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You'd think crossword setting and solving would be a literary pursuit, but as Shortz points out, 'it turns out it's more a mathematical ability to create and solve puzzles, because it involves taking a great amount of information and processing it to work out your answer or get the best possible fill for the puzzle. Grime admits that he, too, can't figure out crosswords, but as he notes: 'I'm in good company with Alan Turing and it didn't make him any less brilliant.' In the film they're recruited with a cryptic crossword-because Alan Turing, the brilliant mathematician and cryptographer who led the team and came up with the first Enigma breakthrough, was hopeless at crosswords.Īccording to James Grime, who runs the Enigma Project, an educational outreach program all about the history and mathematics of codebreaking, 'Turing attended a treasure hunt hosted by a friend and remarked that he was completely useless.'
Utterly useless crossword clue code#
That might come as a surprise to anyone who's seen The Imitation Game, about WWII British codebreakers stationed at Bletchley Park working to crack the 'unbreakable' Enigma code used by the Germans. There are terrific crossword doers who are not good creators-they just don't have the imagination to do it.' If you are a great puzzle maker I think you're going to be at least a decent solver. But puzzle setting and solving are two different skills. 'Both puzzle solving and setting involve looking at a large amount of information and processing it. If we make leaps of imagination that's where good puzzle solvers come for the fore. I think we start solving a puzzle logically, and then we get stuck.
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'Mental flexibility and creative imagination are critical for solving puzzles. Others types of clues include acrostics (using the first letters of a phrase, alluded to by clues such as 'lead' or 'start') reversals (a description of word that spelled backwards gives the answer, with clues such as 'backwards' or 'retracted') and cryptic definitions (in which the answer is defined in an ambiguous or misleading way).Īs one of the world's leading crossword and puzzle setters, Shortz has tips for both setters and solvers. There might be a hidden word, and you might look inside that part that's after "in" and the word will actually be sitting there.' 'There's dropping a letter-dropping the first letter, the last letter, or a letter inside. So a cryptic clue might define chart, define reuse and define chartreuse all together. It's composed of two five letter words, chart and reuse. 'Another is a charade-where you take a word, like, say, chartreuse. Something like that in a clue is a signal that in the adjacent part you're supposed to listen to get the answer. So there'll be a signal like "we hear" or "reportedly" or "so they say". The two words sound the same but they're spelled differently. 'Another could be a homophone, where a word like waist-W-A-I-S-T-is a homophone of waste-W-A-S-T-E. 'The most basic type is the anagram, where you rearrange the letters of something in the clue to get the answer, and there is always a signal in the clue to rearrange those letters, such as "odd" or "badness" or "strangeness" or anything about change, which could signal that the adjacent letters are to be rearranged to get the answer. But there are a lot of conventions to solve cryptic crosswords, and as you become familiar with them, you become pretty sharp at solving them,' he says. 'The first time you see a cryptic crossword, you just throw up your hands. If we make leaps of imagination that's where good puzzle solvers come for the fore.According to Will Shortz, crosswords editor for The New York Times, puzzlemaster for National Public Radio and holder of the world's only degree in enigmatology, the study of puzzles, there is. Mental flexibility and creative imagination are critical for solving puzzles.