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Relative difficulty: Easy
A four-year-old probably couldn't solve this crossword puzzle, but a four-year-old could damn sure "crack" this "code" if you actually just hand said four-year-old the code. Did you ever see "A Christmas Story"? Well I am basically Ralphie after realizing that all that his Little Orphan Annie decoder ring does is tell him "BE SURE TO DRINK YOUR OVALTINE," only in this case the hidden message is "CODES ARE PUZZLES, A GAME JUST LIKE ANY OTHER GAME" (which is nonsense, why would you make your big reveal complete nonsense!?)
This was grim. Grim. I honestly can't get my head around the idea that anyone thought this would be "fun" to solve. ("OVALTINE!? A crummy commercial!? Son of a b—!") Basically I solved the entire puzzle, easily, with no need to decode anything. If I didn't have to write this here blog, I guarantee you I would not even have bothered to do the letter-by-letter "decoding" to get to the "hidden" message, which is one of the great non-messages in the history of messages. What a banal and also inaccurate observation. "Like any other game!?" Games are different from one another. So many games, all of them with different rules and conventions and everything. "Just like any other game," bah. What an absurd generalization. And what does it reveal to us? What about it is unexpected or insightful or interesting or Anything? I guess I am supposed to be impressed that the "code" was rendered in the form of eight symmetrically arranged 5-letter words. Sure, congrats, but from the solver's perspective, there is zero, nada, nothing intriguing about writing in BYSEX or AVERS. It's just ... fill. Ordinary. Unremarkable. The longer "theme" answers are ... well, there are only four of them, and they are cohesive but mostly they just take up space—the bit we're supposed to ooh and aah at is all the code stuff, and it's hard to imagine a more anti-climactic outcome than solving this particular code. Not even worth doing. I'm told that the app does the code-breaking for you? Like ... maybe once you finish something software-y happens and you're supposed to ooh and aah at that? I'm just baffled at the idea that solving this would be anyone's idea of a good time. Looking at it, admiring its architecture, maybe. But solving it? Grr.
Notes:
[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]
The code:
Word of the Day: GOITER (7A: Pain in the neck?) —
- JITSU / EASED / LOOKS / EVERS / CLUNK / BY SEX / PINGS / AVERS
Decoded message:
- "CODES / AREAP / UZZLE / AGAME / JUSTL / IKEAN / YOTHE / RGAME"
A goitre, or goiter, is a swelling in the neck resulting from an enlarged thyroid gland. A goitre can be associated with a thyroid that is not functioning properly.
Worldwide, over 90% of goitre cases are caused by iodine deficiency. The term is from the Latin gutturia, meaning throat. Most goitres are not cancerous (benign), though they may be potentially harmful. (wikipedia)
• • •
What's worse than the theme is the fill, which stopped me in my tracks multiple times, so unpleasant was it on the whole. INATEXT!? LOL what? That is a terrible prepositional phrase, and esp. bad since you've already got INOIL in the grid, practically right next door. I went INATEXT, INOIL, INRI ... and I had to take a deep breath, because it's like the puzzle was deliberately trying my patience. It gave me nothing in the way of sparkle or pizzazz. RESEATS RENEGE REEXAMINE ... where is the joy? Probably the most fun I had during this solve was figuring out how to spell DUMMKOPF (Two "M"s!? Wow, OK!). I also kinda like ERNIE PYLE, but when your spiciest answer is ERNIE PYLE, it's possible you have a spice problem. Maybe I'll throw ANNA WINTOUR in there too. But OF YORE!? LOL, man, did I BLINK AT that, for sure. It's hard to do a Sunday puzzle well—it's hard to do any themed puzzle well, but to have to do it over that much terrain (21x21) is a tall order. I sympathize. But I have rarely felt like a Sunday puzzle whiffed so bad, on both theme and fill. It's not even that the puzzle was *bad*, exactly. It's like it was very committed to an idea of *good* that I could not fathom. Everything was riding on that code, and ... well, from where I was sitting, that gamble just did not work out.
Notes:
- 87D: Bird of the Baltic (SMEW) — on the one hand, I am always happy to see more bird names in the grid. On the other, more important hand, SMEW is crosswordese OF YORE and so I was not entirely happy to see it return (I needed every cross—I'd actually forgotten it existed—used to get it confused with its crosswordese cousin SMEE all the time).
- 89A: What a "Wheel of Fortune" contestant might buy when looking for _NSP_RAT_ON (AN "I") — the ANI, like the SMEW, is a crosswordese bird OF YORE. It was so named because its call bears an uncanny resemblance to the voice of singer-songwriter ANI DiFranco. The only thing I want to say about today's ANI clue is, what kind of ... person ... stares at _NSP_RAT_ON and thinks "Uh ... I dunno ... I better buy a vowel"?
- 74D: Alvin ___, first African American to be elected Manhattan's district attorney (BRAGG) — we need to know *district attorney* names now!? That is a tall, tall order. U.S. Attorneys General, sure, those are national. But municipal DAs!? Pfffff, OK ...
- 61A: Thin porridges (GRUELS) — when's the last time, or any time, you saw this word in the plural? Aside from right now?
[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]
Very easy. I liked the tribute to ALAN TURING part of this and was grateful that the NYT app did the decoding for me because there was no way I was going to do it. If you are interested in learning more about Bletchley Park “The Rose Code” by Kate Quinn is a pretty good piece of historical fiction.
ReplyDeleteI dont know how to enter a reply. I believe this an alphabet code where "s" corresponds to literal "e" and"o" in the grid corresponds to "z". Often the alphabet is slid underneath the coded alphabet but im not sure of that here
DeleteThe big reveal is not nonsense. It’s an Alan Turing quote.
ReplyDeleteI mean, you’re free to think that Turing said a silly and pointless thing, but I think I would not attack the puzzle for that.
But the notes don’t say that it’s an actual quote from Turing. Just that Turing said it in the film. So it’s maybe just words put in Turing’s mouth by a screenwriter….
DeleteCompletely agree. Way off base.
DeleteI thought the quote made it a perfectly fine winner. The difficulty was exact Sunday easy (not hard, just long…man, I got things to do!). But since Rex’s team has started blocking my more astute critiques of his contradictory critiques—I’ll just leave it at this: while Rex continues to bemoan any slip in the most highest expectations for every single puzzle of any given day, 365 days a year (and teaches his prodigies to bemoan the same), the rest of us continue to enjoy the simple joy of the daily solve…which he clearly and utterly loathes. Let’s see if this makes it to print.
DeleteTotally agree with you. This quote IS attributed to Alan Turing. And if Rex had actually read the puzzle answers carefully he would have seen that. While this was not the best Sunday puzzle we solved…we do like most of them…unlike other folks. 😊
DeleteI hit a Sunday personal best on this one (by a lot: several minutes). When I saw ALAN TURING immediately, my hopes for an interesting puzzle were raised, but alas, it was not to be. I didn’t see the title, I couldn’t figure out where or what this mysterious note might be, and after I completed the solve and was staring at the finished grid in disappointment and no little confusion, the puzzle started to change my answers! All by itself! I figured maybe it was haunted, given the proximity of Halloween.
ReplyDeleteAs a great admirer of Turing’s achievements, the best description I have for this puzzle is “damp squib”.
I agree with Rex on this one. Why is the app solving the cryptogram for me? Why go to all that work to make this puzzle to have that happen? Ironically, it's probably better that way so we don't have to solve a that. Just baffling.
