The Further Adventures of Jim Horne

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.

The NYT Crossword Crisis

I used to write about crosswords for The New York Times at a blog called Wordplay. That job ended today so, of course, it’s not too soon for my first tell-all exposé that will blow the lid off that whole operation. Here’s the key question:

How early did I get access to the puzzles?

NYT Crosswords are typically published at 10pm Eastern time and Wordplay posts go live moments later. How is that possible? Some of the more clever commenters have suggested that I must get early access and I’m often asked, '”How early?” The full explanation is more bizarre than you can imagine. The surprising answer, and I swear this is true, is that the posts are written two to three months ahead of time, well before the crosswords themselves are constructed. Let me explain.

Budget cutbacks

Times at the Times were particularly tough in 2008 when Will Shortz got hauled in front of NYT’s Supreme Budget Committee to hear the bad news. The lavish “puzzle lifestyle” was over. Costs had to be slashed immediately and the first cuts were to be in the admittedly well-padded construction budget. One of the junior accountants, a kid named Bumfry, had downloaded a demo version of the Crossword Compiler software with the Grid Generator plug-in. He noticed a button called “Auto-fill” and asked the obvious question: “Why can’t we just use that?” Shortz was taken off guard. He tried to argue using vague concepts like “quality” and “innovation” but made little progress until he blurted out, “What if I could come up with a solution that would slash costs but actually improve the puzzles? I have a radical notion but I need two weeks to pull it together.” He was given three days. The race was on.

The free-market solution

Most people know that Shortz did graduate work at Indiana University on Machiavelli and Adam Smith, but few also know he co-owns three key eBay patents and one more that underpins Google’s auction-based adwords business. If only there were some way to apply that same thinking to crosswords.

Then he got an idea. An awful idea. The Shortz got a wonderful, awful idea! My phone rang immediately. Was I in? The concept was so wild, so crazy, so utterly insane, that I immediately agreed.

Constructor competition

Here’s how it worked. I wrote my posts describing each crossword and those descriptions were electronically distributed to constructors through a secret network code-named CRUCIVERB-L. Each post was attached to an interactive web page where constructors bid on how cheaply they could produce a puzzle that exactly fit those specs. It was brilliant.

So, for example, when budgets were particularly tight, I would write something along these lines: “This Tuesday puzzle has only three theme answers and displays little cleverness in the surrounding fill.” Veteran constructors would pass right over that one, knowing that competitive bids would drive the price down to just a few dollars. It was a godsend for newbies, though, who could try their hand at finally getting published without having to compete with Patrick Berry on the same day.

That saved enough money that, from time to time, I could be a little more creative. Sometimes, I admit, I was even cruel, using phrases like: “seven theme answers” or “every answer in this grid contains at least one B” or, in one particularly nasty case, “quadruple pangram.” It was great fun watching constructors struggle with how low they could bid on that one.

Reaction from puzzle authors

Immediate reaction from the constructor community was negative. Hostile, even. When I emailed Will Shortz to tell him the constructors were revolting, his quick response was, “Aren’t they, though!” I should have seen that one coming, I suppose. Many constructors dropped out in protest.

Those who stayed on came to appreciate the new system. Art thrives within constraints and crosswords had never been so thoroughly constrained. Although the average payment was substantially lower than before, pay for some of the more ambitious grids actually increased.

I sometimes got accused of playing favorites, particularly with visual elements in the grid. Descriptions like “connecting the circles in alphabetical order generates a reasonably recognizable portrait of Beethoven” became known as “Gorski Gimmees” because nobody but she even bothered to compete. Liz made out like a bandit on those ones. Quadruple stacks and record-low block counts weren’t nearly as lucrative, since Kevin Der and Joe Krozel kept outbidding each other. In other words, the system worked!

Puzzle of the year

There’s a particularly funny story about the crossword that I eventually named my 2010 Puzzle of the Year (Across Lite, XWord Info solution, Wordplay.) Francis Heaney apparently misread my blog description and, thinking it was a more straightforward normal rebus, opened the bidding at a ridiculously low $1,000. Of course, nobody else would touch it and he was on the hook to somehow put it all together.

The fact that it worked and ended up being such a wonderful puzzle completely validates the Shortz Strategy, as it has come to be known. Once again, free-market capitalism proves to be the answer to every question.