Puzzles in Pop Culture: Sherlock Holmes (a.k.a. The puzzle is afoot!)

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Mystery novels and stories are catnip to puzzlers, because they’re an entertaining way to exercise our deductive skills and enjoy puzzling outside our usual fare of apps, games, and paper puzzles.

And surely there’s no greater boon to the mystery-loving puzzler than the ongoing adventures of Sherlock Holmes in all his forms. Not only is there are series of feature films starring the Great Detective, but there are two television programs focusing on his singular brand of puzzling: Sherlock and Elementary.

[Note: I will be discussing both seasons of Elementary, seasons 1 and 2 of Sherlock, and the season 3 premiere. So consider this your spoiler alert.]

Beyond the normal whodunnit storytelling that frames both shows — a staple of the genre that traces back to the original Sir Arthur Conan Doyle stories and novels — there are smaller puzzles to unravel.

Perhaps the most famous from the Doyle canon is “The Adventure of the Dancing Men,” where Holmes solves a curious pictographic code in the hopes of preventing a heinous crime.

And both Sherlock and Elementary frequently return to this cryptographic trope, for both dramatic tension and storytelling twists and turns.

Episode 2 of Sherlock, “The Blind Banker,” has a cryptographic mystery at the heart of the story, one that echoes “The Adventure of the Dancing Men” and its similarly perilous stakes.

Codebreaking is also at the core of the season 2 premiere, “A Scandal in Belgravia,” as Sherlock attempts increasingly complex ways of cracking the code of Irene Adler’s phone. (There’s a marvelous scene where he introduces a dummy phone in order to copy her keystrokes is foiled when Irene realizes the dummy phone is a fake, and in turn types in a fake passcode. It’s a terrific exchange of gamesmanship.)

The cipher used in the season 3 premiere, “The Empty Hearse,” is another prime example, and one that quick-witted viewers could solve alongside Sherlock, as he and Mary decipher the message and pursue Watson’s kidnappers.

Elementary has had its fair share of codes as well. The season 2 episode “The Diabolical Kind” featured numerous techniques for coding information — from hidden spaces in seemingly innocuous drawings to elaborate letter-shifting codes akin to the Caesar cipher — all of which Holmes unraveled with ease. (Sadly, the puzzlers in the audience aren’t given much opportunity to crack the codes themselves.)

But each show has also played on the natural human ability to find meaningless patterns in chaos and interpret them as hidden messages. Sherlock‘s season 2 episode “The Hounds of Baskerville” had Watson chasing down a Morse Code message that turned out to be nothing more than flashes of light.

And Elementary‘s most recent episode had an excellent sequence where Watson read too much into a former mobster’s statement about “a mutt” who would be “in the ground tomorrow.” (Watson suspected the “mutt” referenced a suspect’s mixed ancestry, while “in the ground tomorrow” would point toward the suspect’s Jewish heritage and burial traditions.) Holmes correctly dismissed both as red herrings.

Both Sherlock and Elementary had a bit of fun exploring characters fixating on small clues, only to be misled. It’s an intriguing path to take when the main character of each show bases so many conclusions on similarly minuscule bits of data.

With such a richness of Sherlockian material on television these days, both mystery fans and puzzlers have plenty to sate their appetites.

Thanks for visiting the PuzzleNation blog today! You can like us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter, cruise our boards on Pinterest, check out our Tumblr, download our Classic Word Search iBook (recently featured by Apple in the Made for iBooks category!), play our games at PuzzleNation.com, or contact us here at the blog!

Picture this…

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There are all kinds of puzzles. That’s one of the best things about being a puzzle fan: the fact that there are so many varieties of puzzle out there waiting to challenge you. From word searches and crosswords to Sudoku and cryptograms, from brain teasers and sliding-tile puzzles to pattern puzzles and rebuses, the possibilities are endless.

One of the most engaging (and surprisingly challenging, I’ve found) fall under what I’d call picture puzzles.

Picture puzzles demand keen visualization skills, since they often involve manipulating shapes in your head. You might be asked to deduce what letter is on the hidden side of a six-sided die, or how to divide farmland with only three lines and separate every sheep from each other. It’s visual trickery and topnotch puzzle-solving wrapped up in one.

