An amazing crossword puzzle | Hacker News Reader

An amazing crossword puzzle

kottke.org

78 pointssuperchink10 comments

Cool. My dad is a big crossword puzzler. When I was a kid I asked him if he thought it was possible to start with a wrong word and then finish the whole puzzle. We both thought the odds would be tiny but then he decided to design a puzzle that could be done two ways consistently.

He worked on it like a maniac for a few weeks and then came up with two puzzles, one with North/South (or maybe East/West) themes, one with Goethe/Schiller themes (this is all in Germany.)

The clues were a bit contrived and I don't remember how big the puzzles were but he submitted them to the weekly "Zeit Magazin" which runs a popular puzzle and published it in the New Years issue.

These crosswords are called "schizophrenic", and there are more examples here: http://www.xwordinfo.com/Schizo

Truly brilliant.

From the Guidelines:

Please submit the original source. If a blog post reports on something they found on another site, submit the latter.

I kinda liked that the explanation was hidden behind another link, but it led to a literal violation of the guidelines, and for that I apologize.

I'll strive to do better, but hopefully I can be forgiven.

This puzzle is mentioned in the lovely documentary Wordplay[1], which ostensibly follows a cadre of competitors in a year of the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament. Well worth a watch, and I believe it's on Netflix.

[1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0492506/

It's easy to call it amazing now... I'll be amazed when I see a proof that the auther of this traveled through time or something.

Click through to the explanation. The amazing part is that the crossword worked no matter who won.

like any skilled precog :)

You need to click on the "Click through to see how they did it link" to see why this is cool.

They used ten ambiguous clues so "CLINTON ELECTED" and "BOBDOLE ELECTED" were both valid solutions to the puzzle. For instance, the down word intersecting the intial C/B is CAT/BAT with the clue "Black Halloween animal".

Since they publish the solution the next day, they can publish the right solution no matter which way the election goes.

[edit: I didn't downvote you, btw]

Mea maxima culpa -.-

I upvoted you both for my sin.

What can I say, I have one of those extra-short attention span...

When opening the link I first thought maybe the black squares pattern was a game-of-life automata and thought "that'd be clever if it was that, added bonus for related words and definitions" and then my blood just boiled so fast when it turned out (wrongly) to be such a basic predicted-afterward parlor trick that I didn't bother noticing the link... (I'll dig myself a bit deeper but I can't help it but say that this click-on-the-link-to-get-the-meat trick is annoying me too, but that's another story (go ahead, I have 64 more karma bits to loose before the ground))

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