CROSSWORDS: Challenge; Creativity; Problem Solving

Summary | Quotes: General | Literature/Poetry | Music | Science | Theater |
References: General | Art

Summary

• Crosswords present us with complex, multi-layered patterns
  -- problems to solve, boxes to fill, pieces to connect.
• They've been used as an "intelligence" test and recruiting tool
  by code-breaking agencies, e.g., Bletchley Park [UK], NSA.
• A uniquely human pursuit (so far);
  AI programs, e.g., Dr. Fill, have started to recognize the ambiguity,
  word play and exceptions in crosswords.

Quotes

• "As human beings, we have... a natural compulsion to fill empty spaces." ~Will Shortz
• "If you've ever picked up a crossword puzzle and said to yourself,
  'I am not smart enough'... or 'I don’t have a big enough vocabulary for this,'
  please allow us to let you in on a little secret:
  
  A crossword puzzle is not a test of intelligence, and solving is not really
  about the size of your vocabulary. Becoming a good solver is about
  understanding what the clues are asking you to do." ~Will Shortz
• "A study found that even children perceive crossword puzzle solvers as...
  more intelligent" ~'Knows what is Good and Bad,' ‘Can teach you things,'
  ‘Does lots of crosswords': Children's knowledge about wisdom
• "December flurries --
  in the airplane magazine
  a half-finished crossword." ~Urban haiku
• "Making synaptic connections that have lain dormant for years causes... something deep
  in the pleasure center to squeeze out a juicy shot of chemical goodness." ~Jim Horne
• "Finding enjoyment in problem solving... seems like a uniquely human trait." ~Patrick Berry
• "Solving crossword puzzles is... part science of deduction, part mother wit, part erudition."
  ~Margaret Petherbridge Farrar, 1st NYT Crossword editor
• "I was a keen observer and listener. I picked up on clues... I figured things out logically,
  and I enjoyed puzzles. I loved the clear, focused feeling that came
  when I concentrated on solving a problem and everything else faded out."
  ~Sonia Sotomayor, Supreme Court Justice
• "What I love about cooking is... that after a hard day, there is something comforting about the fact
  that if you melt butter and add flour and then hot stock, it will get thick! It's a sure thing!
  It's a sure thing in a world where nothing is sure; it has a mathematical certainty in a world
  where those of us who long for some kind of certainty are forced to settle for crossword puzzles."
  ~Nora Ephron
• "Children are the most desirable opponents at Scrabble...
  as they are both easy to beat and fun to cheat." ~Fran Lebowitz
• "Watching 'CSI: Miami' is like doing the crossword puzzle...
  in 'People' magazine or watching 'Teen Jeopardy!'.
  It makes you feel smart even when you're not." ~Willie Geist
• "Just as dogs love to chew bones,... the mind loves to get its teeth into problems.
  That's why it does crossword puzzles and builds atom bombs." ~Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now

Literature / Poetry

• I decided that there was a Big Mind and a Little Mind...
  And the Big Mind would allow you to consider deep thoughts,
  but the Little Mind would occupy you, so you could not be distracted.
  It would work crossword puzzles, while the Big Mind would delve deep
  into the subjects I wanted to write about. ~Maya Angelou: How I Write, DB; 7/11/2017
• "My mind rebels at stagnation.... Give me problems, give me work, give me the most abstruse cryptogram,
  or the most intricate analysis, and I am in my own proper atmosphere. But I abhor the dull routine of existence.
  I crave for mental exaltation." ~Sherlock Holmes, The Sign of Four
• "The Sunday crossword...
  with one entry done
  left on the park bench . . .
  the scent of spring's
  first lilac blossoms" ~Sunday crossword: tanka 24 syllable poem, similar to haiku
• "I'm drawn to a certain level of ambiguous storytelling that requires hard thought and work...
  in the same way that the 'New York Times' crossword puzzle does:
  Sometimes you just want to put it down or throw it out the window,
  but there's a real rewarding sense if you feel like you've cracked it." ~Damon Lindelof