ReplyDeleteTotally agree. It’s one thing for it to be a simple substitution code. It might have been fun to solve it myself, and challenging as it would be missing the word breaks. But the app’s animation nixed that before i could. What a waste.
DeleteIn the settings (gear icon at top right) you can toggle “Show Overlays” off so that the app does not reveal this sort of thing automatically.
DeleteI have to agree with Rex on this one. But at least I solve on the App, so I didn’t have to go through the long Ovaltine code ring exercise. The App simply switched between the clued answers and the encoded answers every 5 seconds or so once you finished. Finishing, BTW, was extremely easy. I just wrote as fast as I could and never had a do over. I’m sure it was a Sunday PR.
ReplyDeletePain in the Keister
- or -
On 127A
A prince may have a princess
Who will share his royal throne,
And a Duke may take a duchess
So he’ll never be alone.
While a count will choose a countess
Who amuses him with rhymes,
Still an ass will have to ASSESS
Why he’s in the New York Times
Too much Crosswordese and a lame reveal. Dummkopf... who even uses that outside of German speakers?
ReplyDeleteNot even German speakers.
DeleteHmmm...put in the last letter, got the "Congratulations! You have completerd the New York Times Crossword Puzzle..." and left. Why does the hired help at #NYTXW think that I spend *any* time eying a completed puzzle like it was a treasure map? If I feel the need for a well-done meta, I'll go check out the Washington Post Sunday Puzzle!
ReplyDeletesaw the note, ignored the note, solved the puzzle, went to bed. never felt the need to decode. dumb cough.
ReplyDeletezippy
Pretty easy. Didn't do much for me. Didn;t get my goat as nearly as it got Rex's, but as always, I enjoy his humor and insights.
ReplyDeleteThe Enigma machine made it very much more complicated to encode a message than just the simple letter substitution demonstrated here. Wikipedia has an excellent description for those interested. The NYT puzzle app has a graphical effect that lights up - a letter at a time - the “decoded” message. That is what would happen in a real enigma machine while typing in the encoded message (which was sent in groups of five letters like demonstrated in the puzzle). The plaintext would become clear by the relevant decoded letters lighting up on the keyboard when typing in the encrypted codes. I think this puzzle does more to highlight the capabilities of the NYT puzzle app than those of the Enigma machine. That is apart from the references to Alan Turing, a movie about Turing and his decryption effects as well as the name of the machine.
ReplyDeleteFrom a pure construction point of view the challenge is to find a mapping that will allow you to find five letter words that fit the mapping (given the Turing adage) - that is what generates a lot of strain in the grid and especially generates words such as “BY SEX” - I think it took some programming to come up with the right letter mapping - as far as I can see each letter maps to a unique other letter.
ReplyDeleteThe extra code solve was WAAAAY over the top, and unnecessary for a good puzz.
ReplyDeleteI say that as someone who solved this via a @NYtgames subscription, and F-ing whatever.
So, classify this is as SAD!
Man were this weekend’s puzzles unsatisfying. I got a new Saturday best by two minutes and was just shy of a new Sunday best too.
ReplyDeleteI was disappointed that the theme had no impact on solving the puzzle. I didn’t even get the small joy of decoding since the mobile version did it for me.
A workable puzzle with a somewhat interesting theme. I'm ok with it.
ReplyDeleteAgree with Rex at every Turing. Really bad and booooring.
ReplyDelete
ReplyDeleteThe best part of the puzzle for me was watching the NYT app change the letters after the solve. It changes one letter at a time in succession and at one point in the process it reads, "CODES ARE A PUZZLE, A GAME JUST LIK[e] SEX". Which is a *lot* more fun than Ovaltine!
I read the note and took a hard pass on this one. I read @Rex to get his take.
ReplyDeleteOkay, I guess there’s some clever construction here in the code, but it did nothing to make for a pleasant solving experience. Super easy and not much fun. I had to decipher the secret message letter by letter because AcrossLite didn’t do the magic for me, but I’m not sure why I bothered. Agree with Rex, completely.
ReplyDeleteThanks, @Marc, for saying something about the ENIGMA MACHINE, and to @Paul D. I'm not sure the line attributed to ALAN TURING was ever spoken by him, but it might have been, and coming from Turing, one of the most spectacular geniuses of the twentieth century, I think it might carry more depth than Rex surmises. More in a moment.
ReplyDeleteThe puzzle was easy, I grant you. Fill in the blanks. Any decoding could be safely ignored. While I didn't find the puzzle "grim", I agree that it was relatively unexciting. Maybe some further pizzazz could have been had by making more of the clues trickier -- so many of the clues were straightforwardly definitional.
I want to say something about Rex's review, the first part of which I found disappointing. The tone of the objections against the quote, which I found superficial, reminded me of a moderately bright but whiny teenager who hasn't bothered for even a second to look more deeply into (or decode) what the great man could have been saying, flinging words like "banal", "absurd generalization", etc. I mean, stop, Rex. Take a deep breath, and stop for a moment.
A possible ingredient in what Turing is saying, as a team leader, was to encourage his co-workers, including some experienced and gifted students of mathematics (like Peter Hilton), to think of formal systems, such as the internal algorithms of the ENIGMA MACHINE, or even the great formal systems underlying mathematics itself, more lightly: as games. And the task before them was to figure out the rules of this particular game. This is related to a philosophical attitude called mathematical Formalism. In mathematics, we start from initial conditions called axioms, and apply rules of inference (the rules of the logical game) to derive theorems from those axioms.
Thinking of problems in terms of games can be a big help. One of the harder things in becoming a mathematician is learning to deal with alternating quantifiers, "for all" and "there exists". A famous example is the formal definition of limit in calculus, the famous epsilon-delta definition. "For all epsilon greater than zero there exists a delta greater than zero such that for all x..." -- it's a complicated-looking definition, and it takes a while for students to grok it. But you could think of it as a game. Imagine playing a game of chess, as Black (the second player). You want a good strategy. "Given any opening move by White, there is some response I can make, such that for any follow-up move by White" -- the logical structure of that, the alternation of the "for all" and "there exists", is the same as for the definition of limit. (And this is a common feature of two-player games. This could have been another component of Turing's thinking here.)
Thus, when I teach the definition of limit in calculus, I try to get the students to think of the process in terms of a game, a very short and simple game actually, with at most three moves. We play several rounds of this game in class, to get a sense of what this game is like. The limit exists if the second player has a winning strategy, and doesn't exist if the first player has a winning strategy. Then we develop such strategies.
I'm saying all this perhaps mostly over the head of Rex -- not that he couldn't understand it if he really wanted -- but I mean over his head and out to a larger audience who find math, and ways of thinking about it, of potential interest. Humans love games and puzzles, and are in some sense genetically wired for them, so some of this game stuff could make the process of learning math or decoding the Enigma a lot less intimidating.
I'll get off my soapbox now (it wasn't really a TIRADE though).
Yes!
DeleteThank you, Prof. Trimble. That was a fun, and a needed upbeat, lesson!
Delete@TTrimble 7:21 from much later in the day... hope you see this. My older son and I have a bond over "figuring things out", and it can be anything. Long ago I was a title searcher, when everything was done on paper. Much figuring out, logical and especially spatial. Also helped me to be the *only* student in a calculus class freshman year (300 students) to solve an area problem involving a shape with 2 curved sides (area of a larger imaginary shape minus area of a smaller imaginary shape). I had to go to the prof's office and explain how I did it, really I was thinking about land bordered by a river. Would a male student have been asked for the same proof?
