual American Crossword Puzzle Tournament (ACPT) will open for business, marking the commencement of one of the single largest gatherings of puzzleheads from across the country.

Click here to discuss the ACPT in the Puzzlehead forums.

Part 2 – Creation

(Reprinted from the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament web site)

Crossword puzzles are said to be the most popular and widespread word game in the world, yet have a short history. The first crosswords appeared in England during the 19th century. They were of an elementary kind, apparently derived from the word square, a group of words arranged so the letters read alike vertically and horizontally, and printed in children’s puzzle books and various periodicals. In the United States, however, the puzzle developed into a serious adult pastime.

The first known published crossword puzzle was created by a journalist named Arthur Wynne from Liverpool, and he is usually credited as the inventor of the popular word game. December 21, 1913 was the date and it appeared in a Sunday newspaper, the New York World. Wynne’s puzzle differed from today’s crosswords in that it was diamond shaped and contained no internal black squares. During the early 1920′s other newspapers picked up the newly discovered pastime and within a decade crossword puzzles were featured in almost all American newspapers. It was in this period crosswords began to assume their familiar form. Ten years after its rebirth in the States it crossed the Atlantic and re-conquered Europe.

The first appearance of a crossword in a British publication was in Pearson’s Magazine in February 1922, and the first Times crossword appeared on February 1 1930. British puzzles quickly developed their own style, being considerably more difficult than the American variety. In particular the cryptic crossword became established and rapidly gained popularity. The generally considered governing rules for cryptic puzzles were laid down by A. F. Ritchie and D. S. Macnutt.

These people, gifted with the ability to see words puzzled together in given geometrical patterns and capable of twisting and turning words into word plays dancing on the wit of human minds, have since constructed millions of puzzles by hand and each of these puzzlers has developed personal styles known and loved by his fans. These people have set the standard of what to expect from a quality crossword puzzle.

Next time – a history of the New York Times crossword puzzle

I’m always looking for ways to increase user interaction in this little microcommunity, which means reducing barriers to participation.

To that end, I have just removed the requirement of registration on this site in order to leave comments. If you want to comment on something you see and you don’t want to go through the register-activate-post-approve cycle, you can go ahead and comment away with impunity. The only thing you need to fill out is a reCAPTCHA form. Registered users don’t need to use the form, so there’s an incentive for you to register!

If it works, it’ll stay this way. If I get bombarded by hackers who’ve figured out an automated way around reCAPTCHA, I’ll have to turn it off.

My Puzzle Solving 101 Series was mentioned on Show 255 of Podcacher. Whoo-hoo! Take a listen to all of their geocaching (and puzzling) goodness! (free!)

I’ve added a gadget to the blog that detects if you’re reading this from an iPhone and reformats it accordingly.

Unfortunately, I have no such device … if someone with an iPhone or an iPod Touch or Droid or some other such mobile gizmo wouldn’t mind using it to visit this site and let me know if it works, I’d appreciate it.

On Friday, February 19, 2010, in Brooklyn, New York, the registration desk for the 33rd annual American Crossword Puzzle Tournament (ACPT) will open for business, marking the commencement of one of the single largest gatherings of puzzleheads from across the country.

This article will be the first in a four-part series that will be published here in the run-up to the tournament.

Click here to discuss the ACPT in the Puzzlehead forums.

[Read more →]

I’ve been cracking the whip on the Puzzlehead I.T. guys lately … unfortunately, they’re sado-masochists. But one such beating finally convinced them to hop on the Twitter bus to Tweetsville.

You can now follow Puzzlehead on Twitter as “imapuzzlehead” (yes, all other good combinations of “puzzlehead” were already taken). Check out the tweets at this URL:

http://www.twitter.com/imapuzzlehead

We here at Puzzlehead understand how fortunate we are that we can enjoy warm tropical weather year round. But if you’re snowbound and suffering from cabin fever, here’s something at which to throw your collective brains.

That Fedora Guy has put together an interesting geocaching.com bookmark list called The Unfoundlings. On it are caches all around the world that have never been found after having been published for at least six months. As of October 2009, there were 53 unfoundlings, and it should come as no surprise a good number of them are mystery caches. A few of them are just challenges, such as the 100 Letterbox Challenge or the South Dakota County Challenge. But most of them are just really tough puzzles, such as:

• Secrecy
• Cache Noir – Scene One
• Different Alternating Universes

Good luck with these, puzzleheads!

-eP

PS: My favorite unfoundling is not a puzzle – it’s the single most remote cache in North America.

Click here to discuss this article in the Puzzlehead Forums