If you like puzzles (and, if you’re reading this blog, I know you do), be there for an overview of the series; stories of its creation, solution, and discovery; and some fun audience participation.

The Boston Crossword Puzzle Tournament was held this past April 11 (which was a Sunday in April), hosted by Joon Pakh. The contest included 150 registered participants as well as 500 Oreo cookies. Contestants solved four soon-to-be-published puzzles from the New York Times using American Crossword Puzzle Tournament scoring rules.

The winner was Eric Maddy, who not only won the Boston tournament but (as I am led to believe) also won the Brown University tournament the day before. And he’s not even from New England, but hails from California. Impressive!

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

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.

Part 1 – Discovery

When I was in college, I grew tired of the local rock station and the student-run station, and I started surfing the dial for something new to listen to while driving home from work. I stumbled across Fresh Air on the college’s public radio station and became a life-long NPR listener.

When the soon-to-be Mrs. eP and I graduated and moved to South Florida in 1990, we developed a new weekend tradition: every Saturday, we’d grab lunch, take the car to a nearby park, and listen to Car Talk on our local NPR station – our favorite segment was the Car Talk Puzzler. I had loved games and pencil puzzles for as long as I can remember, so the idea of on-air puzzles had me hooked.

As we began to listen to other news programs, we also discovered Weekend Edition Sunday, featuring the weekly Puzzle on the Air segment, led by NPR’s Puzzlemaster Will Shortz. Since 1987, Shortz has challenged a new listener each week to a series of word puzzles as well as posted a new challenge for the following week – the on-air player for the following week is selected at random from all correct responses. One day – real soon now! – I’m sure it’ll be my turn to be chosen to play Puzzle on the Air.

Shortz is one of the world’s leading puzzle gurus. He is the only person in the world to ever receive a college degree in enigmatology – the study of puzzles – a degree program he designed for himself. He founded the ACPT in 1978 and has been its director ever since. He worked for Games Magazine for 15 years and held the position of Editor from 1989 to 1993. In 1993, Shortz left Games Magazine to become the Crossword Puzzle Editor for the New York Times – the most prestigious and widely-circulated crossword puzzle in America.

In the summer of 2006, an announcement was made on an NPR Puzzle on the Air episode that Will Shortz would be featured in a new movie about the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament called Wordplay. I was intrigued … I knew of the NYT crossword but always assumed it was far too difficult for mere mortals like myself. The movie was scheduled to open on the weekend that Mrs. eP and I planned to celebrate our 15th anniversary, so what better way to celebrate?

Since that weekend, I’ve become an avid fan of the NYT puzzle in particular and in crossword puzzles in general. Cruciverbalists (look it up) make up a large segment of the puzzlehead community – it seems that more people solve crosswords than any other kind of puzzle, possibly more than all other types of puzzles combined.

If you aren’t already a crossword puzzle fan, give it a try – you’ll be solving Saturday puzzles in pen in no time!

What puzzles would you recommend solving in honor of National Puzzle Day? Let us know in the Puzzlehead forums.

Stan Newman’s Crossword University ^tm
P.O. Box 69
Massapequa Park, NY 11762
(516) 795-8823 – StanXwords@aol.com – Fax 516-795-6788

Dear Puzzle Friend:You’re invited to join me on our Ninth Annual Crossword-theme event: a relaxing 10-day cruise from Ft Lauderdale, on Holland America Line’s beautiful ms Noordam. The itinerary includes 5 terrific Caribbean Ports plus a visit to Holland America’s private island, Half Moon Cay.

You can count on me for an entertaining program of puzzle activities while you’re on board. You’ll have a “full boat” of crosswords, word games, and other puzzles to keep you busy, and I’ll be leading instructional seminars on improving your solving skills and creating puzzles of your own.

Of course, the Noordam has plenty of non-puzzle activities for you and “signifcant others” to enjoy, plus all the luxurious amenities you would expect from Holland America Line. Special Event Cruises, who has handled the travel arrangements for our previous eight cruises, is a first-rate company that specializes in organizing seagoing theme events at discount prices. Their people are friendly and accommodating, and I’m sure you’ll find it a pleasure dealing with them.

For more information, or to book your cruise, call Special Event Cruises at 1-800-326-0373. Looking for a roommate? Ask Special Event Cruises about Holland America’s unique cabin share program. They will attempt to find you a cabin-mate, and if they can’t, you’ll get a single room at the “per person” double-occupancy rate. You must book your cruise through Special Event Cruises to participate in the crossword program.

For any puzzle-related questions, please contact me directly, either by regular e-mail or e-mail at the addresses at the top of this letter. I look forward to seeing you – and puzzling you – on board the ms Noordam.

Sincerely,

Stanley Newman
President

Next week (on Friday, January 15), one of the most famous puzzle hunts of all time begins anew – the MIT Mystery Hunt! I would try to do justice to this story, but an article in Games Magazine sums it up far better than I could …

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology seems to have been designed for treasure hunts. Its main buildings, constructed in the early part of this century, are interconnected in a bewildering maze of passages, skywalks, and tunnels. Halls suddenly slope, or change direction, or stop, hinting at some architectural compromise now long-forgotten. Harshly-lit basements lurk beneath, with dingy subbasements below them. Even the doors are peculiar. Some are half-size. Some lead nowhere. Some bear inscriptions such as “Department of Alchemy” or “Shelob’s Lair.”