And one of my favorite Picture puzzle wizards is Sam Loyd.

I was introduced to Mr. Loyd’s puzzles in Mathematical Puzzles of Sam Loyd — a collection assembled by puzzle aficionado Martin Gardner — a book I stumbled upon in the library one day while strolling the shelves.

The collection offers math puzzles and brain teasers, deduction problems and tracing games, but the ones that most intrigued me were his Picture puzzles.

Now, adding pictures to puzzles is hardly a new idea. David L. Hoyt’s Jumble puzzle features one, and plenty of Matching / Spot the Difference puzzles — like the Match-Up and The Shadow puzzles offered by our pals at Penny/Dell Puzzles — rely heavily on art. But there’s a marvelous charm to Loyd’s drawings, creating a scene and telling a small story as he offers one brain teaser after another.

I’ll post a few of my favorites, so you can get a sense of not only his artistic stylings, but the extreme cleverness involved in creating these puzzles.

Each of these puzzles requires a keen ability to visualize shapes in your head, as well as some serious craftiness to conquer the challenge Loyd sets before you.  Have you figured them out?

I’ll post the solution to the first one and leave the others for you to puzzle out.

[I didn’t line it up perfectly, but you get the idea.]

Loyd is part of a marvelous tradition of inventiveness and creativity that has helped contribute to the rich and vibrant puzzle world we enjoy today.

[To check out more of Sam Loyd’s puzzles, you can visit this website dedicated to his puzzly legacy (including several puzzles for sale!), a treasure trove of Picture puzzle fun.]

Thanks for visiting the PuzzleNation blog today! You can like us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter, cruise our boards on Pinterest, check out our Tumblr, download our Classic Word Search iBook (recently featured by Apple in the Made for iBooks category!), play our games at PuzzleNation.com, or contact us here at the blog!

5 Questions for Director and Editor David Rogers

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Welcome to another edition of PuzzleNation Blog’s interview feature, 5 Questions!

We’re reaching out to puzzle constructors, video game writers and designers, writers, filmmakers, and puzzle enthusiasts from all walks of life, talking to people who make puzzles and people who enjoy them in the hopes of exploring the puzzle community as a whole.

And I’m overjoyed to have David Rogers as our latest 5 Questions interviewee!

An Emmy-award-winning editor, producer, and director, David has worked on NewsRadio, Seinfeld, Entourage, and The Office (as well as the sadly short-lived but very funny shows Andy Richter Controls the Universe and The Comeback).

During his time on The Office, he edited 60 episodes and directed 9, including the funniest episode of the show’s final season, “A.A.R.M.” He’s currently contributing to The Mindy Project, which is in its second season on Fox.

David was gracious enough to take some time out to talk to us, so without further ado, let’s get to the interview!

5 Questions for David Rogers

1.) You’re both a director and an editor for The Mindy Project, which means you play a significant role in taking disparate scenes and shots and assembling them into a cohesive, entertaining whole. Sounds like just about the ultimate in real-life jigsaw-style puzzle solving. What goes into the production of a given episode, and what are your thoughts as you prepare it for air?

I think the process of putting together any episode of any television show is more like solving a puzzle than anybody watching at home actually realizes, and The Mindy Project is a perfect example of this. From the moment the writers start on a script, they have to be conscious of who is currently doing what and what has happened before, and what’s going to happen down the road. Once the script gets into the hands of a director and the production staff, then more puzzle solving begins.

You break it down and start scouting locations and casting guest stars and then the first ADs (Assistant Directors) put together a shooting schedule. But they have to build it in a way where they can accommodate actors’ availabilities, place locations on a day where we can get the most done, and they also have to be aware of “turnaround issues” for cast and crew, that is whenever we wrap on one day, the cast and crew get a certain amount of time off before the next day’s call time.

An example I’ll give is when I directed “Bro Club For Dudes,” we shot two days, Thursday and Friday, of a Mixed Martial Arts Arena fight down at Hollywood Park. But we had a cameo from Dana White, the president and owner of the UFC, but he was only available Tuesday morning and we didn’t have the location for that day.