DeleteAnyway, we call it "puzzle solving mentality" and are always excited to share instances. I'll bet that's what those recruiters were looking for. People who can bend their minds, look at something differently, like a crossword clue.
Or a Y seam, for any quilters, although for that you can actually move the fabric around. But it wasn't the manipulation that ultimately helped me understand, it was thinking about the relationships, and when I was asleep I "saw" it. Yup, it works. For similar reasons I make my own patterns. Spatial problem solving (seam allowance, triangle calculations, etc) and I do it on graph paper. With a pencil (unlike crosswords).
Amen.
DeleteThis is what happens when an humanities guy comments on computer science. We get laws that say pi ia 3.14.
DeleteNot a mathematician by any accounts…just the humanities for this guy but thank you so much for the mathematical explanation. If I had you as a teacher I actually might have learned something of math!
DeleteThe full was mostly fine but the premise was the turnoff. Don’t make us do extra work!
ReplyDeleteI read the explanatory note at the top of the page and just said no, not gonna waste my time with this crap. Then came here to see if I made the right decision. I did.
ReplyDeleteMemorable moments of my solve:
ReplyDelete• Pulling ANNA WINTOUR and ERNIE PYLE from deep crevices in the outer reaches of my memory.
• “Really? DUMMKOPF has two M’s?”
• Agog-ness over how in the world Addison came up with two sets of words – one a quote, and another a series of eight in-the-language crossword answers – in which each letter of one corresponds to another letter of the other. (Only to be further blown away post-solve reading in his notes that he did this without a computer!)
• Smiling at three wordplay clues: [Flight path?] for STAIRS, [Mountian cover] for SKICAP, and [Bank run, perhaps] for ERRAND.
• Seeing the meta of having the clue for OFT – [O’er and o’er] – be one that has been used oft before.
• Going through an emotional combo right at the end of my fill-in: First, the joy of using the code to fill in my last square, the fourth letter of JITSU, as I didn’t know if it was JITSU/SUSIE or JITZU/SUZIE; second, righteous indignation over having the pleasure of uncovering the quote be usurped by the app; third, the complete turnaround where that indignation was replaced by gratitude upon realizing that the app saved me from the rote-work of uncovering the quote.
I most certainly got my money’s worth today – thank you for this, Addison!
TURING was brilliant and I loved the movie but tribute puzzles just don’t do it for me - don’t care if it’s Mother Theresa, Ghandi or Johnny Ramone - don’t like them. So - in the end this one and it’s meta quote fell flat for me. I’m not tossing as much shade as the big guy did - I think it’s well constructed and overall well filled - just not an enjoyable time.
ReplyDeleteIMITATION crossing INTIMATES caused a side eye. Liked seeing ENIGMA and ERNIE PYLE. Apt use of BYTE and CALC.
The musical sub-theme was neat - YO YO MA, SANTANA, Todd Rundgren, The HIVES, STRAY Cats, The SHINs, SPIRIT, the DEAD and Billy BRAGG. I’m sure there are more.
The puzzle notes refer to the meta quote as “a line spoken by TURING in the IMITATION GAME” - hard to dispute that.
Oh SISTER is my favorite from DESIRE
Not my idea of a good time - but I’m not going to rip it.
Took one look at the instruction, saw it was yet another cutesy-pie POS and decided I'd pass. Mies was right...sometimes less is more.
ReplyDeleteYeah, not my favorite either. I view this puzzle as a kind of novelty, and mentally slot it into some side category outside the mainstream of daily crosswords. As such, I can say it has some interest in its own unusual way – as a tribute to a man with an amazing mind who was indispensable to the Allied effort in WWII and as a grid with uncommon architecture and a flashy graphical finish. I wouldn’t want to see such a puzzle every day but as a curiosity, it gets some leeway for originality.
ReplyDeleteI solved this in a time that was close to my Sunday record, so no real hang-ups. At one point, I had all the shaded 5-letter words filled in and I was curious about the message, so I used the substitution code and found out what it was. Little did I know how unnecessary that was. I wish that solving the message could have been made a challenge for the puzzle-doer – don’t simply provide us with the letter substitutions and don’t have the solution appear on the grid as soon as we’ve finished. Make it a second actual puzzle for anyone who wants to take it on.
I thought some of the long answers were peculiarly appropriate to Turing’s personal story: disapproval of his INTIMATES resulted in his criminal conviction; once he was convicted, they RENEGEd on his cryptographic consultancy job for the government; it is said that he seemed to DETERIORATE during his year on female hormones; but ultimately the government did RE-EXAMINE his case and made an attempt to ATONE FOR the wrongs done to him by granting him a pardon and even expanding it to apply to other people who were also convicted of gross indecency in those unenlightened times.
Prepositions worked hard in this puzzle: SEEN AT, IN OIL, BY SEX, HIT ON, OF YORE, BLANK AT, TELL ON, ATONES FOR, IT IN, IN A TEXT. There are some striking pairs: EVERS and AVERS, MENS and AMENS, and even YODA and YOYOMA. I love the word SMEW (didn’t know it) and as Rex suggested, I can’t help but see the feathered critter as Hook’s avian sidekick.
My husband has done a lot of fieldwork in the Arctic and I’m quite familiar with the ANORAK. But that word also has a slangy meaning in Britain: a person who has a very strong interest, perhaps obsessive, in niche subjects (Wikipedia). I think it was originally applied to trainspotters.
It occurs to me that IMITATION GAME or THE IMITATION GAME contains the letters of ENIGMA. Is that just a coincidence? I’ve wondered if the movie title as a whole is an anagram, but I can’t make anything sensible out of it. If anyone knows anything about this, please tell.
[S.B. LOCO – SBF at work: @okanaganer and @pabloinnh doing well and I’m getting -1s and -2s. Sigh.]
I may be wrong but I heard imitation game refers to Turing's test of whether a computer had (artificial) intelligence. If a person icommunicating with a computer believed they were in an exchange with a real person, that would prove the computer had A.I. I believe he theorized the possibility of modern computers in the 1930's!
DeleteI liked the puzzle better than Rex but it was very easy. As was noted above, the fact that the substitution code was in groups of five letters is a nice touch. That was how Enigma messages were sent out. Enigma was vastly more complicated however.
So it's come to this: Shortz's obsession with puzzles other than Xwords has gotten to the point that he chooses a Xword that has a (dopey) puzzle embedded in it, then provides the instant answer to that puzzle as soon as you finish the Xword. So even if you wanted to solve the puzzle, you couldn't.
ReplyDeleteI had no intention of solving whatever junk the note was talking about--I just wanted a nice, meaty Xword. Happy to see that I wasn't the only one who wouldn't have bothered solving the extra. As is often the case when the grid is sacrificed for some stupid interior joke or gimmick, the overall solve was ridiculously easy, 20 seconds off my PB, but with none of the fun.
WaPo Sunday puzzle, here I come!
Oh, another thing. Rex, Alvin Bragg has been much in the news since he's (recently) taken office, for example weighing in on prosecutions against Trump by the state of New York and whether they should be pursued. This has been national news, so it doesn't seem beyond the pale for US solvers. (I'd think you in particular might have heard of him, since you live in New York state, I think.)