Each January, during the students’ “Independent Activities Period,” an unusual coin is hidden somewhere on campus. Students form teams and spend countless hours solving a host of baffling puzzles in order to track the coin down. To succeed, they may have to determine the duty cycle of an electronic circuit, clamber through a humid steam tunnel, bone up on their crystallography, and break into an elevator control room. Their only prize: to run the hunt the following year.

Credit all this to one Brad Schaefer.

Brad was a graduate student at the Institute back in 1979. An avid puzzle person, he would become well-known for organizing a role-playing game called Spymaster and for recreating famous chess games in the lobby of MIT’s main building using a life-size board and human pieces. His most long-lived contribution, however, has been the invention of the Mystery Hunt.

The idea of a university-wide puzzle activity came to Brad while he was driving cross-country with his girlfriend (and occasional White Queen in the living chess games) Martha. The first Mystery Hunt took place a few months later, in January of 1980. Brad stood in the main lobby of MIT and handed out a set of difficult puzzles whose solution disclosed the location of a hidden Indian head penny. it was the beginning of a new MIT tradition.

Brad’s hunt was not for lightweights. For starters, teams had to translate a Chinese ideogram, evaluate a complex integral, determine the result of a convoluted FORTRAN program, and break a polyalphabetic cipher. Nevertheless, several groups breezed through the hunt, and the coin was found the same day. Brad was to find that the hunts were always solved more quickly than he expected.

“My biggest problem was making the things hard enough. Once I wrote a clue in Minoan Linear B, a totally obscure language that was used on clay tablets in ancient Crete. To make things tougher, I didn’t tell them it was Linear B and I checked out the two library books on the subject. All the teams solved it anyway! One team had a person who was actually studying Linear B. Another just happened to have a book on the subject. It was incredible.”

Jean-Joseph Cotè remembers Brad’s killer puzzles with affection. Jean was an undergraduate at the time and leader of a team called the Holman Reactionary Army.

“We were trying to translate this passage in Bengali, and one of our guys was sitting in the library with a Bengali-English dictionary. Unfortunately, he didn’t know the order of the Bengali alphabet, and the letters get joined in weird ways. He actually got a few words but then we realized there was going to be a meeting of the Indian students’ organization. Three of us got there early and we stood at the door asking each new person, ‘Excuse me, do you speak Bengali?’ We finally found someone who did!”

A slipup by Brad lead Jean into one of the more infamous episodes in Mystery Huntdom. “He’d asked us for the star catalog number of the nearest globular cluster to Cor Caroli and the answer was M3. We were supposed to figure out to drop the M and use the 3 to make the library room number 132. But Brad didn’t realize there’s a mezzanine in that building, so there really is a room 1M32! We raced there and knocked on the door, and there’s this shuffling inside and someone’s holding the doorknob. We went around the back and through a window we could see another team ransacking the office! We found the librarian whose office it was, and she kicked them out. Then she let us search, but it was the wrong place after all.”

Brad ran Mystery Hunts for four years until he got his PhD in 1983. The Holman Reactionary Army found the penny that year (it was taped to the bottom of a drawer full of fossilized worms) and thereby “won” the opportunity to put on the next hunt.

People who were expecting a letdown in intensity once Jean took over for Brad got a rude shock when they received the “Ofishal Mystery Hunt Clue Sheet” in January of 1984. its cheery subheading was “Good luck, folks,” and teams would need every bit of encouragement they could get during the 57 hour and 25 minutes of what was to be the longest hunt on record.

What made this hunt so hard? Puzzles like the 192-letter cryptogram, for one thing. As Jean notes, “A cipher of that length should be a snap to break. And this one wouldn’t have been bad at all if I’d thought to mention that the hidden message was in Spanish. But I didn’t. I also neglected to note that the pairs ‘ll’, ‘rr,’ and ‘ch’ stood for single letters, as they do in the Spanish alphabet.” Chalk up some frustrated victims for this ruse, particularly the people on the Spanish House team, who were among the last to figure out the trick.

Other problems required research into bartending, rock music, topology, and Massachusetts town history. Despite all this a team did eventually find the coin on the third day. They were informed that they had to run the next hunt, and MIT’s newest tradition was solidly on its way.

The hunt begins with an easy opening question. After that, you have to find and solve the five hunt puzzles. The answers will give you clues to the final puzzle (or endgame). At 3PM, the final (and most difficult) puzzle is revealed. Using the clues you have obtained throughout the day, you must solve the puzzle and accomplish a task. This can be a telephone number or a certain place you must go to do something.

You can look at last year’s results here:
http://www.miamiherald.com/heraldhunt/story/742724.html

There is an archive of past hunts here:
http://www.vwtech.com/tropichunt/

There is also a geocache (GCCA54) set up as a tribute to the hunt.

If anyone is interested in setting up a team for this year’s hunt, I think it would be fun!!