So we shot at another location that looked like a dingy hallway that looked like it was a part of our arena, and we also shot a street fight in the loading dock there between Morgan and Ray Ron, and since they were near our stages at the Universal lot, we finished a little after lunch and then came back to our stages and shot more there.

Another example was Adam Pally, who really kicked ass in his fighting scenes, wasn’t available to shoot on the following Monday and we had a hospital room scene of he and Mindy bonding as she stitches him up. Our solution was to build a small three-wall set at our Hollywood Park location and shoot the scene at the end of Friday night.

As an editor, you’re getting multiple takes and different jokes and plenty of alternate lines and performances, and you really have to sift through everything to figure out what’s the funniest, what’s the best, and how do they all connect together to make a cohesive story. It just takes time and building different versions until you see what truly works the best.

And in the process of cutting out time and sharpening the story, you move scenes around, add and change lines with additional dialog recorded later, and there are lots of other elements that come into play including music, sound FX, and what we call “invisible” visual FX that all help make the show we want to make.

[David with his Emmy Award for Outstanding Single-Camera Picture Editing for a Comedy Series (one of two he’s won for The Office!)]

2.) You’re a big fan of comic books. What influence does that sort of long-form serialized storytelling have on your approach to TV production?

I am a huge fan of comic books and have been ever since I was 5 years old and got my first “The Brave and the Bold.” It’s interesting that when I was younger I was all about the art, and as I got older it was all about the writing and the art didn’t have to be from John Byrne or George Pérez or Neal Adams. But when you read a comic book, you’re really watching a TV show or movie in your head. You’re “casting” voices for the different heroes, you’re imagining what the action scenes and explosions are like, and you’re giving life to still images on a page much like a director uses a set of storyboards.

And that’s the part of a comic book where even if the artist isn’t a favorite like the ones I mentioned above, their work is still essential to what makes the comic book a living, breathing thing. There are these great examples given in How To Draw Comics The Marvel Way, where John Buscema and Stan Lee demonstrate two different pages of art work for the same material. One is fine and gets the story across, but the other is so much more exciting and dramatic and really puts you into the action — and that’s what good directors are constantly aware of when they’re shooting a scene.

What is visually better for the material? What adds to the humor or the drama or the action? And in TV where the schedule is so tight and the budget is always being looked at, what can you do with the tools and time that you have?

I came from The Office, where we were limited with how to shoot scenes because of the hand-held documentary style of the show, but we would still focus on things like shooting it spy or in the room, cross-covering with two cameras, or whipping around with just one, and really blocking positions and making the most of what our shots looked like without them looking like they were set up.

In the penultimate episode “A.A.R.M.,” I directed a scene where Dwight runs Angela off the road and then proposes to her with a bullhorn as traffic goes by in the background. The shots included a go-pro camera set up in Angela’s car where we would see Dwight pull alongside of her as they both “free-drove” — that’s when the actors are really driving the cars.

Meanwhile we get a “boat to boat” shot, where a free-driving process trailer — a truck made for rigging cameras and lights — leads in front of them with two cameras shooting straight back to cover the action. The shot from inside Angela’s car shows their faces very clearly as the scene plays and really brings out the comedy of the situation. Then from the outside, our Stunt Driver Dwight cuts off and runs Stunt Driver Angela off the road and this shot really highlights the action and danger of the stunt.

When we get to the next part of the scene and the cars are on the side of the road, we blocked the actors and cameras in a way so that when Dwight is tender and heartfelt (and yet proposing with a bullhorn), we can see the noisy cars going by on the street behind them, which adds to what should be a very intimate and yet very comedic marriage proposal.

Choosing how to shoot and compose a scene like that, and then executing it is absolutely like putting together a gigantic, complicated, wonderful puzzle!

3.) I understand you’re also a classic television automobile enthusiast. What can you tell us about that?

I don’t know if I’m so much a classic television automobile enthusiast as I am a Super Car enthusiast. I love the Mach 5 from Speed Racer, the DeLorean time machine from Back to the Future, the 1966 Batman television show Batmobile, Herbie the Love Bug, and of course K.I.T.T. from Knight Rider. I just bought a full sized Trans-Am Firebird replica of K.I.T.T and I’m in the process of adding a Season 4 1-TV dash and really making the interior look like the car did on the show. It’s a fun side project and it’s something I’ve wanted since even before I could actually drive!

