—SKW CROSSWORD€¦ · What this puzzle is 22-23. An animal of prey 26-27. The close of a day 28-29. To elude 30-31. The plural of is 8-9. To cultivate ... CROSSWORD FUN 1 2 4 6

PLAYERS PENCIL IN letters to feel the teensy “aha” rush when the answer fits. Research also shows that sat-isfaction might not be the only upside to crosswords: Regular playing may help delay memory loss and other signs of cerebral aging. Whatever the reason for our obsession, in the 107 years since a New York City news-paper first published one, the audience has grown steadily and now includes the hundreds of thousands of fans who try to defeat The New York Times’ trickiest grids daily. —SKW

Likely inspired by the an-cient Sator square—a box

of five words that sound out the same sentence backward and forward—England-born

Arthur Wynne created the first published crossword. The me-

chanics of the diamond-shaped game, which ran in The New

York World in 1913, are the same as contemporary ones.

FIRSTthe

Instructions: Fill in the blank squares with answers to the clues below.

2-3. What bargain hunters enjoy4-5. A written acknowledgment6-7. Such and nothing more10-11. A bird14-15. Opposed to less18-19. What this puzzle is22-23. An animal of prey26-27. The close of a day28-29. To elude30-31. The plural of is8-9. To cultivate12-13. A bar of wood or iron16-17. What artists learn to do20-21. Fastened24-25. Found on the seashore

10-18. The fiber of the gomuti palm6-22. What we all should be4-26. A daydream2-11. A talon19-28. A pigeonF-7. Part of your head23-30. A river in Russia1-32. To govern33-34. An aromatic plantN-8. A fist24-31. To agree with3-12. Part of a ship20-29. One5-27. Exchanging9-25. To sink in mud13-21. A boy

Adapted from The New York World (1913)

CROSS

WORD

F U N

1

2

4

6

10 13

9

14

18

22

26

28

30

34

31

29

27

25

2124

20

16

12

17

33

23

19

15

11

7 8

3

532

S U M M E R 2 0 2 0

When publisher Simon & Schuster released its first volume, The Cross Word Puzzle Book, in 1924, the 3,600-copy run sold out. Its success cemented crosswords’ place in popular culture. Today, variations from The New York Times and other outlets test the vocabularies of millions of pencil-toting fanatics.

Ada

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Across1. Happy colleague4. War horse 11. El ___14. “Eureka!”15. Media critic Ken 16. Suffix with Capri17. Ostensible duration of a famous

waltz in D-flat maj.18. Charles Dawson’s find in Sheffield

Park, reported in London on December 18, 1912

20. Sinks in a pool22. With every hair in place23. Letter accompanier: abbr.24. They may amend xword clues27. Entertainment industry father

Joel or daughter Jennifer28. Scientific field that en com passes

studies of 18-Across, among others

32. “That’s good enough for me”33. Sioux shoes, informally

66. A podcast about impolite conver-sation topics: “Death, ___, and Money”

Down1. Like many a dungeon2. Battleground state in recent

presidential elections3. Did not renew4. Hyannis Port locale5. Number of joueurs in a 31-Down6. Ready to go7. On Soc. Sec.8. Protected by the mfr.9. ___ jacket10. Bodybuilder’s breakfast, maybe11. Monte Cristo title12. European country containing two

of the smallest countries in the world

13. Withhold from19. ___ a one21. Toll25. Tenor who sang baritone until

1959 and again since 200926. Position for The Simpsons28. Position for Louganis29. Egyptian solar deity30. Bellini’s title priestess who sings

“Casta diva”31. Expensive wedding band34. These structures divide the

human body approximately in half, top to bottom

35. Character who says “Play it, Sam”36. Plethora39. Rook’s starting place40. Lord’s lodgings42. Political pals44. A.C. Green was one45. Resistance units46. Set free47. Dedicatee of a piano classic48. Hardly hard51. Nanjing nanny52. Philadelphia’s Franklin ___: abbr.54. Starting point for many a fairy

tale55. All dried out56. What 18-Across is now believed to

represent an examplar of58. Govt. property overseer59. Cariou of Broadway’s

Sweeney Todd

34. Informal e-mail salutations37. Fall (over)38. Entertainment industry father

John or daughter Bonnie40. Pepper profferer’s prop41. Armageddon42. “Hurry up!”43. Go by45. Key component of 18-Across47. Mute nymph who was in love

with Narcissus49. Forever and a day50. Harrods’ head51. Reunion attendees53. Like Porky, but not Petunia57. What 18-Across was once hypoth-

esized to represent an exemplar of60. Prefix with con or classical61. Bat wood62. Gist63. “La-la” lead-in64. What Willie Mays may have said?65. By or grand follower

