Crosswords

[seekingferret]

I've always been a puzzle person, and I've been poking at the New York Times crossword since I was ten years old sitting next to my grandmother at her kitchen table messing around with the Sunday puzzle. I wasn't particularly helpful to her, but that wasn't exactly the point. In high school, my quiz bowl team used to sit around with a photocopy of the Friday puzzle from the school library and wrestle with it after practice- we could usually nail it in less than half an hour.

For the uninitiated, the New York Times crosswords from Monday to Thursday are progressively more difficult themed puzzles. Then Friday is a rather challenging themeless and Saturday is a more challenging themeless. Sunday is generally designed to be roughly of the same difficulty as Thursday, but in a larger puzzle format.

About three years ago, I got the NYTimes crossword iPad app and started doing the puzzle daily. The app keeps track of times and some other statistics. And I have seen my best times on the app creep down slowly since then. When I started doing the puzzle daily, I was doing Sunday puzzles in about forty five minutes. A couple months ago, I solved one in a little over sixteen. A few weeks before that, I got a Friday time down to less than eight minutes.

These are not, in an absolute sense, great times. It was a general rule of thumb three years ago that the fastest crossword solvers in the world would solve a puzzle about four times as fast as me- it's now down to about twice as fast. Still, I am proud of the improvement.

And then something happened and my times for the past month were often ten minutes slower than my recent norms. I wasn't really sure what had happened, I worried that something was wrong with me. But I'm back! Solved this Sunday puzzle in seventeen minutes, solved Monday in 4:41 (just ten seconds off my personal Monday best), solved Saturday in about eleven minutes.



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The other thing I want to say about crosswords is that I've been watching Grey's Anatomy and Grey's has weird ideas about crosswords. People on Grey's report crossword times worse than mine and brag about them. Maggie Pierce demonstrates that she's a wunderkind by bragging that her personal best on a Friday New York Times puzzle is 11 minutes. I solved this Friday's in nine and change and it's a good time for me, but a few minutes off my personal best. (Meanwhile over at Dan Feyer's blog, many time ACPT champion Feyer reports solving it in less than three minutes)

Still, Pierce's Friday 11 is better than some other places on Grey's, where solving in pen is the mark of mastery (general consensus in the crossword community is that assholes who refuse to admit their fallibility solve in pen- everyone makes mistakes on tricky crosswords, no matter how brilliant they are) and handling the Sunday puzzle is held up as proof of being able to handle the hardest crosswordland is capable of offering (it's not, as noted above). On Brooklyn 9-9, a show much more attuned to the nuances of crossword geekery, Amy Santiago has a favorite Saturday crossword constructor, not a Sunday constructor. (That episode was so much fun for me. Random Willz cameo!)

I suppose the fanwank is that these misunderstandings about crosswords are a deliberate character choice- the arrogant surgeons on Grey's have mediocre solving times and think that they are, of course, brilliant cruciverbalists because they are *the best* at everything they touch. That is of course too subtle to be the real reason, but I can accept it because it amuses me. Derek Shepherd strutting around thinking he's such a great puzzle solver because he's never met any ACPT competitors. That makes me laugh a lot.


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All that said, I should say that though I'm pleased and proud my times have gone down, I'm not exactly obsessively training or anything. There's a cohort in the crossword community for whom the Sunday Times puzzle is a thing you do over a cup of coffee with breakfast, and you luxuriate in it. If it takes less than half an hour, they reason, you're doing it wrong. There's nothing wrong with this logic. It's fun to take puzzles slow enough to catch all the little details. I got through the Tuesday puzzle so quickly this week I didn't even register the theme until I was done. Which was okay, it was kind of a cute theme (Garry Trudeau of Doonesbury co-created it as part of the Times's recent run of celebrity co-constructed puzzles, so it had a bunch of hidden comic strip names), but it wasn't a brilliant theme that greatly enhanced the puzzle.

But anyway, there is pleasure in slow-solving, and there are things I could do to get faster if I really cared, but I'm nonetheless pleased with my improvement.

Comments

[the_rck]

I haven't done a crossword in many years and never got fast (or even necessarily reliably finished), but I remember working on them with one of my grandmothers, too. It's one of the good and ongoing memories I have of her (I was 30 when we lost her to colon cancer. I'm 50 now) from middle school and high school, so thank you for reminding me of her. I don't think of her nearly enough.