4.) What’s next for David Rogers?

I hope to continue editing. directing, and producing on The Mindy Project, which I really think is an exceptionally funny, very high quality, well-made show. I am also starting to develop some of my own ideas for TV shows as I look to direct more things down the road, including hour-longs and maybe even an independent film.

5.) If you could give the readers, puzzle fans, and aspiring TV and filmmakers in the audience one piece of advice, what would it be?

Persistence. Never give up and always work on your skills. So often getting the first job is really all about being in the right place at the right time. And you have to be ready to deliver when the pieces all come together and the time comes for you to step up and show everyone what you can do!

Many thanks to David for his time. You can see his work on The Mindy Project, which airs on Tuesdays at 9:30 P.M. Eastern on Fox, and be sure to check out his full filmography on his IMDb page. I can’t wait to see what he crafts for us next.

Thanks for visiting the PuzzleNation blog today! You can like us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter, cruise our boards on Pinterest, check out our Tumblr, download our Classic Word Search iBook (recently featured by Apple in the Made for iBooks category!), play our games at PuzzleNation.com, or contact us here at the blog!

Bigger really is better, sometimes…

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giantsudoku

[A massive Sudoku grid, created to promote a Sudoku gameshow in England in 2005.]

There’s just something about puzzles on a grand scale. From the Great Urban Race’s citywide scavenger hunts to the Internet-spanning curiosity that is Cicada 3301, puzzly ambition makes for some truly mindblowing experiences.

But those are puzzles of staggering complexity and scope, not actual physical size. When it comes to sheer dimensions, you have to go building-size.

There is, of course, the solvable crossword from Lviv, Ukraine, where the grid takes up the entire side of an apartment building, with clues hidden all over the city. It’s a brilliant tourism move and a terrific challenge (especially if you don’t read Cyrillic).

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

There was also the classic MIT hack from 2012 where ambitious miscreants transformed one side of the Green Building into a multicolored, playable Tetris game. (I recently learned that students from Brown University in Rhode Island accomplished a single-color version of the same feat back in 2000. You can find video of both hacks here.)

tetris1_img6080

But Javier Lloret has upped the ante with Puzzle Facade, an art installation which transforms the Ars Electronica building in Linz, Austria into a solvable Rubik’s Cube.

Using a small handheld cube as an interface, a solver can manipulate the cube and watch the same changes carried out across two entire sides of the building in full color.

rubikbuilding

As you might expect, having only two sides of the cube available makes for a greater solving challenge, but who cares when you’re lighting up a building with every twist and turn!

It’s a fantastic meeting of puzzly fun and electronic wizardry, and the latest in a grand tradition of massive-scale creativity. I cannot wait to see what intrepid puzzlers come up with next.

Thanks for visiting the PuzzleNation blog today! You can like us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter, cruise our boards on Pinterest, check out our Tumblr, download our Classic Word Search iBook (recently featured by Apple in the Made for iBooks category!), play our games at PuzzleNation.com, or contact us here at the blog!

PuzzleNation Book Review: The Centenary of the Crossword

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Welcome to the eighth installment of PuzzleNation Book Reviews!

All of the books discussed and/or reviewed in PNBR articles are either directly or indirectly related to the world of puzzling, and hopefully you’ll find something to tickle your literary fancy in this entry or the entries to come.

Let’s get started!

Our book review post this time around features John Halpern’s The Centenary of the Crossword.

With the hundredth anniversary of the Crossword only a few weeks behind us, interest in puzzle is perhaps at an all-time high. With that in mind, constructor John Halpern has put together a tribute to the crossword that’s part history, part solving tool, and part celebration of everyone’s favorite pen-and-paper puzzle.

It’s a wonderful introduction to puzzles for anyone looking to get into solving crosswords. Beyond the timeline of puzzle history and glimpses into the minds of various constructors (or setters, as they’re known in England) and crossword editors (Rich Norris of the Los Angeles Times and Will Shortz of the New York Times included), Halpern offers numerous solving hints, including a terrific breakdown of cryptic cluing for fans of British-style crosswords.