1

51

57

41

37

32

28

14

17

20

15

18

21

45

22

2

47

29

3

48

23

4

42

5

52

58 59 60

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38

30

6

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39

24

7

33

25

8

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26

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9

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31

10

50

44

27

11

34

16

19

40

12

55

35

13

56

36

Across2. Interior (5)6. Signal agreement (3)7. Cuddle (3)8. Slight error (5)11. Still to be paid (4)12. Area of a church (4)13. Piece of pasture (3)14. Flightless bird (4)16. Pleased (4)18. Form of public

transportation (3)20. Domestic animal (3)21. Sweltering (3)22. Feline (3)24. Salt Lake City’s state (4)25. Fit of petty annoyance (4)27. Frozen water (3)28. Noticed (4)30. Capital of Italy (4)32. School of thought (5)34. Fishing pole (3)35. Pull at (3)36. Adolescence (5)

Instructions: Use the clues to arrange the tiles at left in the grid above. The number after each clue is the letter count in the answer. In the solution, the black boxes sit symmetrically.

Riffs on the crossword further tax our gray matter. Some hide clues inside the grid itself, or offer riddles instead of conventional prompts. One particu-larly dastardly version combines a jigsaw and a standard teaser: It takes visuospatial skills and a solid internal dic-tionary to best the pile of jumbled squares.

VARIANT

the

Down 1. Set free or release (6)2. Indolent (4)3. Bite sharply (3)4. Ostrichlike bird (4)5. Accepted (6)9. Speak without

preparation (5)10. Unexpected catches (5)15. Maladroit (5)17. Remote in manner (5)19. NATO member (3)22. Khaki cotton (5)23. Unit of heat (5)24. Uncertain (6)26. Leave the nest (6)29. Circular movement

of water (4)31. Solemn promise (4)33. African antelope (3)

Courtesy of Clarity Media S U M M E R 2 0 2 0

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85

In the 17th century, the purpose of a maze eventually switched from enlightenment to bafflement. Intricate garden designs featured a new addition: choice. These “multicursal” patterns no longer let people follow one clear route to the end. Instead wanderers had to navigate a series of twists, turns, and cul-de-sacs.

CLA

SSIC

the

THREE-DIMENSIONAL mazes can make us feel as if there’s no escape. Even in 2D, a confusing path poses a unique chal-lenge to our internal GPS. If the route is circuitous enough, even on paper, our hippocampus, which regulates learning and memory, kicks into over-drive to make sense of the environment. It uses vis-ible cues—say a familiar switchback—to help us wend our way from one end to another. —SKW

MAZE

FIRSTtheStone labyrinths were the meditation apps of the ancient world. Many of the mazes, which date back hundreds of years, consist of a single long trail—one way in and out, with zero dead ends. They were often located at medieval cathedrals; parishioners, priests, and philosophers would pace the corridors while they reflected, with no real worry of getting lost.

Adapted from “The Chartres Pattern”

Adapted from “The Maze at Hatfield House”

86

What is the most ocular punishment?

When is coffee like the soil?

Why is the letter K like a pig’s tail?

Why is a fishmonger never generous?

Why is the alphabet like the mail?

VARIANTthe

In 1898, puzzle maker Sam Loyd drew “Back from the Klondike” to disprove Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler’s assertion that a person can solve any maze backward. You can’t maneuver this one from the outside in. Because of a typo, the original had many solutions, but this revised version has just two.

Instructions: Start at the “3” in the center and move that many squares in any direction. The number you land on tells you how many steps to go from there. Continue in this fashion until you reach freedom at the edge of the field.