ReplyDelete@TTrimble, AMEN and thank you! I usually turn to Lewis or LMS for a counterpoint to a grim review.
ReplyDeleteWow, rarely have I seen such universal agreement with a Rex pan. Other than @Lewis, who always makes the constructor feel good, no one seems to have liked it. Can’t say I disagree, although I didn’t despise it as much as Rex did.
ReplyDeleteCompletely agree with other app solvers who had mixed feelings about the magical decoding when you finish. On one hand (with its 14 KNUCKLEs - anyone else look at their hand to confirm the number?), why would you tell us how to solve the code and then literally not let us do it, even if we wanted to? On the other hand, thank you for doing that because I have no interest in doing something a four-year-old could do, as Rex rightly (and hilariously with the Ovaltine reference) points out. And yes, Evan Birnholz in the WaPo would have found a much more interesting way to challenge us.
The other annoying thing about the app’s magic is that you can’t stop it. I was looking at the completed puzzle to see if there were any interesting answers worthy of a pseudo- witty comment here, but the damn app keeps changing the letters on me. Oh well.
I have to agree with @Paul D and especially @TTrinmble. Thank you for the thoughtful essay. I asleep disagree with Rex. The point of the quote is not that all games are the same but that you can look at cryptography in the same way as you do a game.
ReplyDeleteI was pleased at the start to see that this would be a Turing tribute. He was a true hero of WWII, but being gay was treated shabbily by the nation he helped rescue. I think Rex could have been more appreciative of that.
I also agree with everyone who said that had the app not completed the quote for me I would not have even bothered to do it myself.
Finally, the whole thing is typical Shortz. Listen to his dopey Saturday NPR spot and you will understand.
Boring puzzle.
ReplyDeleteI didn’t bother decoding it…. But! I can’t imagine how it was ENcoded!
And then placed in an Xword grid. Wow!
I just thought the puzzle was way too easy. The fact that it was about codes was evident at the outset and that made too many of what should have been interesting themers gimmes--Imitation Game, Alan Turing, etc. (I haven't seen the movie yet btw, but knew the premise.) Sorry, this one looks like it was more fun to construct than solve.
ReplyDeleteHad a most OFL-ish reaction to this one, right down to being sure that the message would be something about Ovaltine. Solving on paper does not get the instant decoding thing that the app does, as I read here. Anyway, I read the instructions and knew instantly that I would just wait for the blog to see what the secret message was. Good call.
ReplyDeleteAlso like OFL, I was happy to see SMEW again after all these years.
I knew ERNIEPYLE right away, but I'm afraid my acquaintance with Ms. WINTOUR and M. Versace is sadly lacking. See also Mr. BRAGG.
Otherwise, the only thing I noted was the RATE crossing of ADRATE and DETERIORATE, and wondering if that violated any sacred crossword rules. Guess not, because there it is.
Solid enough Sunday, AS. Always Something I don't know much about, like Mr. Turing and his achievements, but that's not your fault. Thanks for some fun.
So, apparently the revealer is something AT actually said, which validates what otherwise felt very blah. Without the cipher provided, would anyone ever be able to work it out? I doubt it? You would need a computer! So, if you solved the old fashioned way you would never get to the quote, but if you solve on the app, the code is deciphered by the internal computer and you don't have to solve it. The answer lights up on the screen for you. The machine does the revealing. On reconsideration then, this becomes a much more nuanced and clever theme than it first appears.
ReplyDeleteIronic that one of the easiest puzzles in human memory is a homage to Alan Turing and decryption
ReplyDeleteAn easy Sunday puzzle with several cool references to Turing. I think all the gripes are merely taking the puzzle too seriously. I hat cryptograms so I ignored them, but at least on Android I got the quote any way. What's not to like?
ReplyDeleteRead the prologue and didn’t expect much since a cryptic gimmie puzzle is not something I relish. Saw the ANNA WINDOUR x ALAN TOURING clogging up the NW and knew it wasn’t going to be for me. Stumbled and bumbled around the grid looking for standard crossword fare and took what I could get. Nice trivia lover’s delight in other parts of the grid as well (three side-by-side entries are ERNIEPYLE, ALvin BRAGG and YOYOMA for heaven’s sake). Hopefully the gimmick-puzzle fans will enjoy it at least.
ReplyDeleteThe concept and its implementation were impressive in and of themselves. Unfortunately they were totally divorced from the solving experience.
ReplyDeletePuzzle was mostly easy for me. The decoding bit made me feel like I was ten again, poring over my Games magazine.
ReplyDeleteI can't understand the vitriol over the encrypted message. It took a good puzzle, and just spiffed it up a little.
ReplyDeleteAnd, we should remember that when Turing was recruiting people to help crack the Enigma, one of the qualities he was looking for in people was a love of word games, especially crossword puzzles. Maybe some of us might have helped him.
I agree with TTRIMBLE regarding OFL’s s—t storm. For sure, it’s not a pleasant way to start Sunday morning. The venom was so thick and gratuitous. Even though Trimble’s sane remarks were mostly over my pay scale, I truly appreciated his calm.
ReplyDeleteAs for Mr. Snell’s puzzle, too easy but not repugnant in any way. I applaud his tribute to Alan Turing, a hero for many reasons and for the ages.
Hey All !
ReplyDeleteIs this a subset of a Schrodinger puz? An encoded puz, but we have the key. Thought I wouldn't decode it myself, as I come here immediately after solving, and figured Rex would have the decoded message for me, thereby saving precious seconds that I can use for further procrastination. When what to my wondering eyes should appear (oops, wrong holiday), the NYTXW app decoded it for me! Ah, the miracles of modern technology.
Reading y'all, realizing that it was a quote by TURING, makes it more palatable then when I thought it was just a made-up, non-sensical jibberish phrase.
Tough to make puz, so I'm impressed by that. Addison had to come up with eight 5 letter words, that were 1)real words, 2)that would work being substituted (which may not sound all that difficult, but there are repeating letters that make it more challenging), 3)come up with the substitution code, 4) make it all work adding four other Themers, and 5) not end up with crappy fill everywhere. Whew!
Smart to pick an E as a substitute for the five A's. Less stress that way.
The theme didn't add much to the solving experience, but was still neat seeing the end result. I SMILED.
I did have an FWE (Finished With Errors). Three wrong squares. AaRO/aRNIEPYLE (silly one there), CASSIp/pLATES (Ten Commandments are written on pLATES 😁), GRUELl/less (because SES??). Fiddlesticks.
The ole brain sometimes seems like an ENIGMA MACHINE. I have yet to crack that code.
Four F's
RooMonster
DarrinV
I kinda liked it?
ReplyDeleteThe five letter clues were still some fun and I guess I’m a basic solver? But it was still a nice Sunday AM diversion.
Devising a cipher alphabet which can be used to construct words and phrases in both ciphertext and plaintext is a considerable feat. The puzzle may not have been as difficult as purists like, but one needs to credit the constructor's cleverness.
ReplyDeleteIt's clear from Parker's review that he knows little or nothing of cryptography. Would he prefer a phrase enciphered with a multiple alphabet substitution?
Moreover, I'd like to see him abandon his supercilious tone occasionally; it's tiresome.
My question for PORTIA (47A) -- if the quality of mercy is not strained, what keeps it from getting lumpy?
