What is “difficulty” when it comes to solving a crossword?
First, a happy thought. I sometimes mention a poll I commissioned, which suggested that, in the UK, over 7 million people decide which paper to buy at least in part on the basis of the crossword. I mention this, of course, because America’s free press is being intimidated, and so it needs money. What I’m saying is that subscriptions to the New York Times crossword are the only thing holding at bay a four-year-long Cuban Missile Crisis, but this time with an unhappier ending.
So, some pressure on those hosting the NYT’s crossword to keep puzzlers interested. Here’s a recent innovation:
[W]e’ve added a Difficulty Index ... for every New York Times crossword going back to July 1st, 2015 and every future NYT crossword will have the Difficulty Index added to its leaderboard page automatically as soon as we have collected enough data to calculate one.
This is from a post from Puzzazz, an app that is one of the ways NYT subscribers can solve away from pencil and paper. Puzzazz’s boffins have been crunching away at their data showing how long solvers take; the headlines are: Thursday’s puzzles often demand more time than Friday’s, and the notion expressed by former puzzle editor Margaret Farrar – that Saturday’s paper host a “two-cups-of-coffee puzzle” – holds today.
For me, the most interesting question is: do you, reader, measure a puzzle’s “difficulty” in terms of the time taken from first glance to a complete and correct grid?
The question teases out one difference between paper- and screen-solving. Any digital solves I do tend to be solo and in a single sitting. If anyone else gets involved, it’s always paper; and it’s only on paper that I leave a puzzle for a while. Thoughts of leaderboards and stopwatches can be put aside; my brain of later today may be able to tackle different clues to my brain of right now. Is any of this just me?
And for me, “time to completely solve” overlaps with but is not the same as “difficulty”. Dean Mayer’s puzzles in the Sunday Times (Meet the Setter here) offer an example: it takes me an extraordinarily long time to see what some of the wordplay is doing, but I tend to finish them, having eventually understood every clue. They are “difficult” in a different sense to a puzzle where, say, I might rattle off most of the clues but find two intersecting entries are definitely words I’ve never met before. I might guess them right, and finish quicker than with a Dean Mayer – but I’ve found that crossword “difficult” in an equally powerful way.
Perhaps “average completion time” is a more meaningful metric for what Puzzazz is measuring, and any measure of “difficulty” should incorporate other factors (we looked here at “crosswordiness”: the relative obscurity of language)? Again, reader: what about you?
None of this, I must add, is to quibble with what Puzzazz is trying out, or indeed anyone maintaining interest in puzzles. See the above aside about global annihilation.
View all comments >