The Further Adventures of Jim Horne

Notable Puzzles of 2011

Every December I look back on the year of NYT puzzles, highlight some that caught my eye, and pick my Puzzle of the Year. There’s little suspense for the Outstanding Achievement of 2011 but read on anyway. There is much to celebrate this year.

Grids

As usual, I start with a few statistical observations. The biggest is that 2011 was not particularly a year of groundbreaking technical accomplishments. Joe Krozel had the least inky grid of the year with 24 blocks but that’s six more than his record set just last year. Seven puzzles had 25 blocks, including two by Patrick Berry. Mr. Krozel did manage to blow through the old record for most blocks in a 15x grid with 56. Julian Lim had the lowest word count (58) but again, well off the record. Only one grid managed a Scrabble Average over 2.0. For the second year in a row, we had two puzzles with two quad stacks of 15-letter answer words but no new stacking arrangements appeared.

Records were broken for most C’s and most R’s in a 15x grid, and records were tied for most M’s, P’s, and V’s. I call this one the official record for most T’s. There are 51 T’s in that grid, every answer contains a T, and every clue starts with a T.

Creativity

Grid records may not be falling but this has been a strong year for grid creativity. David J. Kahn gave us our first schizophrenic puzzle in nearly five years. Read the JNote on this crazy grid by Jeff Chen. Jonah Kagan has a sophisticated math/science theme. Jeremy Newton and Tony Orbach had us traveling around the grid by opening doors we had to find ourselves, and this Yin/Yang grid is simply gorgeous.

Each group of three consecutive black squares formed a BAR in this puzzle and then Mr. Kahn followed up with his own BAR hopping theme. Jeremy Newton included a familiar melody from Beethoven. Brendan Emmett Quigley tipped us off about his impending fatherhood. Within hours of the announcement of the death of Steve Jobs, Kevin G. Der created this tribute puzzle.

My favorite NYT crossword tradition is the year-end Elizabeth C. Gorski visual theme puzzle. If it weren’t for the diabolical genius of the eventual winner, this would have been my puzzle of the year.

Answer words

After going a bit out of fashion last year, ERA regained its spot as the most popular answer of 2011. TEN was, surprisingly, in the top three. New words introduced this year include BLOODLUST, ELENAKAGAN, USUALSUSPECTS, GROUNDEDFORLIFE, SIDVICIOUS, HANNIBALLECTER, BLINGBLING, MEH, NAPOLEONCOMPLEX, ANTIDISESTABLISHMENTARIANISM, GETAROOM, BATGIRL, ACMECORPORATION, CHEFBOYARDEE and about 3,000 more. Oh yeah, including UPTHEWAZOO. Surprising debuts include not just MOLTENCHOCOLATE but plain old CHOCOLATE too.

New constructors, and a few gone missing

Congratulations to the 38 constructors who debuted this year. In order, they are David Hanson, James Tuttle, Chris A. McGlothlin, Jessica A. Hui, Victor Barocas, Steve Salitan, Albert R. Picallo, Robyn Weintraub, Erik Wennstrom, E. J. Masicampo, Gareth Bain, Michael Farabaugh, Nina Rulon-Miller, Jeff Dubner, Alex Vratsanos, Angela Olson Halsted, David Steinberg, Kelsey Boes, Milo Beckman, Joseph Samulak, Tom Baring, Paul Johnson, Johanna Fenimore, Caleb Rasmussen, Ellen Leuschner, Kurt Mueller, Janie Smulyan, Parker Lewis, Dana Delany, Kay Anderson, David Gray, Ben Fish, Dan Feyer, Barry Franklin, Sara Kaplan, Rolf Hamburger, Timothy Polin, and Louis Zulli.

A few constructors fell off the radar in 2011. The great Manny Nosowsky may well have published his last NYT crossword. Even so, his lifetime Shortz-era total of 246 puzzles including 29 Sundays is not going to be eclipsed any time soon. The other heavy hitter missing from the 2011 list is the frequent mentor Nancy Salomon. Richard Silvestri had at least one puzzle every year from 1993 but not this year. Sarah Keller had an 11-year streak end and one of the most creative constructors, Karen M. Tracey, was absent in 2011 as well. Beloved bloggers and podcasters Brian Cimmet and Ryan Hecht hung up their microphones and shut down their website.