ReplyDeleteThere was a Thursday puzzle years ago with the central across answer a mix of seemingly random letters, maybe 10 or 12. Then there were as many four-letter answers in the grid each with IS as the central letters, e.g., DISC, MIST, etc. And reading those as "D is C, M is T," gave you the code for the message in the middle. I can't remember what the message turned out to be, but I really enjoyed that puzzle.
Maybe Rex has a point about the decrypted "saying" being meaningless but I don't think he should blame the puzzle - blame the scriptwriter for the movie. I personally had fun figuring the quote out and yes, I used to enjoy dot-to-dot "puzzles"!
ReplyDeleteI thought there were some great words in the grid - DETERIORATES, INTIMATES, RE-EXAMINE, KNUCKLE. Some good wordplay like the clues for GOITER, HIVES, well maybe that's it for wordplay.
And Rex complaining about GRUELS had me wonder if it was related to GRUELing though I didn't look very hard for a connection.
Addison Snell, I like that you took a tribute puzzle and jazzed it up, thanks.
I came here to read the comments. the Annoys are pretty good today..especial at 2:10...dumb cough!!!!
ReplyDeleteI feel bad for Señor Addison because he must've spent MUCHO time to construct something from an ENIGMA MACHINE.
My heroine was Frances Steen. I think they did a movie about her and how she was able to decipher messages that eventually led to the death of Admiral Yamamoto. But that's just me...and it has nothing to do with this puzzle.
They don't pay me enough to become a cryptologist. It's much too much work. So now the question is: Is the puzzle worth doing for its own sake now that I know I have no intention of breaking any codes? And the answer is: Yes, I found it diverting enough to soldier on anyway. Some answers were boringly easy, but there was enough here to keep me mildly interested.
ReplyDeleteI saw and loved the movie. I knew all the associated names. And now I'll go to Rex -- who I'm sure has done the work -- and find out just what those 8 words translate to and what the movie line is.
I'm sort of curious, actually. I'm just not THAT curious.
A GAME JUST LIKE ANY OTHER. This has a special meaning for the Minnesota Vikings, who are 5-1 in spite of themselves.
ReplyDeleteFine writing on TURING today, @TTrimble (7:21) et al. And thank you @Rex for pushing the appropriate buttons to inspire such thoughtful replies.
Once Turing et al. cracked the Enigma code, the Allies (led here by Churchill and the British intelligence operations) went to extraordinary lengths to conceal their success. For obvious reasons, they wanted the Germans to continue using the code. To add to the reading list on the subject (see @JAE (12:18)), for those interested: for historical fiction, "Cryptonomicon" by Neal Stephenson and "Gravity's Rainbow" by Thomas Pynchon. For non-fiction, "Bodyguard of Lies" by Anthony Cave Brown and "Operation Mincemeat" by Ben MacIntyre. Well worth the reads.
I have a two-wheeled TURING MACHINE. The tires need some air, but once that's under control I'll get a little exercise and drink in this season of mists and mellow fruitfulness. (I do see in myself something of the TTrimblean errant student.)
@Anonymous 9:21 !!! I think you have found the diamond in this theme! The app plays the part of the ENIGAMACHINE!
ReplyDeleteI saw the puzzle note and thought of the hassle involved in transposing the code - I'd either have to print out the puzzle so I could view the letter substitution list on the app, or fetch paper and pencil and painstakingly one at a time toggle between list and puzzle to break the code, ala Ralphie. Then as soon as it was solved, the decryption revealed itself. At first I was annoyed, then appreciated being saved the dithering around. And now I see that it was the culmination of the theme!
Bravo, Anonymous!
OK, so after solving the puzzle and ‘crap-o-gram,’. I could not wait to read how Rex was going to rip this puzzle a new a…. one.
ReplyDeleteI loved the Ralphie decoder ring analogy.
Thanks Rex for not disappointing!
In the online puzzle the cryptogram is automatically revealed---no need to kidnap a four-year-old child!
ReplyDeleteI hated ANAS for "Santa ___ (desert winds)"---I suppose it passes, but would anyone really use it in conversation?
Realize that the reveal is a Turing quote.
ReplyDeleteThat’s nice.
I didn’t read the notes… and if I had I would not bother to decode…
It was fast and easy which made it not a DRAG, and tho I love that it was Turing’s quote and it is a reward …. For me, it boils down to flashy gymnastics. Just mho.
😏🦖🦖🦖🦖😏
Yes, it was easy, but for someone who is not in the upper echelons of crossword puzzle solving it was FUN. Not a boring slog like recent puzzles have been.
ReplyDeleteSeems reasonable to me for the New York Times to have the District Attorney of New York County as an answer in its crossword puzzle.
ReplyDeleteLiked it a lot. Even better were the posts of @Egs,(hilarious), @TTrimble (I'll read it a couple more times today), and @Birchbark (desperate for a good read, thanks).
ReplyDeleteCongratulations, Mr. Snell.
ReplyDeleteI’m on the WEE island of OUOLAPOD wishing this puzzle had not caused so many crabby moods.
Solving in the mag, I had no app to do the decoding for me, and I didn't do it for myself either - with the CRYPTOGRAM I discovered a theme type ranking (for me) even lower than anagrams. But I enjoyed doing the puzzle - I loved the movie and over the years have been a fascinated reader about the subject. And overall I found the grid fun to fill in. One "BLINK AT" moment: for 47A - singling out one character for wordplay in a Shakespeare play?
ReplyDeleteI always read Rex on Sunday—not to get any answers but to get my weekly fix of highly biased uninformed churlishness. Was not disappointed today. Thank you to TTrimble for a more thoughtful and educated perspective on this puzzle.
ReplyDeleteIt was worse than Ralphie and his decoder ring if you used the NYT app: The solve was a breeze, so I was actually looking forward to cracking the code, finding the mystery phrase at the end, preserving the “aha” moment. Unfortunately, I solved the puzzle itself extremely quickly and the app itself did the big reveal … like an invisible Vanna White turning the letters over and over to spell the coded phrase.
ReplyDeleteThx, Addison; what a great tribute puz! :)
ReplyDeleteEasy-med.
Pretty much flew thru this one, tho the lower left quad was somewhat challenging.
Participated in a baseball umpire's board on USENET back in the '90s.
A sawed-off 7 IRON was my go-to for short chip shots. ⛳️
Loved 'The Imitation Game'.
Vintage SKI toques on ESPY
New: BRAGG; GIANNI, PORTIA, CLARK.
Enjoyed today's solve! :)
@pablo yd; 👍 for your QB dbyd! :)
Off to taCKLE the NYT' 'Variety CRYPTic' xword, but first, have to KNUCKLE down and try to finish this week's beastly Sat. Stumper. 🤞
___
Peace 🕊 🇺🇦 ~ Compassion ~ Tolerance ~ Kindness to all 🙏
Like @Lewis, my final letter was the correct guess of the S in SUSIE/JITSU.
ReplyDeleteLike @Rex, my first thought was Ralphie and Ovaltine.
I had some struggle in the NE, which was the last section to fall.
Ixnay on this uzzlepay
ReplyDeleteRex makes a good point about the reveal just handing over the answer by providing the key. But the shaded answers are not words which match the words in the reveal in length. JITSU gives us CODES which is fine but EASED = AREAP. So the code would be virtually impossible to solve without the letter key. Practically speaking, this is about as good as it gets for a puzzle with this gimmick.