Music

• "The piercing sound of Jimmy Reed's harmonica... won his attention;
  Bishop would later liken it to a crossword puzzle that he had to figure out.
  What was this music? Who made it? What was it all about?";
  quote about Elvin Bishop
• "Writing songs and lyrics is not that different from...
  doing the 'Times' crossword every morning.
  They both give you a good mental workout." ~Leslie Bricusse
• Solving your own crossword puzzle: Jason Isbell
  I start with a melody...it scans, and it sings, and it rhymes, and it works.
  A crossword puzzle you made yourself... You're solving your own crossword puzzle; 1/25/2022
• "You're never quite sure where the song is going,... because
  you might not find the word to rhyme with the end of the line.
  You have to find associative meaning to get you there.
  So it's rather like doing a crossword puzzle backwards.
  A kind of strange, three-dimensional, abstract crossword puzzle." ~Annie Lennox
• "Every time I write a song,... it's different.
  I'm all about the rhythm of the words and the melody.
  Musically, you gotta have a throbbing pulse going.
  But as far as what it's all about, there's a million ways to go.
  You have to invent a new code for every song. Then you have to break it.
  It's like Scrabble or a crossword puzzle on steriods.
  I could talk about the process for days.
  But it's never dull and there's no one way in." ~Dan Bern
• "There's this moment sometimes,... when you do a crossword puzzle
  and you have the one really long word. And once you get that,
  the whole thing kind of comes into focus. Sometimes it's just working
  things over in your mind and then finding that one line that kind of ties
  the song together, and now it works. It's a puzzle of sorts." ~Craig Finn

Science

• "Similarly to solving a crossword puzzle, solving puzzles in science is...
  an accumulation of many pieces of independent, yet interlocking, lines of evidence."
  ~An Easy & Fun Way to Teach about How Science 'Works':
  Popularizing Haack's Crossword-Puzzle Analogy; The American Biology Teacher; 8/2013
• "[How to put astronauts on the surface of Mars] is... the first thing I think of
  when I wake up after having some breakfast and doing the crossword."
  ~Bush Still Working On Manned Mission To Mars Quietly In Spare Time The Onion; 9/27/2010

Theater

• A friend was in a theatre production about crossword puns...
  It was a play on words.
• "I’ve enjoyed every second of... [deciphering a difficult verse from William Shakespeare’s play Edward III].
  It taps into the part of my brain that likes puzzles. I’m decoding something really intricate and special.
  The process has revealed Shakespeare’s craft as a writer. I’m getting into Shakespeare’s head,
  like when I try to think like Will Shortz so I can solve New York Times crosswords." ~Octavio Solis, 2017
• More confounding than any maze,...
  With dead ends at every turn,
  It always demands a word or phrase
  That you have yet to learn.
  
  
  Across and Down almost never align,
  Dooming puzzlers oh so smart.
  Devious, perverse, and malign
  Is the Constructor of the human heart.
  ~NYT: Poem: The Unsolvable Puzzle