Not only that, but the book is chock full of complete puzzles for the reader to solve, starting (quite appropriately) with Arthur Wynne’s marvelous “Word-Cross” and proceeding straight through to the modern day, featuring constructors from around the world. These puzzles show the depth and variety of crossword grids and cluing, and I think even well-established solvers will get a lot out of tackling the puzzles Halpern has collected.

The book is capped off with interviews with the top solvers from last year’s American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, some terrific clues (including some from PuzzleNation Blog favorites David Steinberg and Doug Peterson), and a delightful collection of crossword-centric anecdotes, weird words, and impressive anagrams.

Essentially a cross-section of modern puzzling and the rich puzzle community, The Centenary of the Crossword is a quick and informative read, peppered with puzzles to engage and challenge you. I’m happy to report that I learned a great deal about crosswords (especially cryptics!) from Halpern’s work, and enjoyed every minute of it. What a treat.

[To check out all of our PuzzleNation Book Review posts, click here!]

Thanks for visiting the PuzzleNation blog today! You can like us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter, cruise our boards on Pinterest, check out our Tumblr, download our Classic Word Search iBook (recently featured by Apple in the Made for iBooks category!), play our games at PuzzleNation.com, or contact us here at the blog!

A puzzle mystery three years running…

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It’s January, and for some cryptography enthusiasts and high-level puzzle solvers, their Christmas gift has finally arrived in the form of another Cicada 3301 mystery.

Two years ago, a curious message appeared on the message board 4chan:

“Hello. We are looking for highly intelligent individuals. To find them, we have devised a test.

There is a message hidden in this image.

Find it, and it will lead you on the road to finding us. We look forward to meeting the few that will make it all the way through.

Good luck.

3301″

Intrigued Internet users quickly discovered that this message concealed numerous other images, clues, and puzzles. It was the start of an elaborate chain that led to hidden websites, as well as GPS coordinates across the globe. (Many of these puzzles and clues were accompanied by an image of a cicada, giving the mystery both a name and a symbol.)

Obscure knowledge (poetry, mathematics, literature, and history have all contributed to various clues), advanced cryptography skills, and some serious tenacity were required to navigate the labyrinthine maze laid out by whoever masterminded Cicada 3301.

Eventually, the savviest and sharpest code-breakers found their way to a secret website, one that vanished after a certain number of crafty solvers discovered it. It then shut down, never revealing to the outside world who was behind the puzzles or why they’d created them.

A year later, on January 5, 2013, another series of puzzles appeared, utilizing different solving techniques, different GPS coordinates, and admitting another select group of puzzle solvers to a secret website before it too shut down.

As of this posting, new puzzles have appeared all over the Internet, though Cicada 3301 enthusiasts believe the vast majority of them to be the work of hoaxers and admirers. (Only one clue so far, a message on Twitter from an account previously used by Cicada 3301, is considered legitimate.)

As you might expect, theorizing abounds regarding the reasons behind the Cicada 3301 puzzles. With the advent of viral marketing and ever-savvier customers, there’s always the possibility that this is an incredibly elaborate video game tie-in or corporate advertising project. (It definitely reminds me of the down-the-rabbit-hole ARG style of that puzzle hidden within the game Portal I wrote about last year.)

But the sheer complexity — and the intrinsic level of secrecy regarding how the puzzles and websites have been managed — has led conspiracy theorists to suspect the CIA, the NSA, or some other government entity. Another leading theory is that a bank or private security company is behind Cicada 3301, recruiting topnotch cryptographers to improve security features and thwart cybercrimes.

It may sound silly or a bit too Last Starfighter-ish, but recruitment-through-puzzle-solving is nothing new to the intelligence community. Crossword puzzles were used to identify potential recruits for Britain’s Bletchley Park, one of the key cryptography centers during World War II.

Whatever the purpose of Cicada 3301’s puzzles, there’s no doubt that puzzle solvers and codebreakers the world over can’t wait for another shot at a challenge like this.

[For further information, check out this NPR story, sent to me by friend of the blog Cathy Quinn!]

Thanks for visiting the PuzzleNation blog today! You can like us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter, cruise our boards on Pinterest, check out our Tumblr, download our Classic Word Search iBook (recently featured by Apple in the Made for iBooks category!), play our games at PuzzleNation.com, or contact us here at the blog!