ReplyDeletePS - Alternative clue for 74D: English singer-songwriter and activist Billy ____ .
ReplyDeleteThere were precisely two things I enjoyed about this puzzle. First, I smashed my best time for completing any NYT crossword (not just a Sunday best). Second, Rex’s write-up. Cheers!
ReplyDelete@TTrimble. Thank you for your explanation. I found it very thought provoking, and surprisingly understandable for this non-mathmatical mind.
ReplyDeleteOops, forgot to post this link.
ReplyDeleteThe crossword and other puzzles that the Bletchley Park recruiters used
Something that's always mystified me, though, is the notion that adeptness with word puzzles was necessary for the kind of codebreaking that Turing and co. were doing. Wouldn't mathematical ability be much more to the point?
Nitpicky point here about 56D. I know it’s about the L train in Chicago, but do people really say ELS? Is there more than one L train? And wouldn’t most people just say L trains instead of ELS?
ReplyDeleteOk ok this (crossword) puzzle wasn’t the greatest. But if it inspires even one NYT solver out there (obviously not this group) to research Alan Turing — a hero of WWII later totally screwed by the very government he saved — it’s worth it.
ReplyDeleteAs to dissing the content of the ‘hidden cryptogram’ — as others point out it’s clearly identified as a QUOTE (either from Turing or from the movie character playing him) and never intended to be a ‘factual’ statement. That said many thanks to TTrimble 7:21 for describing in detail how the statement does actually make sense.
As to the puzzle: SW corner took me awhile since I very confidently wrote Hemingway at 81D (well he was a WWII journalist and he did win a Pulitzer… although, I guess, not for journalism). Had to work to find the (barely known to me) ERNIE PYLE.
Most definitely an impressive feat of construction.
ReplyDeleteConsider:
-Start with a 40 letter phrase.
- Now figure out a 1-1 letter substitution code that converts that phrase into 8 5-letter chunks of text that have a good chance of fitting into a crossword puzzle.
- Now create a puzzle that includes those 8 5-letter chunks.
From a solver's point of view:
- Easy
- Essentially themeless
- Lots of DUMMKOPF fill
- Not really terrible but nothing special either
Villager
Theme mcguffin lacked humor or wordplay (or Halloween), so that's gonna make any big ol' SunPuz solvequest a bit of a chore, at least at our house. Was OK to solve half of it and then pass it on to the PuzEatinSpouse, as is our traditional handlin of ginormous-sized puzs, tho.
ReplyDeleteLiked: KNUCKLE. DUMMKOPF. SANTANA. NUCLEI. All the constructioneer's car trouble with CLUNKs & PINGS. ITT [token spooky reference].
staff weeject pick: ADJ. Which is ETC, decoded.
Thanx, Mr. Snell dude. SEN PILA JBXXERIX AIKKU.
Masked & Anonymo9Us
Happy Halloween, Eve! … U too, Adam.
**gruntz**
Alvin Bragg isn’t just another municipal DA. He’s the guy who refused to prosecute Trump followed by the resignation of 2 veteran prosecutors. BTW the population of Manhattan is 1.6 million, larger than a dozen states with and with National visibility.
ReplyDeleteMy mother was one of the women recruited during WWII to decrypt enemy codes. Many of the women were recruited from 7 Sister colleges (Vassar, Wellesley, Bryn Mawr, Smith, Mount Holyoke, Radcliffe, Barnard.) recruiters looked for women good at both math and crossword puzzles. In Washington DC, decrypting for the Army, my mother met my father, a soldier also working on codes.
ReplyDeleteShe continued doing puzzles until her death and years after the war they broke a code for the Oregon Historical Society. Turned out to be a “little black book” of a River Pilot who had lovers in every port of call.
Wonderful story!
DeleteAs it happens, there were many more women code breakers in the US than at Bletchley Park during WW II. Most British women were left with the lower level work.
Actually, the American women did a phenomenal job. They have been overlooked.
I would have been more impressed if the coded message was "Always drink your ovaltine". At least it would have been a very meta joke as the holiday season is about to kick off with Halloween.
ReplyDeleteJFC! Where is all this outsized animosity coming from?! The puzzle is clever. It was easier than most Sundays, I guess. But the theme was cohesive, and added a little something beyond the usual wrinkle, such as rebus answers. And yet Some of you a-holes are acting like you’re victims of a hate crime perpetrated by the constructor, who was just trying to give you b@st@reds a brief respite from your miserable existences. I swear. The longer I live the less I understand the world.
ReplyDelete@Barbara S. wrote:
ReplyDeleteSomething that's always mystified me, though, is the notion that adeptness with word puzzles was necessary for the kind of codebreaking that Turing and co. were doing. Wouldn't mathematical ability be much more to the point?
I think, yes. I don't know much about it; a number of people here (like @bocamp) have read about the Bletchley Park story and may be able to shed light, but the type of close detective work and flexibility of thinking required in order to be adept at UK cryptic-style crosswords may have been meta-qualities desirable in codebreakers. A kind of secret sauce in addition to purely mathematical facility.
Maybe someone can confirm this, but I seem to remember that the Enigma code output appeared as a sequence of 5-character blocks, which if true was a cute feature of today's puzzle, also in the form of 5-letter blocks.
(Thanks to those who signaled appreciation of my earlier long comment. Today I learned there is a 4096 = 2^{12} character limit on comments.)
As was mentioned earlier by someone else, the Enigma messages were coded in five letter blocks. Rex would argue that most people, including him, would miss this! So why bother?
DeleteBut I liked that
Based on what the history books report, you are right that both qualities were looked for in code breakers. They also sought out people good with languages. I think as the Germans tried to make Enigma tougher to crack, the British had to rely more and more on computing. So the skills needed moved more to mathematics but also engineering.
There is more than one El train (i.e., elevated) in Chicago. So Els seems reasonable as a word.
ReplyDeleteThere is only one L train (the name of the line since circa 1967, when it originally was called the LL because locals were designated with a double letter - much of it is underground) in NYC.
Villager
@thefogman 12:07pm... agree on Billy Bragg. Here's a lovely tune with Wilco.
ReplyDelete[SB: @Barbara S... must be some others who did well yd, I missed this 4 letter should've to end my streak.]
Follow-up on cryptogram keys.
ReplyDeleteThere are 25 factorial (about 1.5 x 10^25) different one-to-one letter substitution codes. No doubt zillions of these would convert the key phrase to a useful assemblage of letters. But how do you even find one of the good codes?
I suppose you can write a program that goes through a billion or so of the codes one by one, and analyzes the output in some kind of automated way to determine if it might make 8 usable 5 letter blocks. Then you could manually look at some of the outputs your program has given you and make a human judgment as to which result you like best.
Very labor-intensive. Maybe there's a better way I haven't thought of.
Villager
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
ReplyDeleteI basically worked this puzzle as a themeless…well I KNEW the theme answers like @Nancy but cared not to actually solve the cryptogram. Good thing, because as stated earlier, once I completed on the app the coded message would NOT go away. @TTrimble I add more kudos to you. I thought @Rex was a bit over the top today on his panning.
ReplyDelete@garylucy…I’m with you!
@thefogman…I do NOT live in Chicago, had relatives in Chicago, and visit a lot (in other words close enough to be dangerous and spout off). Yes, the El is typically thought of as the elevated train that goes around “The Loop” and I THINK the term “The Loop” is the part of “downtown/midtown/uptown…whatever” that is within the El tracks. I have NO idea whether El originally meant “elevated” or whether IT was actually from The Loop (the L). I leave that for a true Chicagoan to answer but will now go to Google.
