He's Down With This Until He's Across
February 18, 2023 4:50 PM   Subscribe

I like puzzles of all sorts. People who like crosswords like to have their knowledge and vocabulary tested, and people who like Sudoku like the purity of the logic challenge. And my experience is that they’re two vastly different groups of people. I’m one of the rarities who loves both. Will Shortz’s Life in Crosswords [The New Yorker; ungated]

Previously on crossword puzzles and diversity
Previously on Will Shortz
Previously on the New York Times crossword
posted by chavenet (44 comments total) 14 users marked this as a favorite
 
I have no idea how Will Shortz's brain is wired, but it is definitely wired in a way that often confounds mine. I'm glad he's around, although some of the NYT crossword choices have been a bit weird lately.

If anyone wants the Sondheim crosswords, they can memail me for a download link.
posted by hippybear at 5:08 PM on February 18, 2023 [4 favorites]


Oh, what a great interview. I picked up my first issue of Games magazine in early high school, loved it and was frustrated by it in equal measure (I still always think of those envelopes readers would send them, where the Post Office had to solve a puzzle to get it to the right address), and then later when I'd see Shortz mentioned with crosswords I'd think, wait, the Games magazine guy?, and sure enough it was him. I can't think of too many other people who have so consistently brought so much pleasure to the world. I spent so much time on his Sudoku as a break from diapers and bottles, and the Times crossword is a favorite treat when I'm on vacation. It's good to hear that someone who has made people so happy, has settled into such a happy life himself.
posted by mittens at 5:11 PM on February 18, 2023 [4 favorites]


So what does it mean about people’s brains if they like both crosswords and sudoku?
posted by eviemath at 5:23 PM on February 18, 2023 [5 favorites]


For me, the math games feel like work, or homework, while the word games can be relaxing if I am in the mood for them.
posted by Dip Flash at 6:02 PM on February 18, 2023 [4 favorites]


Awwww, and he finally found his soulmate at age 69! Finally! I hope they have a long, healthy life together.

(< bill and ted > 69, dude! < / bill and ted>)
posted by jenfullmoon at 6:14 PM on February 18, 2023 [3 favorites]


This is a nice interview. I also liked the documentary Wordplay way back when.
posted by janell at 7:08 PM on February 18, 2023 [1 favorite]


A fun interview and I am so happy for him that he has found a new joy!

The puzzlemaster cannot use puzzles to relax, so, table tennis!! I am pleased that he has his own relaxation outlet.
posted by brainwane at 9:12 PM on February 18, 2023 [2 favorites]


mittens, your experience with Will Shortz is nearly the same as mine, down to finding GAMES Magazine in school (elementary school for me).
posted by JHarris at 10:01 PM on February 18, 2023 [2 favorites]




Most of my friends are part of the puzzle community. Most of us not only like to solve both word and logic/math puzzles, but many write both kinds of puzzles. I'm really surprised that there is a divide. I mean, more puzzle equals more fun!
posted by obol at 10:55 PM on February 18, 2023 [9 favorites]


I still always think of those envelopes readers would send them, where the Post Office had to solve a puzzle to get it to the right address

It didn't take the local post office long to figure out that any weird envelope went to Games.
posted by Etrigan at 12:16 AM on February 19, 2023 [5 favorites]




Watching Gillian Jacobs lose her shit over Will Shortz warms my icy heart.
posted by Jessica Savitch's Coke Spoon at 6:21 AM on February 19, 2023 [4 favorites]


So what does it mean about people’s brains if they like both crosswords and sudoku?

Or if you can take or leave both? I don’t seek other out but I will happily do either one to pass twenty minutes in a waiting room or what-have-you.

I suppose this means there are two types of people and I am neither.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 6:25 AM on February 19, 2023 [1 favorite]


I like my crosswords, but nope-out on sudoku or any other math/numbers-based puzzles. That part of my brain runs and hides when math enters the room.
posted by Thorzdad at 6:43 AM on February 19, 2023 [4 favorites]


(I still always think of those envelopes readers would send them, where the Post Office had to solve a puzzle to get it to the right address)

I suspect that after a point they just forwarded all the cryptically addressed envelopes to them.
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 7:12 AM on February 19, 2023 [2 favorites]


I like my crosswords, but nope-out on sudoku or any other math/numbers-based puzzles. That part of my brain runs and hides when math enters the room.