The most prolific constructors were, as usual, Emily Cox and Henry Rathvon who had an acrostic published every second week plus three cryptics. Ignoring variety puzzles, the clear winner was Patrick Berry with 19, including six in a row. The only others in double digits are Peter A. Collins with 12 and Ian Livengood with 11.

The rise of conservatism

Why do grids seem less ambitious this year? It could be just coincidence or merely the pendulum swinging back. It could also be that loud voices in the blogosphere inveighing against gimmick puzzles are changing the trend. The respected puzzle critic Amy Reynaldo often zeroes in on the least lively fill, marking down any grids with too many overused, obscure, or crosswordy answers. I mean this literally – she grades each puzzle. Extreme grids or complex themes almost always mean an above average level of junk in the fill.

Personally, I can tolerate all kinds of junk fill in the service of a delightful theme but mine seems to be a minority view. Some of my favorite puzzles are built around the craziest gimmicks; connect the dots, fold the paper, constrain the available letters or use them all, stack the 15s, shade the circles, reorder words in the clues – it’s all good. My hope is that Will Shortz continues to encourage innovation. We need both the crossword Brahms continuing to polish the classical forms and the crossword Stravinsky breaking all the rules and upsetting the critics and allowing a little (or even a lot of) dissonance along the way.

The Puzzle of the Year

The counter-argument, of course, is that it’s possible to both be highly creative, even gimmicky, and still be smooth. The Patrick Berry “Cross” Word Contest is Exhibit A. Of course it’s my Puzzle of the Year, but even Mr. Berry had to resort to EEL, ITAL, LAIC, ENNUI, ASTI, ASEA, ARE, ORR, ETTA, TAR, EMTS, IDI, EGAD, and so on to pull off his masterpiece.

Let me be absolutely clear about my level of enthusiasm for this six-day challenge. It’s the best word puzzle I have ever done. If somehow you missed it, don’t worry, I haven’t and won’t give away anything important.

If you have a NYT puzzle subscription, go to this page to download the set. You want to print these out so either download the PDFs or download the Across Lite files and then print them. One puzzle, the Friday, is only available as a PDF (although I have a proof-of-concept web-based solving page that sort of works.)

If you don’t have an NYT puzzle subscription, these puzzles alone are worth signing up for it and then you’ll get access to eight new puzzles a week plus the archives going back to 1996.

What makes this set of puzzles so good? Remember, it’s a “Cross” word contest. Each of the first five puzzles brilliantly introduces a variation on the “Cross” theme. On their own, they are outstanding puzzles. By the time you solve number six and realize how everything fits together, check your jaw. If it hasn’t dropped, you haven’t yet figured out all the levels.

Update:

Looking for another opinion? Deb Amlen and some guy named Will Shortz have now posted their own separate year-end retrospectives on Wordplay. Mr. Shortz may have included even more stats than I did.

Acrostics vs. Electric Cars

Which is harder to create from scratch?

At the New York Times, acrostics are those rectangular Second Sunday puzzles that appear on alternate weeks in the magazine. Most crossword solvers summarily ignore them but acrostics have a loyal, even fanatical following. The passion and, yes, smugness of the fans reminds me of those annoying people who drive electric cars. That naturally raises the question, which is harder to construct?

At first, building an electric car sounds difficult, but Elon Musk proved it’s a piece of cake. With exactly as much background in the automobile business as I have, he was able to put together a little roadster that some hail as the beginning of the end of the ICE age. ICE, as in Internal Combustion Engine. Here’s how he did it. Follow these same simple steps for your own electric vehicle.

Elon noticed right away that batteries are heavy so everything else had better be light. No problem. He found a French company willing to build some carbon fiber body panels that weigh next to nothing. Next, he convinced an English company to slap them together to make a car body, add some details like seats and a steering wheel, and then ship that shell (car nuts call it a glider) to California. Now all he needed were the bits to make the machine actually go – a battery and a motor. He had to build his motor himself, but how hard could that be? Make one about the size and shape of a watermelon and wrap it around the rear axel. Easy. There are about 10,000 parts found in normal cars that you don’t need.