@Anon 9:21 wrote "Without the cipher provided, would anyone ever be able to work it out? I doubt it?"
ReplyDeleteFWIW, I wrote out the encoded "message" in standard Cryptoquote form (including the author name, encoded with the same cipher) as follows:
"JITSU EAS E DLOOKS, E VERS
CLUN KBYS EXP INGSA VERS."
-- EKEX NLABXV
Presented it to my wife, who does the daily Cryptoquote in our local paper. She solved it in just under six minutes without breaking a sweat. No computer needed, just familiarity with letter patterns in written English. Might have been a nice meta-puzzle if the substitution code hadn't been provided. Not having the word breaks would make it more difficult, but having the other (uncoded) theme answers puts you in the neighborhood of words like "codes," "puzzle," and "game."
It was totally fine. Easy? Yes. As soon as I saw Turing I knew what was going on and cruised through it. I would have liked a bit more of a challenge and I don’t think it would have taken much to do so. But the theme was good and a nice way to spend a little time on Sunday.
ReplyDeleteHave to disagree with that "Easy" verdict. I blame myself for forgetting an important name like ALAN TURING, but it's *STILL* a name, and crossed with ANNA WINTOUR ("Longtime media figure" I never heard of), "AMIE" (is that someone's name, or French for some kind of familial relation?) and GIANNI (Sorry, but I'm fashion-impaired and not ashamed of it -- who cares what's being marketed to the bourgies as "cool and trendy" this week?), it made the NE well-nigh unsolvable. "ALI" (Wong) didn't help either.
ReplyDelete@Barbara S. (12:13 PM)
ReplyDeleteAs @TTrimble (1:42 PM) alludes to, 'CRYPTic thinking' was vital to speeding up the breaking of the ENIGMA code, e.g., one of women discovered a piece of key information that was beyond the scope of pure mathematics.
___
Peace 🕊 🇺🇦 ~ Compassion ~ Tolerance ~ Kindness to all 🙏
I have to admit – this from @Rex's review made me lol:
ReplyDeletewhat kind of...person...stares at _NSP_RAT_ON and thinks "Uh...I dunno...I better buy a vowel"?
I never knew Madeline Kahn was a Sufi scholar.
The "El" stands for "Elevated." One line (the "orange" line -- they're color-coded) runs between Midway Airport and downtown, which was originally dubbed "the Loop" in the late 1800s/early 1900s because the city's burgeoning mass-transit system (cable cars, railroad depots, eventually "El" [or "L"] tracks themselves more or less circled the central city area. (That being said, a lot of the "El" trains actually run underground as subways.)
ReplyDeleteI bet the constructor was hoping figuring out the quote WITHOUT the substitution key could have been made into a contest, with all correct submissions getting some sort of Alan Turing themed prize. As long as the key was given, I was glad the puzzle did it for me, otherwise I might have wasted more time on this pretty bad Sunday offering.
ReplyDeleteI solved this, but never used the NOTE because the note never appeared in the online version, for which I pay $39 a year. The online version recently even has stopped including the puzzle’s Title. I get that by asking my wife to go to Rex’s page. She then tells me the title, which helps. This puzzle wasn’t so hot.
ReplyDelete@Joe The title and the note is available on the NYT app (I also am a subscriber) at the “i” button upper right.
Delete@TTrimble- very helpful explanation
I didn't read all this carefully after the first few hours of it. Did ANYBODY who solved on paper bother to solve the encryption? I had no interest.
ReplyDelete@Barbara S 12:13.
ReplyDeleteThere is a book about women code breakers of WWII called “Code Girls” by Liza Mundy. It focuses mostly on those recruited to work for the Navy, but the experience is similar to the little my mother told us about her experience at Arlington Hall for the Army.
Alas the book does not say anything about the relationship between facility at puzzles and code breaking and it does quote William Friedman, head of an important code unit for the Army as saying there is no relationships because crossword puzzles exist to be solved and ciphers and codes exist not to be solved ( or words to that effect.) So patience and persistence are required. But the book does point out that the military recruited women who were good at puzzles. Though I am sure that was neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition.
@Masked and Anonymous (M&A) 12:45 p.m.
ReplyDeleteEXT UBD PILA JEUUBU!
@TTrimble (1:42 p.m.) and @bocamp (3:19 p.m.)
Thanks for weighing in. Sounds like both sets of skills were indispensable.
@okanaganer 2:09 p.m.
My downfall was on the other end of the length spectrum.
@jazzmanchgo…lol! After looking at everything online I’m willing to believe ANYTHING with respect to El/L. Believe me…I am NOT questioning you. Will only point out that “the El or L” in the city is definitely “elevated.” I HATE walking under the tracks OR driving under the tracks downtown. I totally believe the El/L eventually morphed to underground routes. I used to take the Southshore into Chicago a lot before I retired but probably was only on the El/L as a kid.
ReplyDeleteLate on a Sunday, when I solve on paper. Basically what everyone else said, meh. Went very fast, got the theme answers with no crosses. Did like the movie.
ReplyDeleteIn Berlin we visited The Spy Museum (warning! tourist trap) only so I could take a picture of the enigma machine for our oldest, who is deeply interested in codes, ciphers, cryptography.
Nice to see AAMILNE, not time to change my avatar yet!
@dgd 5:25PM
ReplyDeleteYES!!!! This is another of Turing's great contributions. He was way, way ahead of his time, and was a very thorough and careful thinker. Everyone can follow the links here to their heart's content, but link [2] in that WP article was the origin of "the Turing test".
(I don't know what Turing would have made of some of the great subsequent controversies of claims to or programs toward AI, during the 60's and 70's, but I'm squarely on the side of Hubert Dreyfus in pointing out the various excesses from that time. If anyone cares.)
Did anyone else do the cryptic from this Weekend's Variety section? For me, so many 'aha' moments -- I really enjoyed it. @bocamp?
@Tale Told (12:56 p.m. & 5:17 p.m.)
ReplyDeleteTo what extent was your mother free to talk about her wartime experiences? I think many (at least, in Britain) were sworn to secrecy even after the war, but that may not have applied to everyone. It sounds like her story was a fascinating one.
Thanks for mentioning the book. One reads time and again that recruiters looked for people who were good at the kind of ordinary puzzles one encounters in civilian life, so that must have been an indication of potential for codebreaking ability. But clearly the successful candidates' capacities must have gone well beyond cryptics and sudoku (which I guess didn't exist then).
@Joe 3:59 - If you are using the NYT app to solve the puzzles you need to tap on the small letter “i” in the upper right corner to see any notes and who the author is. BTW, only Sunday puzzles have titles.
ReplyDeleteWas hoping for something Halloween-related!
ReplyDelete@Joe 3:59
ReplyDeleteCheck your settings, because I have the same $39/yes NYT puz app, and I get all the nuances of all these trick/different type puzs. Notes, italics, shaded squares, animation.
I don't know how to personally check the settings, but I'm sure someone here can help you out.
Anyone?
RooMonster Not Much Help Guy
Damn, someone sure did whizz in y'alls Wheaties today. TTrimble's comment is a much-needed balm to this needlessly caustic and in many cases flat-out incorrect grumping. If one is so dead-set on being a curmudgeon, one should at least be an intelligent one.