I'm highly a math-philic person and I still don't particularly care for sudoku. I've got to say, first, that sudoku isn't really about numbers; you could replace them with any group of nine symbols and it would still work exactly the same way. I once saw a puzzle page in a sports magazine that had a sudoku where you were supposed to fill in the grid with the abbreviations for the nine positions on a baseball team.

I think what sudoku doesn't give me is a variety of things to think about. Whenever I've done one (which, admittedly, is not often) it seems like there's a sameness to all the logic you have to use. Word-based crosswords require thinking in more varied ways, and they make your brain do a bunch of different things. But there are number-based puzzles that also have this feature — I greatly prefer KenKen, in particular, because it has the arithmetic aspect and the Latin-square aspect, and so I end up needing to attack different parts of the puzzle in different ways to be successful.
posted by Johnny Assay at 8:07 AM on February 19, 2023 [5 favorites]


Thank you for sharing this interview! I have been doing the NYT crossword in various forms for years now (current streak 161, longest streak 286) and I have really noticed and appreciated the modernization and diversification of clues. There is still a ways to go, but if I've had to know ASTA (the dog from The Thin Man, a movie/novel that is almost 90 years old) to complete puzzles, it's okay for someone older than me to have to know the current day artist DUA Lipa.

I love crosswords but my brain can not handle sudoku. I get it, but I can't ever manage to hook into the right squares that would get me to a solution.

I'm so happy for him!
posted by kimberussell at 8:27 AM on February 19, 2023 [2 favorites]


We might divide puzzles into types based upon the brain skills they draw upon?

Sudoku is a pure logic puzzle. There is nothing there of the numbers form of math, no implication, no memory, and no knowledge outside of what has been learned about solving them. It's part of a whole class of logic puzzle of the type popularized by the Japanese puzzle magazine Nikoli. If you like sudoku, you'll probably like most of the puzzles generated by Simon Tatham's Puzzle Collection (which I still think is one of the great jewels of the internet). I've noticed that, ultimately, these kinds of puzzles are actually about learning the process of solving them.

Crosswords tax multiple areas. There is some logic in it, but there's also vocabulary, riddle-answering, general knowledge, and even some intuition when it comes to sensing likely fill, and the weirder gimmicks. (You definitely start to pick up a nagging kind of feeling of whether a crossword puzzle is going to have rebuses.) Crossword puzzles have become a formidably great style of puzzle over the decades, wide enough to have their own subgenres (cryptics, rebuses), deep enough that sometimes you can get hard answers with no knowledge of a clue, based on their location in the puzzle and adjacent letters. If you have a Down answer at the right edge of the puzzle that contains a J or a V, you had best immediately look at the Across that ends there and make sure it's the kind of clue that suggests a weird final letter. Maybe a foreign language clue, or something involving Roman numerals? If it's not, it's a strong hint your answer might be wrong.
posted by JHarris at 8:33 AM on February 19, 2023 [6 favorites]


Since the sudoku vs crosswords thread is a bit of a derail anyways, I'm going to toss in my own derail: USA Today is the best crossword you're not already doing and Erik Agard is a fantastic editor. It's significantly easier than the NYT, but it's so great for modern, clever clues and having a diverse pool of puzzle designers. My fave crossword on the regular.
posted by Pitachu at 9:47 AM on February 19, 2023 [3 favorites]


Lovely interview and happy for him that he found love at 69!

If you subscribe to NYMag and like pop culture, I love the Vulture crossword.
posted by ellieBOA at 9:54 AM on February 19, 2023 [2 favorites]


Most of my friends are part of the puzzle community. Most of us not only like to solve both word and logic/math puzzles, but many write both kinds of puzzles. I'm really surprised that there is a divide. I mean, more puzzle equals more fun!

I like a lot of kinds of puzzles but I do strongly identify as a crossword person over a sudoku person. Sudoku just don’t have so much of the stuff that’s fun about, and that provides variety in, crosswords.
posted by atoxyl at 10:24 AM on February 19, 2023 [1 favorite]


I do the Times crossword every day (my best Saturday is about six minutes, although 12 is more typical). I also like some logic puzzles, but Sudoku isn't my favorite. Something about the flavor of it, in a way I can't describe. I'm not actually good at logic puzzles, but I somehow find them addictive (to the point where if I get into one, I end up having to block the site so my sleep/work don't suffer). I accidentally discovered a new one while working on my last game, and I hope to release an app next month (watch MeFi projects!). It's got proportionately more search and less propagation than a sudoku (see Norvig's excellent article), which seems annoying but actually isn't.