References

• subsection: Art
• topics: AI, NSA, Sudoku
• National Puzzle Day 1/29: celebration / reflection on those puzzles, games
  and even challenges in life that we embrace every day but sometimes take for granted;
  unofficial; unclear when started -- different from Nat. Crossword Day: 12/21
• Across or Up, Rock Climbers and Crossword Solvers Puzzle Alike
  climbers say they love the sport because of its similarity to puzzles,
  not only for the athletic feats; NYT; 6/17/2024
• How to Tell If Your Brain Needs a Break
  taking a few minutes to do a puzzle can allow you to return to work sharper and more creative;
  "In a 2013 Daily Beast article, Maya Angelou referred to her work process as switching between her
  “big mind and her little mind.” Her big mind did the heavy lifting, crafting the poems she became famous for.
  Her little mind, which she used in between writing sessions, loved doing crossword puzzles"; NYT; 2/3/2023
• What It’s Like to Compete at a Crossword Puzzle Tournament NYT; 4/11/2022
• What's Your Wordplay Resolution? NYT; 12/31/2021
• Research like a crossword: The further down the wrong road you go,
  the harder to turn back 10/26/2021
• John Cleese on why 'advertising is like a very good crossword'
  it takes two days of your life but it's awfully interesting; 7/2/2021
• 3 Reasons Your Child Will Benefit By Doing A Crossword Puzzle
  Crosswords For Kids Improve Memory & Cognition;
  Works On Developing Social & Emotional Competence
  Develops Real-Life Problem-Solving Skills; 1/28/2021
• What Climbing and Crosswords Have in Common
  what does solving a boulder problem have to do with solving a crossword? Outside; 1/27/2021
• Crossword puzzles are a gift to the spirit, imagination and the mind of solvers
  Conversations That Matter; 12/18/2020
• The King/Kimes NY Times' Crossword Challenge You Never Knew You Needed
  In advance of Dec. 21's National Crossword Puzzle Day, two of ESPN's more "puzzling" wordsmiths
  square off in completing a Friday NYT crossword; 12/21/2019
• Filling in the Blanks When life does not provide the answers, a woman finds certainty in crossword puzzles; NYT; 3/13/2019
• Captive Octopuses Get Bored Unless You Give Them Puzzles Giz; 10/26/2015
• A Million Little Boxes ACPT 2005; Dan Feyer; 538; 4/17/2015
• The Psychology of Flow: What Game Design Reveals about the Deliberate Tensions of Great Writing
  "Books of sudoku and crossword puzzles are often labeled easy, medium, or hard because few people will pay
  for a book of puzzles they can’t do, and not many more will spend time with puzzles that are too simple"; 12/5/2014
• Can You Solve 'The Hardest Logic Puzzle In The World'? Giz; 10/5/2014
• Thinking Outside the Grid: What crossword puzzles tell us about how reasoning and memory work
  “In problem solving, we tend to assume that we have found the solution, and once we do, that it’s the
  only solution to be found. Typically, we don’t think further about the problem and discover that there
  may be other solutions.” ~Raymond Nickerson; 7/19/2012
• In Crosswords, It's Man Over Machine, for Now NYT; 3/18/2012
• The Computer's Next Conquest: Crosswords ("Dr. Fill" at ACPT 2012); NYT; 3/17/2012
• 'Knows what is Good and Bad,' ‘Can teach you things,' ‘Does lots of crosswords':
  Children's knowledge about wisdom the study found that even children perceive crossword puzzle solvers
  as more intelligent; Judith Glück, Belinda Bischof, Linda Siebenhüner; European Journal of Developmental
  Psychology 9, no. 5 (2012): 582 -- 598, DOI: 10.1080/17405629.2011.631376.

• 
  

  NYT: Tracing the Spark of Creative Problem-Solving NYT; 12/7/2010

• NYT: Enigma: Asking the Mind to Jump Through Hoops Teller; NYT; 12/7/2010
• NYT: The Rush of the 'Crossword Puzzle Moment' NYT; 12/7/2010
• NYT: An 11-Letter Word for Perfectionist? Starts With C
  'constructor'; NYT; 12/7/2010
• NYT: Across and Down, the Wizard (Dan Feyer) Who Is Fastest of All
  ACPT 2010; NYT; 12/7/2010
• NYT: A Puzzle Solver Moves On to Life's Riddles NYT; 12/7/2010
• Puzzling The World (video)??:
  Few puzzles have swept the world and created such passionate devotees as Sudoku and crosswords.
  While crosswords require specific linguistic capability, Sudoku players only need to understand basic numbers,
  a feature that makes Sudoku particularly transnational and global. Maki Kaji, godfather of Sudoku and President
  of Nikoli Company and Will Shortz, Crossword Puzzle Editor, The New York Times, discuss the similarities and
  differences of crossword puzzles and Sudoku as well as trends and themes driving the popularity of puzzles around
  the world today.; excerpts [video; 4:36]; Will Shortz: editing, solving puzzles: empowerment, mental aerobics; 10/23/2008
• BarelyBad: Why to play, and why not
• The Most Frustrating Crossword Puzzle of All Time; The Easiest Crossword; etc. College Humor
• Sudoku: the end of the crossword as we know it?

