“I thought, ‘OK, I’ve got to do something with that.’ Will Shortz in particular has pioneered the idea of crossword puzzles being timely and interesting and topical.” Working with the idea of “kind of nonsensical” phrases, Ginzburg jotted down the following:Ĭlue: Shocking discovery: tiny boats paddled by sprites!Ĭlue: Oliver Twist’s so-called boss shows his delight- you won’t believe why!Ĭlue: Sign of the times, if not The Times One such idea is based on a phrase that had suddenly come into the language: fake news. Ginzburg keeps a file for theme ideas that he started to think about but never used. A commentator on a blog noted that he got as far as UVEXP but then figured with that odd letter lineup something had to be wrong in the crossword, until he worked out the theme.” I had VWSCIROCCO, which is a car I once drove, and UVEXPOSURE. “So, I had ABPOSITIVE, which is a blood type. Ginzburg remembers having particular fun working with a theme based on phrases that start with a pair of letters in consecutive alphabetical order that are an abbreviation. For a Sunday puzzle, which is larger, it’s more like six or seven.” “If it’s a daily puzzle, you need to come up with three or four or five themed answers that are all consistent and fit together and make sense.
“It’s really the most critical part of the puzzle, certainly if you want to create a marketable puzzle,” says Ginzburg. And so you have to use heuristics you have to apply intelligence to it to try to find a solution that you know isn’t going to be optimal but is going to be pretty good.” This, he says, is where the artistry of crossword puzzle creation meets the science of computer science.įor Ginzburg, the real pleasure in both solving and constructing a crossword puzzle lies in the theme, the clever idea or piece of word trickery that unites a puzzle’s longest answers. “It comes from a class of problems where there is no guarantee of a perfect solution. “Filling a grid with interlocking words is a very interesting problem from a computer science perspective,” he says. He attributes much of that interest to his training in computer science. Other newspapers, including the New York Sun and the Los Angeles Times, have published his puzzles over the years, and though the puzzle pursuit has taken a back seat to parenthood and his work to improve safety-critical automobile software, Ginzburg is as much a crossword puzzle fan as ever. The following year, one of his puzzles was accepted by legendary puzzle editor Will Shortz and published in The New York Times, the gold standard for crosswords.
In 2006, he had his first puzzle published in USA Today. Humbled by the difficulty of the task, Ginzburg contacted “a very active, supportive community of crossword puzzle constructors” and found a couple of puzzle veterans who coached him by email. “I thought about it for a few minutes,” he remembers, “and I realized, ‘You know what, these are probably more interesting to create than they are to solve.’” With that, he grabbed a piece of graph paper and started make his own puzzle.
It was not the challenge of solving the clues that held his attention, though.
#CROSSWORD EDITOR SOFTWARE SOFTWARE#
On a trip home to Santa Cruz to visit his parents, Ginzburg, who was working as a software engineer in Santa Barbara at the time, was intrigued by the puzzles his empty-nester parents tackled at breakfast. Steve Ginzburg (BS ’98) was only a few years post-Caltech when he caught the crossword bug.
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