I have also been enjoying Knotwords, which is somewhere between a KenKen and a crossword.
posted by novalis_dt at 10:50 AM on February 19, 2023 [3 favorites]


There are so many types of logic puzzles out there. Sudoku may be the most well-known, but I don't actually like it. I love Masyu, Slitherlink, and Nonograms. My husband is a wiz at KenKen. When you think about it, Minesweeper is just another numeric logic puzzle.
posted by obol at 12:05 PM on February 19, 2023 [3 favorites]


I close off every night laying in bed and doing the next days wordle and crossword. Oddly helps me go to sleep.

And I think it's great that he and the Times reacted to the letter the way they did instead of entrenching themselves.
posted by drewbage1847 at 12:38 PM on February 19, 2023 [4 favorites]


I've got to say, first, that sudoku isn't really about numbers; you could replace them with any group of nine symbols and it would still work exactly the same way.

This is only true of the most basic version of sudoku. There are a number of variant rules people use to make more complex puzzles, and most of them involve restricting what digits can be in certain cells based on the total value of the cells, or that a cell must be at least x higher or lower than an adjacent cell, or so on.

Here's a representative sample from the Cracking the Cryptic youtube channel. I used to not have any time whatsoever for sudoku, I found it both boring and extremely fiddly. After watching CtC for a time though, I've developed a lot more respect for it, as a foundation on which much more interesting and varied puzzles can be constructed.

However, if anyone's looking for a less rather than more complicated version of Sudoku, I can recommend Star Battle, which is basically sudoku positional logic distilled down to its purest form, without the hunting and searching of Sudoku. And I'd add Nurikabe, Fillomino, and Cave to the ones Obol recommends above.
posted by rifflesby at 1:13 PM on February 19, 2023 [2 favorites]


Harold Nolte's YouTube channel is a fantastic resource on learning to solve Sudoku.
posted by wittgenstein at 1:19 PM on February 19, 2023 [1 favorite]


(the actual puzzle-solving starts around 5:15 in the video I linked above)
posted by rifflesby at 1:37 PM on February 19, 2023 [1 favorite]


Before he ascended to the NYT crossword throne, he did a puzzle segment with Liane Hansen on NPR's Sunday morning show. I disliked Hansen intensely, and the way she competed with and blatantly cast shade on stage-frightened listener guest solvers drove me especially crazy.

I’ve never quite forgiven him for it, and beyond that, he also seems to lack any real aesthetic appreciation of the English language. I solved hundreds of his puzzles, and I don’t recall feeling that even one was beautiful in a way that Eugene T Maleska's were on a regular basis.
posted by jamjam at 3:34 PM on February 19, 2023 [1 favorite]


I do Wordle first thing in the morning, but my favorite is Mathler.
I prefer KennKen to Sudoku because of the arithmatic, although I've been spending a lot of time the last year on a couple of Cracking the Cryptic puzzles.

I remember Will from Games, and, while his puzzle-ness is terrific, I most envy him for his table tennis skills. I guess it helps to own your own club with a champion coach on your payroll.
posted by MtDewd at 5:28 PM on February 19, 2023 [2 favorites]


I think of Sudoku as logic and not really math, because you can use any 9 unique symbols. Kenken is actual math because there is calculation involved.
posted by soelo at 5:31 PM on February 19, 2023 [1 favorite]


As a mathematician, I feel that sudoku is math despite not being about numbers, as math (even when it is about numbers) is also not about numbers. But I dislike sudoku, as a mathematician, with all the vigor with which I dislike the kinds of math I dislike.
posted by aws17576 at 6:18 PM on February 19, 2023 [6 favorites]


Part of the whole point of computers is that logic is math, when you boil down the number system to 0 and 1, logic and math merge together. You can do addition with ADD and OR, and starting from that point, things quickly get elaborate.
posted by JHarris at 9:11 PM on February 19, 2023 [2 favorites]


logic is math
In computer terms, I agree. I am talking about what happens in my brain when I do a logic puzzle as opposed to a puzzle involving addition or algebra, for example.
posted by soelo at 6:15 AM on February 20, 2023 [1 favorite]


sudoku isn't really about numbers; you could replace them with any group of nine symbols and it would still work exactly the same way.