Adapted from The Cyclopedia of Puzzles, Sam Loyd (1914)

Adapted from

Gu

ess Me, F

rederick D’A

rros Planche (1879)

RIDDLE

S U M M E R 2 0 2 0

4

5

1

7

6

1

7

4

4

9

9

5

7

17

7

8

1

3

43

1

9

3

3

3

6 8

8

6 3

3

1

7

2

5

16

7

8

4

2

7

8

7

2

3

5

5

3

1

7

4

1

4

2

8

3

2

1

5

9

3

3

1

6

5

1

5

6 5

5

1

3

4

3

8

5

8

8

5

4

8

5

1

7

8

4

6

4

5

7

3

9

1

7

4

6

3

3

4

3

2

4

1

4

2

3

7

7

5

7

3

7

7

3

6

1

1

1

1

1

1

5

2

1

5

2

4

2

4

4

7

7

6

7

2

5

1

1

2

4

7

3

4

1

3

1

4

4

5

2

4

4

4

7

7

2

5

3

2

2

1

3

3

1

7

9

7

9

1

3

3

8

7

9

5

2

2

3

7

7

1

2

3

1

1

1

9

5

7

7

1

5

7

3

2

4

2

1

2

3

3

2

2

2

4

6

6

4

2

2

6

6

2

2

5

5

6

1

4

4

3

5

1

3

3

12

1

2

2

3

5

1

5

3

5

4

4

9

1

4

2

8

6

4

5

3

2

4

3

4

9

4

9

5

6

4

4

3

7

6

5

5

2

4

5

4 7

2

8

4

2

1

8

2

1

2

9

5

8

7

8

3

6

8

1

2

8

2

1

1

9

5

3

8

2

6

4

8

2

3

2

5

2

3

1

7

3

2

1

2

5

1

3

3

2

4

4

6

4

5

3

33

4

5

4

4

6

6

4

2

YOU CAN SOLVE almost any sudoku as long as there are at least 17 numbers filled in at the start. Unlike crosswords, these nu-merical grids require zero vocabulary and so translate to folks whose languages use pictograms instead of letters. While do-ing one daily might not turn you into an arithmetic marvel, some studies have sug-gested that these kinds of tasks can help keep noggins spry longer. —SKW

SUDOKU

FIRST

VARIANT

the

the

CLA

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the

French mathematician Jacques Ozanam’s 17th-century riff on the magic square—whose rows and columns always have the same total—has only one solution. Play-ers get 16 pairs (say, four colors of circles, squares, triangles, and dia-monds) to fill a 4-by-4 grid; they can use each pair once, and no color or shape can repeat in a row, column, or diagonal. Leonhard Euler, a Swiss mathematician, later dubbed the teasers “Graeco-Latin squares.”

Instructions: Write the 16 face cards (aces included) from a standard 52-card deck on the grid above so that each row, each column, and the two corner-to-corner diago-nals have only one card of each suit and value. We started things off for you by picking the top-left card.

J

J

Adapted from Récréations Mathématiques et Physiques, Jacques Ozanam (1694)

Courtesy of Clarity Media

Courtesy of Clarity Media

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By the 1990s, sudokus were pop-ular enough to inspire harder variations. Some creators throw letters in the mix, combine as many as 280 grids into one massive field, or layer five puzzles on top of one another to form an overlapping mind-bender. Killer Sudoku adds ele ments from kakuro, a game that works like a crossword but uses sums instead of verbal clues.

Instructions: Fill all rows, columns, and blocks with the digits 1–9 exactly as in a regular sudoku. The catch: The answers inside each region bounded by a dotted line (known as a cage) must total the number there.

Dell Pencil Puzzles and Word Games magazine printed the first modern sudoku, called “Number Place,” in the 1970s. In the ’80s, Japanese publisher Nikoli took over and made improvements— as well as gave the stumper its name, a riff on a phrase that translates to “the numbers must remain single.”

Instructions: Enter the digits 1–9 in each nine-square box, row, and column such that no number appears in any of those areas more than once.