Art

• The Art of Crosswords -- a short post/essay by Steve
• Behind the scenes of Knives Out sequel Glass Onion: 'It’s a rollercoaster ride not a crossword puzzle'
  "I think the trick to these movies is to make sure that there’s a narrative engine that is not a puzzle, that is a ride";12/19/2022
• On Crosswords and Crime Fiction
  What is it about puzzles and crosswords that lend themselves so well to a good crime novel? 8/25/2022
• THE CROSSWORD PLAY (or Ezmeranda's Gift) by Donna Hoke
  in THE CROSSWORD PLAY we join an expert level crossword puzzlemaker in a puzzle-making workshop, where she guides us
  through the conventions, strictures and rules of crossword puzzle creation -- until things get a bit unruly; 2021
• Review: What’s ‘Inside the Box’? A Rewarding (Rewording) Time
  in a new show by David Kwong, the noted cruciverbalist offers a collection of games
  built for Zoom that let the audience be part of the puzzle; NYT; 10/14/2020
• Review: Crossword master David Kwong tries to turn puzzles into theater.
  It’s not easy Geffen Playhouse's Stayhouse: Inside the Box; LAT; 10/8/2020
• The Real Work Although poems cannot be truly 'solved' like crosswords,
  reading poems draws on some of the same skills as working crossword puzzles. These include:
  - Proceeding line by line through the puzzle/poem.
  - Answering what you know.
  - Guessing at what you think you know but don’t know for sure,
  hoping later info proves you right.
  - Bracketing what you don’t know.
  - Using what you know, or come to know, including the theme of the puzzle/poem,
  to help you figure out what you didn’t know or didn’t know for sure.
  - As with words in a crossword puzzle, parts of a poem often systematically fit together
  and you can use one part of a poem to help you figure out another,
  just as you can use one word in a crossword puzzle to help you decipher another; 5/1/2020
• The Crossword Mentality in Modern Literature and Culture by Adrienne Raphel;
  .pdf; Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University, Graduate School of Arts & Sciences; 2018;
  e.g., Chapter 2. Crosswords and Literature, pp. 105-

• 
  

  5 Works of Art Inspired by Crosswords
  1. Crossword Puzzle by Max Ferguson
  The scene is of a man in a pub in London, whom the artist chanced upon while traveling
  through the city in 2004. By the look of it, the solver is battling a particularly fiendish cryptic.
  2. Crossword Puzzle with Lady in Black Coat by Paulina Olowska (2009)
  A crossword person will no doubt notice the unorthodox checking and clue slot numbering of the grid.
  Perhaps it represents a puzzle that's not meant to be solved?
  3. Dad's Crossword by Duane Keiser (2013)
  "I don't think he [Dad] even reads the news anymore in the paper
  -- he pulls out the crossword and throws the rest away."
  4. Crossword Tools by Sarah Lytle
  "[Mom] must have her glasses, her morning coffee and her pen. I can see her sitting
  at the breakfast table or curled up in the chair, glasses perched on her nose,
  newspaper folded in half to the puzzle, working away. It makes me smile thinking about it."
  5. Red Tomatoes on Crossword Puzzle by Carolyn Watson
  "I loved the way the red of the tomatoes was reflected into the shadows and
  how the black of the newsprint was darker in the shadow."
  These tomatoes eclipse the clues too, in making the grid fills: VINE, RIPE, HOME, GROWN, TOMATO
  -- and the US-style grid gives neat placeholders for the words on the left hand side.
  Also: Red Peppers on Crossword; 5/26/2015