The battery seems hard because there’s all that chemistry and stuff but stuff turns out to be the answer. Build a box and stick it right behind the seats. Then jam it full with 6,000 laptop batteries. That’s it. Finis. I have no idea what to do with all those battery-less laptops but perhaps you can sell them on Craig’s List. This video contains a few more details.

How do you know your car works? Jump into the driver’s seat, switch on the flux capacitor, and press the gas pedal. Hmm, we better call it the accelerator pedal. Take note of how long it takes you to reach 60 mph. If your stopwatch says 3.7 seconds, you’ve built a Roadster rival.

(I’m skipping over the part where you finance it all by starting PayPal first and then selling that for hundreds of millions of dollars.)

Making an acrostic

Acrostics, on the other hand, require a little more imagination. In case you’re not up on the art form, let me explain how it works. Each puzzle has up to 26 crossword-like clues. Maybe they’re more like cryptic crosswords clues. Most, I have to say, are hard. On the first pass through, you might only get one or two of them but don’t worry, that’s by design.

Each letter in each answer word maps to a specific location on a 8 by 27 grid that, when filled in, will contain a quote from a book. It’s laid out in such a way that you can see the word breaks but not the punctuation. (Hyphens are the exception, you see those.) You don’t even know where sentences end.

In a normal crossword, you can make progress two ways; by looking at Across clues or Down clues. That’s what puzzle insiders mean when they say that each square is checked – it’s part of two clues. Acrostic squares are checked too. There’s the 26 or so clues, but there’s also the quote. You make progress either by solving clues, or by looking at the quote and using sentence logic to guess likely letters. Lone squares are probably A or I, since those are the only one-letter words in English. (Careful, though, the quote might be designed to trick you!) T followed by H followed by one more letter is probably THE. And so on. The usual experience is that it’s a big struggle until you get a few consecutive quote words and then the puzzle tends to fall rather quickly after that.

So far all this sounds like an unusual but not necessarily magical experience. Ah, but here’s the kicker. There’s yet another check on some squares. If you read the first letters of each answer in order, it spells the author and name of the book the quote is from. Now we’ve gone from moderately impressive to completely amazing.

Can you see the problems for the acrostic constructor? First, you need a quote that’s the right length, close to but not exceeding 216 squares, including spaces. Not just any quote, though. It needs to be one that includes all the letters used to spell the author and title. This constraint alone means that most quotes you’d like to use are simply impossible. Then you need to scramble all the letters into words, each one starting with one of those author or title letters. (Remember, no more than 26 of them!) Then you need to come up with a set of brilliant clues.

If that isn’t amazing enough, there’s yet one more level to this magic trick. Often, many of those answer words or clues are related somehow to the theme of the quote.

Yikes. You’re better off trying to build an electric car.

How can I try one?

If you mean how can you try an electric car, they’re now easy to find. Everybody is making them now. Ask for a test drive.

If you mean acrostics, I can help you there. The downside of acrostics is that the paper-and-pencil method of transferring letters between answers and the quote grid is error-prone and, well, boring. Computers make it fun. The NYT website lets you do them online. My XWord Info site always lets you solve the most recent NYT acrostic here. Each Times acrostic is constructed by the brilliant team of Emily Cox and Henry Rathvon.

It turns out Hex, as they’re collectively known (for reasons that escape me) aren’t the only regular acrostic constructors. I also urge you to check out American Acrostics by Cynthia Morris. Click on “This Week’s Puzzle” to try one. The setup and constraints are slightly different but the central idea is identical. The over-arching theme is American History. That sounds like yet another big constraint but since Americans keep making more history, she’s unlikely to run out of material any time soon.

Viewer mail

I no longer work for the New York Times but I’m often asked, ok I’m sometimes asked, ok I’ve been asked three times, if I’m still going to write my annual year-end wrap up of notable crossword achievements. Uh. Ok. Sure. Coming soon.