I tend to do crosswords and other word puzzles in pen because I can't reliably read pencil on the sort of paper that such things tend to be printed on, not after I've dragged my hand across it a couple of times. If I use the right sort of pen, I can still read the letters after I've gotten ink all over my hand. I don't consider it in any way a point of pride because it's an adaptation, just a thing thing if that makes sense.

[seekingferret]

I tend to do crosswords and other word puzzles in pen because I can't reliably read pencil on the sort of paper that such things tend to be printed on, not after I've dragged my hand across it a couple of times. If I use the right sort of pen, I can still read the letters after I've gotten ink all over my hand. I don't consider it in any way a point of pride because it's an adaptation, just a thing thing if that makes sense.

I meant no offense to people to happen to use pens to solve crosswords for whatever technical reason. I do crosswords in pen, too, sometimes, when I only have a pen, but I do so with the awareness that I'm going to have to cross out and write over letters when I make mistakes. My criticism was of the sort of person who brags "I do the Sunday crossword every week. In pen." as a claim that they do it without ever making a single mistake.

[melannen]

My dad used to do the weekend crosswords every week in his head, without writing anything down. He claimed it was because if he wrote it down, he had to scribble so many mistakes out that it wasn't worth it. It kind of ruined me for anyone bragging about doing it in pen, though. (My family was always of the "longer the better" type - my grandfather used to do them over the phone with his girlfriend every morning. Doing it without writing it down is definitely not the way to a speed record.)

I wonder how the times are affected by doing it on an app instead of paper, though. Do the serious competitors have numbers on that? I've only done computerized crosswords a few times, and never on a touchscreen, but I bet the workflow is different enough that times aren't going to be directly comparable.

[seekingferret]

I've done some early week puzzles in my head, to see if I could. (Also, because I was doing it in class while I was supposed to be paying attention to the professor, sometimes.) It definitely offers its own challenges. I guess there is a version of the in-pen trope I've seen where the depiction isn't "So arrogant they claim they never make mistakes" but rather "so finicky/ocd that they refuse to write anything down until they're certain it's correct." I find that less offputting, but I don't have such issues myself.

I wonder how the times are affected by doing it on an app instead of paper, though. Do the serious competitors have numbers on that? I've only done computerized crosswords a few times, and never on a touchscreen, but I bet the workflow is different enough that times aren't going to be directly comparable.

My understanding is that if you're really serious about the fastest way to solve, most of the really serious people find that solving on a computer with a keyboard is the fastest workflow (I routinely lose fifteen seconds or more a puzzle to data entry mistakes with the tablet). ACPT is a paper crossword tournament, so a lot of the top solvers talk about deliberately switching to paper crosswords some time before the tournament because the mechanics are different and they need to readjust to them. (And the top top solvers talk about practicing on a giant whiteboard before the tournament because the final puzzle is solved on a giant whiteboard in front of an audience, and that's a whole experience itself).

[ghost_lingering]

The rest of my family is much more into the NYT puzzles than I am, but I always enjoy them when I visit my parents and they have printed copies of that week's puzzles lying around. My parents enjoy it as an activity they can do together and perhaps the one thing they actually like about having a daughter who lives halfway across the country in NYC is that they can ask me about some of the more NYC-centric or East Coast-centric clues. (Last one was a question about if there was a Lex train line which I confirmed there was, though it is more commonly referred to as the green line or the 4-5-6.) My brother is much more serious about it (or was before he had a toddler) -- he did ACPT one year, though he was eliminated rather quickly. He's also dabbled in making puzzles.

One thing that I find interesting about both crosswords and Scrabble is that (in my experience) they reward people who are stronger in math and more "left brained", which, as the more right brained black sheep of my family I used to find really frustrating. It didn't seem fair that the kid who wound up majoring in math was better at word puzzles than the one who wound up majoring in English! But framing it as being a puzzle is the key to why that is -- as interesting as the puzzle themes can be, it's still a matter of interlocking answers, not a matter of narrative or plot or character development. Reframing it that was as an adult has allowed me to enjoy them much more than I used to when I was younger.

You've seen the documentary about the ACPT right?