I once made a little web app that was sudoku using just the number 9 in 9 different fonts
posted by oulipian at 8:30 AM on February 20, 2023 [3 favorites]


Number 9...? Number 9?

On the logic/math derail, yes, I made that point upthread, I just thought we were getting a little more pedantic and tried to acclimate.
posted by JHarris at 8:43 AM on February 20, 2023 [1 favorite]


I thought maybe this would demonstrate that they didn't need to spend any more time on Sudoku

(from Norvig’s article)

This kinda gets to the heart of how I feel about Sudoku, too. Solving them feels like executing an algorithm by hand. Give me an hour, tops, to write a program, and I don’t have to actually solve them anymore.
posted by atoxyl at 9:12 AM on February 20, 2023 [4 favorites]


The thing about Sudoku, and all of its class of logic puzzle, is that algorithms only goes so far. The top difficulty Sudoku puzzles don't have a known algorithm, may not have a workable algorithm. There's some tricks you can apply to help there (like the implications of there being a single unique solution), but at some point you'll ultimately have to go to trial and error. If you write a computer Sudoku solver, you could then just exhaustively try options at that point.

But what enjoyment is there to be had doing it that way? For me, part of the fun of doing this class of puzzle is in coming up with the algorithm itself. Like, I have some pretty good tricks to doing Slant and Loopy (in Simon Tatham's Puzzle Collection) that I've come up with.
posted by JHarris at 11:18 PM on February 21, 2023 [2 favorites]


The top difficulty Sudoku puzzles don't have a known algorithm, may not have a workable algorithm.

If you write a computer Sudoku solver, you could then just exhaustively try options at that point.

I mean I don’t think an “easy” (better than an exponential function of the number of blanks) algorithm for solving Sudoku exists, except that the conventional game has a fixed size so there’s an upper bound. Especially if limited to puzzles that have a unique solution.

But I’ve written the “obvious” semi-efficient solver - it’s theoretically a job interview question - which is an exhaustive recursive search of possibilities, optimized by keeping track of which numbers are still “allowed” in each row/column/box at each level of the search and by starting in the place with the fewest possibilities, and I don’t think it’s a whole lot different from what I’d do mentally/manually to solve one, which is sort of my point. And I’m pretty sure pushing the puzzle into territory that would be hard for computers would make it impossible for humans.
posted by atoxyl at 10:34 AM on February 22, 2023


Again don’t take this rivalry too seriously, but the cool thing about crosswords is there’s some of the same logical thinking about intersecting possibility sets but also clues that come via wordplay and free association.
posted by atoxyl at 10:39 AM on February 22, 2023


I fell into the advanced sudoku rabbit hole last year, aided by this advanced sudoku solver.

The basic skills of elimination and locked candidates then leads into grid analysis (aka x-wing etc) then gets more complicated. The 'finned fish' is just within my comprehension, but in practice I rarely manage to spot them.

The 3D medusa chain analysis on the other hand is just black magic to me.

I made a spreadsheet tool that did the simple stuff automatically and showed the remaining candidates, which for a while was more fun than the actual solving.
posted by Marticus at 1:35 PM on February 22, 2023


And I’m pretty sure pushing the puzzle into territory that would be hard for computers would make it impossible for humans.

I wouldn't say impossible. Once we get into the realm of puzzles where there is no good trick, what I do is look at it from the other direction: making assertions, filling them in, then working through their implications until I find a contradiction.

Doing this in a program with unlimited undo helps a lot for this. And there is a strategy to making progress this way too: you want to pick what you judge to be the least likely assertion to be correct, but one that, if it's wrong, will make you the most progress, because your real aim isn't to solve from the assertion but to show that it's not part of the answer, and can be immediately ruled out. This is what I do in Nonograms (a.k.a. Picross) when I get to the very hardest puzzles, when they can't be done completely through tricks alone.
posted by JHarris at 3:55 AM on February 23, 2023


Ah, that trial and error assertion strategy appears to basically be what is described in more detail as "Hypothesis and Disproof" here.
posted by JHarris at 4:00 AM on February 23, 2023


Diagramless crosswords have much more interaction between logic and word puzzle.

Panda magazine and Grandmaster Puzzles are some other nice puzzle sources.
posted by nat at 5:00 AM on February 23, 2023


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