andrew_jorgensen | (no subject)

I shall be sticking to crosswords. Sudoku seems to me to belong with other Taylorist pursuits like American football; entirely lacking in charm.

I find that there needs to be some requirement of inductive reasoning to keep me interested in a sudoku; most straight sudoku puzzles, and just about all newspaper sudokus, are solved through deduction alone, so I've moved on to obscure variants such as "Greater-Than-Killer Sudoku" and the like. Of course, once I get the trick of a variant knocked, it becomes as dull as the original.

I've been having more fun with the kakuro puzzles.

To be fair, some of the harder "straight" sudoku puzzles have a point where they become more chess-like -- you have to think two or three or four moves ahead because there's no place that you can definitely put a given number.

When you're into puzzles like the atrocious ones here (http://www.divingforbananas.com/sudoku/) that require techniques with names like X-Wing or Swordfish, it's probably best to just pull back.

I...I feel curiously drawn to any puzzle entitled "Pernicious." Perhaps that says way too much about my upbringing.

I hate Sudoku. Every time I see people playing that in the subway it makes me feel like I'm surrunded by zombies. Scary !

We're coming to eat your brains!

I got some sudoku puzzles to take on the trip. Also logic problems. Can't help it. I'm not much of a crossword fan.

I wonder why I never see very many good cross-number puzzles. I mean, even GAMES publishes one only every several years.

Dell is publishing a magazine of them under the Kakuro name. I got the first issue and after the first few dozen they were insanely difficult. I guess the trick is not to make them impossible.

It's all about priority. Every afternoon, I do the crossword first, the sudoku second, and the cryptoquote (often the hardest of the batch) third. That's in order of preference. Then I read the comics and maybe, if I have a chance, find out what's happening in the world. But only if I feel like I might care.

I don't get a regular cryptoquote. Well, actually, the only paper that I get delivered these days is the Times, so I don't get anything other than the crossword. But I wouldn't mind the cryptoquote, or the Scrabble puzzle. I do, however, get the Jumble! Man, the headaches I get matching wits against the Jumble . . .

Oh, wait, that comment doesn't make any sense. The Plain Dealer, delivery of which is currently on indefinite vacation suspension, lacks a cryptoquote and the Scrabble puzzle, but does have the Jumble. The New York Times does not in fact have a Jumble, other than Maureen Dowd's writing style.

My dilemma is that The Detroit Free Press has much better comics, but no cryptoquote, while the Detroit News has horrid comics (and lamentable politics) but a regular cryptoquote plus a cyclic string of daily alternative puzzle. Both have crosswords and sudoku. The jumble is only in the News as well, and I do that on occasion (we are speaking of the one with 4 jumbled clues and a "punnish" answer to a final question, no?) My problem is that I'll get the answer first and then suffer the dilemma of whether doing the actual jumbles is a question of intellectual integrity.

And Heh! on Maureen Dowd. I've had similarly disapprobationary thoughts about her logic skills.

Don't think I've heard of cryptoquotes--is that something like a double-crostic?

PS: Hi, Ran!

Hey. A cryptoquote is a simple substitution cypher puzzle wherein a quote is encoded by changing all letters into other letters (i.e. "e" becomes "q".) They can be extremely easy or relatively difficult depending on the sorts of words used and the repetition patterns of letters in a given quote. You can probably google some examples.

Oh, that sounds like what I know as cryptograms. I don't remember if they were always quotes, but yeah, I know what you mean. Thanks.