Christina Franks — A crossword puzzle is solved one word at a time. Letter by letter, the answers start coming together. And with more letters comes more answers. How do we know? Math.
Crosswords vary in their degree of difficulty, so under what conditions can that person expect to be able to complete solve a puzzle?
Dr. John McSweeney of the Mathematics Department at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology set out to find that answer a while ago and shared his findings with Wabash students and faculty on Tuesday.
What McSweeney was able to prove was that, dependent on a puzzle’s difficulty level, there is a certain number of letters from clues that, once obtained, will make a crossword puzzle almost completely solvable.
“Mathematics is really not about numbers – it’s about patterns,” Professor of Mathematics & Computer Science Emeritus David Maharry said. “And a crossword puzzle has huge patterns in it once you start looking.”
The graphs McSweeney used also showed the initial qualities of a puzzle can be so random that a person, even if he or she is not great at solving the crossword one day, the next day might be better. Even if the crossword puzzles are of the same difficulty level, if that person is able to figure out more clues or the letter arrangements make a bit more sense, McSweeney’s research shows that the second day’s puzzle just might go smoother than the last.
McSweeney used crossword puzzles from the New York Times, where Crawfordsville native and 2010 honorary Wabash graduate Will Shortz serves as the crossword puzzle editor. He graduated from Indiana University with the nation’s only degree in Enigmatology, and just a few years later, at age 25, Shortz founded the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament.
So if math has shown that once a person gets a certain amount of letters a puzzle becomes completely solvable, Shortz might have to start making sure the Times’ crosswords are even more puzzling.
