Whilst sitting one evening looking through lists of Listener, Tough Crosswords and Magpie mathematical puzzles wondering where my next puzzle for The Magpie would come from and listening to the greatest keyboard player in rock and roll Keith Emerson molesting his Hammond by sticking knives in it I was struck that WORD SUMS had not been used for some considerable time. (more…)

Inspiration for puzzles comes from many sources - whether it be a sidelong glance in a reference book, or a more determined review of thematic material - mine simply came from a Christmas shopping trip. Any solver who has ever visited Winchester (my home city) may have turned off the high street at the Butter Cross, walked between the two pasty shops (or into them, in my case), and (more…)

I’ve been a fan of John Horton Conway’s “Game of Life” since it was first publicised by Martin Gardner in Scientific American in October 1970. That such interesting patterns and effects could arise from extremely simple rules fascinated me. At that time, the best you could do with a “Life” computer program was to output its results, generation by generation, to a line printer. Not very inspiring! But this all changed (more…)

The first version of this puzzle was quite different from the one that was published. A few years ago I think I read an article in which multiplications were performed from left to right and the wrong answer ensued! The title of the Dylan track The Times They-Are-A Changin’ was too good an opportunity to miss and so about a year ago I tried to relocate the article amongst my many books and journals and failed dismally! This resulted in my making up my own version in which the multiplication was done from left to right with the tens digit being put down and the units digit as the carry. In order to illustrate this I intended (more…)

About ten years ago I spent a few afternoons at the University Library in St Andrews trawling through back issues of The Listener searching for numerical puzzles. I found about 200 of them and two in particular caught my eye. One was Listener 2919 by Piccadilly in which the digits 1 to 9 were replaced by the letters in the word NUMERICAL and the other was Listener 2944 Indeksikod by Klan in which (more…)

Wolfgang Pauli was a physicist, known for his exclusion principle and the postulation of the neutrino. He was also a scathing critic. One of his best-known quotations is “This isn’t right. This isn’t even wrong”, which pithy reflection on the inadequacy of unfalsifiable work brought him to the attention of this crossword setter. (more…)

When I’m creating a puzzle I really become the absent-minded professor preoccupied day and night over the minutiae of how to make the puzzle work. But as soon as I’m finished it is like a dream; I let it go completely and often find I have little memory of it apart from the general gist of the theme.

And so it was, when I opened Magpie #59 and saw “Metamorphoses by Charybdis”, that my first reaction was to stare blankly at it and ask myself “Eh? What was that one about?” (more…)

As I may have mentioned before in my 2006 Listener solving weblog, my brother Philip is very into classical music. Not well-known classical music, rather English composers who will be unheard of by most people. He actually runs a company called Chosen Arts that aims to promote such composers. He has published books on such composers as Gerald Finzi, has been an active member of societies including the Havergal Brian society (of which Dimitry (more…)

The Beginning Of The Beginning

Toward the end of Sue Grafton’s N Is For Noose, private detective Kinsey Millhone finds a desk blotter with a generic calendar for the month of February (with two days crossed out) written out in the corner. It turns out to be the template for a simple cipher, where the alphabet — written vertically by days — corresponds to the normally-written dates of the calendar in a not-completely-expected way. (more…)

As some of you have noticed, over the last few months I’ve become more and more interested in so-called Japanese pencil puzzles and so I’ve had in mind creating a Battleships-type puzzle for a while. (more…)