New York Times Election Day Crossword (2009) | Hacker News Reader

New York Times Election Day Crossword (2009)

crosswordunclued.com

They did this particular gimmick again early last year. This time, the offering was a choice between the "better of two sci-fi franchises." The correct answer was of course STAR TREK, but STAR WARS would have fit too.

edit: archived copy (from jwilk) https://web.archive.org/web/20230614093839/https://twitter.c...

Archived copy:

https://web.archive.org/web/20230614093839/https://twitter.c...

Devious how answering "It's a trap" leads you to Star Trek.

Some people call these "quantum puzzles" because they can exist it two states at once.

(And I'm guessing someone has made a puzzle with three different possible answer keys. I guess.)

Since we're on the subject of clever construction, I think the 6/6/23 puzzle by Daniel Jaret from just a few weeks ago is legendary[1].

Standard American-style crosswords have rotational symmetry in the squares. This one has rotational symmetry in the answers themselves. It's extraordinary. I think I actually yelled out loud when I finally realized what was going on.

[1] https://www.xwordinfo.com/Crossword?date=6/06/2023

What was going on?

All of the answers have 180 degree rotational symmetry!

For the acrosses, the top left corner begins with DAP. The bottom right ends with PAD. Then OGRE/ERGO, REED/DEER, and so on.

For the downs, it's DORA/AROD, AGES/SEGA, PRET/TERP.

And right in the middle, two palindromes STETS and RACECAR.

Every single letter in the top left has a matching letter in the bottom right. It's an insane feat of puzzle construction.

We’re both expressable as the sum of two cubes!!

>It's an insane feat of puzzle construction

While it is, DAP/PAD both loosely fit the prompt "Fist bump" which made me incredibly impressed with the puzzle. I then tried to figure out what fairy tale featured an ERGO, and became slightly less impressed.

That's insane. I breezed through this puzzle and did not notice. Indeed legendary

Nice, dumbass me solved that without noticing at all! Going back and looking at the grid was wild.

On that site, how do you print an empty crossword with clues? The PDF link on top returns an error.

The New York Times puzzles require a subscription, and that link is just a direct one to the PDF on the Times site.

There was also this crossword affair that some suspected was too clever for its own good:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D-Day_Daily_Telegraph_crosswor...

Ha, imagine MI5 agents frantically trying to figure out how the D-day codenames and other content resulted in actual espionage.

I presume the NYT always published the solution in the next day's paper? If so, a fitting conclusion would have been to not acknowledge the two possible solutions, and (since by then the result was known) only include the solution with Clinton as the winner. I'm curious what they actually did.

If you subscribe, you can actually pull it up with Times Machine, which is one of my favorite things on the internet. (An exhaustive, searchable archive of essentially every issue of the NYTimes dating back to its very beginnings, or as far back as they have records.)

The previous puzzle has both answers interlaced, and then a callout box:

"For Crossword Solvers: Yesterday's puzzle clues, for 39 and 43 across ("Lead story in tomorrow's newspaper") offered readers a choice: "Clinton Elected" and "Bob Dole Elected" fitted equally well with the crossing words, if not with the voters."

While I get your point about it being fitting, I think this sort of cleverness merits the victory lap.

Submitted for your approval: https://i.imgur.com/4nMeZ4o.png

What's a better victory lap?

Clever cruciverbing, or political prognostication?

You can watch Chris Remo of the Daily Solve do this crossword.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zi1uQcshSbQ

I often watch his channel as I find his voice relaxing to listen to.

Good find. Relevant part starts from 11m10s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zi1uQcshSbQ&t=11m10s

Oh wow, thank you! I think I found my new “listen to this to fall back asleep if I wake up at 3am” choice. It’s all so pleasant and makes enough sense not to be jarring yet also quickly blurs into noise.

He's also the composer of the soundtrack for the game Firewatch, if someone is looking for another relaxing thing by him to listen to.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7wtrkp5Mx4&list=OLAK5uy_mVP...

Wow. I used to be an avid listener to Idle Thumbs which he was part of. Since the Firewatch team got bought by Valve they have all been pretty quiet online so even though I don't do crosswords it is nice to see him online.

The same trick was played by some Italian newspaper for Bush vs Gore.

I don't remember the details but one definition was 'island country in the Atlantic Ocean' and it could've been either Ireland or Iceland (in Italian: iRlanda vs iSlanda)

I thought it was an original idea and now I'm a little sad.

I'm not an English native, but how is the IRA a provider of support?

Individual Retirement Account

A native of England might not get that either

And certainly not Northern Ireland.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Individual_retirement_accoun...

> An individual retirement account (IRA) in the United States is a form of pension provided by many financial institutions that provides tax advantages for retirement savings.

> the NYT clues do not mention solution lengths

I don't understand, can't we just tell from the grid?

Cryptic crosswords usually provide the lengths of each word in the solution as part of the clue. If that were done here it would have spoiled the ambiguity because either answer would have had (3,4,7) or (7,7) in the clue.

I think this site probably deals more with the cryptic crosswords, so that aside probably made more sense for regular readers.

A bit further in the article :

> Of course, the same device couldn't have been used in a standard cryptic crossword as word length breakup of solutions - (7, 7) vs (3, 4, 7) - would have given the game away.

Clinton would be 7 letters, Bob Dole is two words, 3 and 4 letters respectively.

I've never seen a crossword that does this, the ones I see just use the grid to show word breaks. However, I've also never seen a crossword that has one hint that cuts across a black square, like this one does. But I'm not an avid crossword puzzler.

Breaking across a black square is uncommon but not unheard of. When it’s done the clue will make it obvious like in this case (“with 43 across”).

Yes you can count the number of letters in the grid, but it's normal in most puzzles in other newspapers to have the solution lengths after the clue.

This is important with multi-word answers because 14 spaces could be a 14-letter word, or a single letter followed by 13, or 2 letters followed by 12 and so on. In cryptics (which this isn't, really), knowing the letter distribution in multi word answers is essential to it being a pleasant and fun puzzle in my experience.

That would have prevented this trick working, because you would have to give the length as (7, 7) for "CLINTON ELECTED" or (3, 4, 7) for "BOB DOLE ELECTED" depending on the "right" answer.

Omitting the lengths allowed this little game to work. It would not have, otherwise.

Enumerations are never provided for non-cryptic crosswords in American publications.

Most people solving this at the time probably figured out the planned ambiguity, right? I mean, I'm pretty sure some people guessed at a point, say, CAT for 39D and OUI for 40D, etc.

Is there an easy way to modify one of the existing crossword generators to produce such ambiguous ones (with two or more possible solutions)?

I don't think the copy of Crossword Compiler I use has an option for this (it could be buried somewhere, there's a lot of niche stuff); what I'd do if I wanted to do this is run the filler with manual word choice turned on and only pick words that work for both solutions.

I was a big cryptic crossword fan when I lived in the UK, and turned my nose up at American-style crosswords as being too vanilla. But I finally got into the NYT crossword after living in the US for a few years, and now I love it. Clever constructions and wordplay like this example are the reason why.

Playing with fire there a bit; if it had been too close to call, they could have ruined the credibility of the crossword forever :)

It wasn't though. Dole was totally uninspiring as a candidate and Ross Perot was a spoiler on the Republican side. There was little doubt about how the election would go.

I wonder how you'd encode something like that into the digital crossword file formats used now.

It would be quite short-sighted for the designers of such formats not to allow multiple values to be encoded somehow, whether to support something clever, or just vague clues that match multiple words.

(2009) article about a (1996) election.

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