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Dec 21, 2018 · He has made more than 30,000 puzzles in his nearly three-decade career. But one stands above the rest. "The World's Hardest Cryptic Crossword" got its title because of its intensely abstruse clues ...
Despite the equally ludicrous claim that the puzzle would take the best part of a year to solve, ten brainboxes sent me the correct solutions within hours. They are, in order of receipt, Simon Anthony, Clive Weatherley, Derek Harrison, Ivan Reid, crypticsue, John Chute, Mark Williams, Graham Dixon, Stuart Sussex and Lesley Duff.
- The Original Box You Have to Think Outside of
- The Puzzle That (Helped) Save The Free World
- The Rubik’s Cube on Steroids
- The (Possibly) Hardest Logic Puzzle Ever
- The Puzzle The Cia Can’T Solve
- The (Possibly) Hardest Jigsaw Puzzle in The World
- The First Crossword
- The Simple Wooden Box from The Japanese Master
- The Naughty Riddle from Medieval Monks
- Not Your Average Sudoku
You’ve heard the cliché “think outside the box.” Now meet its likely origin: The Nine Dots Puzzle. Connect all nine dots without lifting your pencil from the paper in as few straight lines as possible. If you’ve never solved it, pause here. Spoilers ahead. The Nine Dots Puzzle has been around since at least the early 1900s, with some attributing it...
How can I not include a puzzle that helped us defeat the Nazis? In the early 1940s, the British newspaper The Daily Telegraph received a letter that issued a challenge: If someone could solve a crossword in less than 12 minutes, the author wrote, he would donate 100 pounds to charity. Twenty-five participants were invited to the Telegraph’s offices...
Let me throw out some numbers to show why the Rubik’s Cube (and the beastly puzzles it has inspired) has to appear on this list: The original Rubik’s Cube has sold an estimated 450 million units. It’s got six sides, six colors—but a mind-boggling 45 quintillion possible arrangements. So passionate are its fans that one has solved it in a record 3.4...
There is a delightfully nerdy debate about which logic puzzle is the hardest logic puzzle ever written. I’m going to with one of the top contenders, The Three Gods Riddle, written by logician Raymond Smullyan and published in 1996. I’ll be honest. I wrestled with it for about an hour and then broke down and looked at the answer. But I wanted to inc...
The world is filled with tantalizing, unsolved puzzles (for instance, the Voynich Manuscript, Minoan Linear A alphabet). But my favorite unsolved puzzle is called Kryptos, a sculpture installed in the Langley, Virginia, headquarters of the CIA. The main part of the sculpture is a nearly 12-foot-tall by 20-foot-long copper wall. But the twist is, th...
For my book, I also went in search of the hardest jigsaw ever, and though there are several contenders, I have to go with the infamous Olivia puzzle. Olivia is manufactured by a Vermont-based company called Stave, which produces gorgeous hand-carved wooden puzzles renowned for their deviousness (they have uneven borders, there’s no cover image prov...
The first official crossword (at least according to most puzzle historians) was written by a former concert violinist named Arthur Wynne and appeared in The New York World in 1913. And judged by today’s standards, it kind of stinks: Not only does it use one word as an answer twice—which is a major no-no—many of its clues are ridiculously arcane. Th...
While researching my book, I stumbled onto a worldwide cult phenomenon: Japanese puzzle boxes—handcrafted, wooden works of art doubling as puzzles, which have been made in Japan for centuries and typically served as storage for valuables. But those boxes were simple compared to modern puzzle boxes: Opening them requires figuring out the right combi...
Riddles are perhaps the oldest and most widespread forms of puzzles, appearing in almost every culture. Some of my favorites are from a 10th-century tome compiled by monks called The Exeter Book, which features a few delightfully naughty puzzles. Take, for example, Riddle Number 25: "My stem is erect, I stand up in bed, hairy somewhere down below. ...
Sudoku began its life with as a puzzle with the dull name of “Number Place” in a 1979 issue of Dell Pencil Puzzles and Word Games. Few noticed. That is, until Japanese puzzle publisher Maki Kaji renamed it sudoku in 1984, made some adjustments, and launched a global phenomenon. Most sudokus you find in newspapers and online are either partially or ...
Mar 27, 2020 · In 1945, the war ended. But, in both the U.K. and the U.S., the crossword remained, transitioning from relief to ritual. And in new times of trouble, the crossword puzzle is still there to help ...
- Adrienne Raphel
Mar 17, 2020 · Perhaps that very problem suggested its solution: a puzzle in which readers had to fill in blank spaces with ideas of their own. Image The winners of the first U.S. Open Crossword Puzzle ...
For starters, he pulled off a great technical feat. Tausig’s crossword is a so-called Schrödinger puzzle, named for the physicist’s hypothetical cat that is at once both alive and dead. In a ...
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May 19, 2023 · Key Takeaways: Crossword puzzles have a rich history that dates back to ancient word squares, gaining massive popularity with Wynne’s first modern puzzle in the New York World. The New York Times, once a skeptic of crosswords, embraced the trend during World War II, contributing to the puzzle’s status in popular culture.