ReplyDeleteMyself, I thought the degree of cohesion required to cleanly blend the themers with the incorporation of one type of puzzle (albeit a far less respectable one) into another was a little mind-bending, and was well-executed and clever in a good way. This is the sort of feat of construction I am personally quite envious of. And unlike many, I was fully ready to decode the cryptogram after finishing. Maybe I'm some kind of mutant freak, but I'm still able to actually derive enjoyment from doing puzzles for their own sake. Though I do appreciate that the app respected my time and did the legwork for me, and in such a colorful way. I will say I think it's a little weird that they can pull off visual fireworks like that in the app yet can't seem to make it less finicky about rebuses (which made Thursday more than a little un-fun for me).
Re: 89A—If you have seen the kinds of Wheel of Fortune clips that go viral these days, you would know that there are, sadly, many people who would think this. Or worse, think "I should buy an E."
I solve on paper on Thursday - Sunday, and hands up for not bothering to do the decoding. (Even though I do Cryptograms everyday and enjoy them - I need clues like words length to have a chance.)
ReplyDelete@TTrimble enjoyed your comment. I'm neither mathy enough or good enough at puzzles to have ever been recruited to solve the Enigma Machine, but I did have the definition of a limit as my yearbook quote, and have been known to argue that calculus is akin to poetry in math. That moment when you get what a limit is, and why it's such a beautiful concept, I still remember that feeling.
Like so many, I got my hopes up for something very tricksy and wonderful when I saw ALAN TURING. Alas. So disappointing in so many ways. ‘Nuf said.
ReplyDelete20D - Cosette to Marius in Les Mis was AMIE? Non, they were not amies; she was his amoureuse. Perhaps the writer was thinking of Eponine, not Cosette.
ReplyDeleteChiming in late because of travel this weekend. Solved with record ease (like many). But not disappointed in the least. I loved the Turing focus (better deemed a "tribute"). I acknowledge Rex's points of critique, but they didn't stand as a particular frustration for me. The brisk solve, combined with the ease with which unfamiliar terms/names were readily handled by the crosses, gave rise to a gestalt that was satisfying at a gut level. (Once again, @Lewis has nailed the essence of the solve to a "t" :) .
ReplyDeleteI agree with Rex about the quote. Banal. Patronizing if he said it to people he was working with. I Googled and couldn't find whether he really said it. Just because it's on quote aggregation sites doesn't mean he did. Was interested to read about the women who worked on the project, who didn't get the credit they deserved: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-29840653
ReplyDeleteI may be one of the few people who really loved today’s puzzle. I thought it was fun, relatively easy, and I enjoyed many of the clues. For example, Flight path (stairs); One with an inside job (spy) and icon to click for more icons (folder.) I also liked doing the final decoding by hand.
ReplyDeleteI do the Sunday NYT puzzle for fun, and this was fun. Sorry so many of you didn’t enjoy it.
Phew... too tough due to all those people. Took a LONG time and a half-dozen research projects. Quite the special effect at the end.
ReplyDeleteUniclues:
1 Toyota.
2 Agent gets paid.
3 Delete Tigger duplicates.
4 Tone deaf jazz radio station director makes final selection.
5 Wife tells husband to trash those 20-year-old undies.
6 Narrow down boyfriend list.
1 NISSAN IMITATION GAME
2 SPY DRAGS CRYPTOGRAM
3 NEATEN AA MILNE FOLDER (~)
4 DUMMKOPF OKS SANTANA
5 "INTIMATES DETERIORATE"
6 REEXAMINE AMOR SLATES
@Barbara S 6:04 PM: both my parents were sworn to secrecy, probably for their lifetimes about most of it. I don’t know what languages they were decrypting, except once they worked on a Finnish code. (Or so they said. Neither of them knew Finnish but they had frequency tables of letters and combinations.) During the war my mother had a “cover story” to use when people asked her what she did. She was once in a line to meet Eleanor Roosevelt and Mrs Roosevelt asked the woman in front of my mother what she did and the woman said exactly what my mother was supposed to say. My mother dared not deviate from her scripted story.
ReplyDeleteIt was an easy solve for me. I ignored the theme, which seemed like creating a theme for its own sake and not for enjoyment.
ReplyDeleteAlan Turing helped win WWII against the Nazis. For this heroic act, he was prosecuted for being gay after the war and chose chemical castration instead of jail. He committed suicide in 1952.
ReplyDeleteI have, reluctantly and ever so slowly, had to reach the conclusion that Rex Parker who "does the NYT crosswoard puzzle" is pedantic.
ReplyDeleteNOT A REAL TURING QUOTE, DISAPPOINTING
ReplyDeleteMrshef worked in Bletchley (in the 1990s - nothing to do with code-breaking), so remembering that was fun. Puzzle was okay, I thought. Very easy, but with some nice non-theme answers.
ReplyDeleteWow, Fearless One! Did they forget to bring you your GRUELS today? Oof, what a downer! But let's see.
ReplyDeleteThe message. I submit it is not nonsense; it is meant to demystify the whole genre of coding. Every game has this in common: it has a goal. Football: TD. Basketball: the hoop. Parcheesi: "home." Whatever you name. The goal has not been attained at the start, JUST LIKE in a CRYPTOGRAM. Mr. TURING was hardly a nonsensical person.
Yes, providing the key in an accompanying note does seem a bit much; I'd rather just leave the shaded areas in and let the solver try his hand at codebreaking; it would be like two puzzles for the price of one. I suppose, though, that the constructor realizes that a big enough part of our day has already been spent doing the crossword.
In that vein, it did seem a bit of a slog, but then it's hard to avoid that in a big grid. At any rate, I'm not heaping on the vitriol that some are doing; the puzzle deserves at least a par.
Par also in Wordle.
INTIMATE AMOR
ReplyDeleteI EASED my DESIRE FOR SUSIE,
to REEXAMINE how OFT I missed her,
her FRIEND LOKKS like A DAM floozy,
so I'll ASSESS STRAY SEX with her SISTER.
--- ERNIE BRAGG
Rex at his best(worst?):
ReplyDeleteA hater's gonna hate!
I did not bother to decode the CRYPTOGRAM. Not that interested, though I usually do the CRYPTOquip in the daily paper. Without the hint.
ReplyDeleteDid the puzzle in pen, on a real newspaper as I do every week, so the letters didn’t automatically change as it did for those who solved on line. I didn’t care to figure it out. Wasn’t interested enough to do the work by hand to see what clever thing the brilliant man Alan Turing had said. Have never in my life heard of “User Net.” Boring puzzle. Mr Turing, not at all.
ReplyDeleteListen to local SoCal tv news during the appropriate season and you will most definitely hear references to “Santa Anas.”
ReplyDelete@Tea73 -- somewhere a tear of joy comes to the eye of an old professor.
ReplyDeleteI had the misfortune to start watching The Imitation Game a week before doing this puzzle in syndication. What a load of garbage. Turing did great things and how the British treated him was awful (but to be expected from that horrible island) but to take the work of the brave men and women of (mostly) Poland and (a little bit) Britain and turn it into one man using a super power caricature of Asperger's to single-handedly break German encryption is just *vomit*.
ReplyDeleteNeedless to say, as soon as I had worked my way around to the themer and realized what was going on I threw this puzzle in the rubbish where it belongs.