S U M M E R 2 0 2 0

2

2

2

1

1

5

5

4

5

5

6 1

8

8

8

3

3

7

7

7

7

9

9

9

10

9

10

13

13

171914

177

10

12

13 15 8

8

8 6

7

3

8 8 9

12

12

12

11

11

19

18

8 17

17 24

FOR MORE THAN 1,200 years, logic puz-zles have revealed how well we reason. Al-though solving them can require some tricky calculations, they rarely involve any traditional arith-metic. They also test less concrete skills like imagination and memory. Most are crackable with some head-scratching and regular ol’ pencil and paper, but contempo-rary mathematicians also apply advanced techniques, including a type of problem- solving called dynamic programming, to parse the baffling clues. —CI

LOGIC

FIRSTthe

Eighth-century English scholar and cleric Alcuin of York penned one of the first known collections of mathematical brainteasers: Propositiones ad Acuendos Juvenes (Problems to Sharpen the Young). Among the vol-ume’s questions is an early instance of a river-crossing scenario, which challenges puzzlers to transport items across a waterway given an unusual set of constraints.

Instructions: With the information provided, plan the trips necessary to ferry goods across the river.

1. A farmer needs to transport a wolf, a goat, and a box of cabbage across a river. However, his boat can carry only two of these at a time. He cannot leave the wolf alone with the goat, nor the goat alone with the cabbage. What trips must he take to get everything across unharmed?

2. A man and a woman want to cross a river. They see two kids with a boat on the bank, but the boat can carry, at most, one adult or two children at a time. How do the adults cross so that the youngsters end up on the original bank with their boat?

3. A man and his wife, each the weight of a loaded cart, have two kids, each the weight of half a cart. The fam-ily needs to cross a river, but the boat they have can only carry the weight of one cart. How can the four cross the river so that the boat won’t sink?

Adapted from Propositiones ad Acuendos Juvenes, Alcuin of York (ca. 800 CE)

Lewis Carroll filled tales like Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland with wordplay. As a lecturer of mathematics at Christ Church, Oxford University, he used the same trickery to teach systematic reasoning—parsing a series of premises to reach a conclusion. His so-called syllogisms debuted in The Game of Logic in 1887, and he built on them in 1897’s Symbolic Logic.

In 1978, American philos-opher and mathematician Raymond Smullyan re-fined an existing logic puzzle to test deductive reasoning, or how well a person applies broad rules to arrive at a specific an-swer. In his “knights and knaves” scheme, problem solvers must determine the occupations of people on an island based on how they self-identify.

CLASSICthe

VARIANT

the

Instructions: Read the following statements, note the relationships among their assertions, and determine one unstated truth.

Instructions: There is an island on which all the inhabitants are knights or knaves. Knights always tell the truth, and knaves always lie. Based on the statements, answer the question.

3. (A) No ducks waltz. (B) No officers ever decline

to waltz. (C) All my poultry are ducks.

2. (A) A plum-pudding that is not really solid is mere porridge.

(B) Every plum-pudding served at my table has been boiled in a cloth.

(C) A plum-pudding that is mere porridge is indistinguishable from soup.

(D) No plum-puddings are really solid, except what are served at my table.

1. (A) No kitten that loves fish is unteachable.

(B) No kitten without a tail will play with a gorilla.

(C) Kittens with whiskers always love fish.

(D) No teachable kitten has green eyes.

(E) No kittens have tails unless they have whiskers.

1. You encounter two people: Alison and Bernard. Alison asserts, “At least one of us is a knave.” What are Alison and Bernard?

2. Three people approach: Alvin, Byron, and Claudia. Alvin says, “All three of us are knaves.” Byron says, “Exactly one of us is a knight.” What are Alvin, Byron, and Claudia?

3. A trio of island dwellers greet you on the beach: Alicia, Betty, and Clyde. Two of the group are the same, either both knights or both knaves. Alicia offers, “Betty is a knave.” And Betty counters, “Alicia and Clyde are the same type.” What is Clyde?

Ada

pted

from

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S U M M E R 2 0 2 0

—SKW CROSSWORD€¦ · What this puzzle is 22-23. An animal of prey 26-27. The close of a day 28-29. To elude 30-31. The plural of is 8-9. To cultivate ... CROSSWORD FUN 1 2 4 6

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