Tag Archives: Pop culture

Puzzles in Pop Culture: Parks and Recreation

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In a previous installment of Puzzles in Pop Culture, Amanda of amandalovesmovies suggested checking out a puzzle-centric episode of Parks and Recreation. Well, Amanda, your wish is our command, and by wish, I mean suggestion, and by command, I mean I finally got around to tracking down the episode in question.

Today we’ll be exploring puzzly goodness of the Season 4 episode entitled “Operation Ann.”

It’s Valentine’s Day in Pawnee, and town employee Leslie Knope has gone all out, as per usual. Not only has she organized a Valentine’s Day dance in the hopes of finding someone for her best friend Ann, but she’s cobbled together an elaborate scavenger hunt for her boyfriend Ben. (The final clue will tell him where to meet her that night.)

His first clue is a cryptex, a locked cylinder popularized by The Da Vinci Code, and the five-letter code that opens it is a word that represents their third date. Ben is totally stumped, and turns to affable dolt Andy and mustachioed he-man Ron for help. Ron smashes the cryptex open with a hammer.

Inside is a rhyming clue pointing toward several murals throughout City Hall. Ron instantly deduces that the next puzzle is an acrostic, requiring the first letter of each marked mural. The three men split up and gather the necessary letters, which Ron then solves with impressive anagramming skills.

It’s worth noting that throughout this adventure, Ron repeatedly states how much he hates riddles, despite all evidence to the contrary.

Ben is now totally reliant on Ron’s help, and as it turns out, their next clue leads directly to Ron. (Leslie has managed to hide a clue on the bottom of Ron’s shoe.)

They discover there are TWENTY-TWO more clues to go. Ron again states that he hates riddles. They decide to split up, as Ben heads for the snow globe museum, Ron to a local bar, and Andy sticks around City Hall.

Their hunt continues in the following video clip:

As Ben begins to despair that he’ll disappoint Leslie by not finishing the scavenger hunt, Ron delivers one last time, suggesting that the only thing Leslie likes more than making people happy is being right. So Ben considers anything that Leslie changed his mind on, and quickly figures out where she is. Valentine’s Day is saved!

In a hilarious episode chock full of puzzle fun — anagrams and acrostics and riddle-solving of all kinds — it’s very cool that one of the core values of puzzle-solving is what saved the day: deductive reasoning.

Every crossword clue and riddle requires a certain mindset, where you get into sync with what the riddlemaster or puzzle creator was thinking, usually in a glorious a-ha moment. Seeing Ron and Ben do the same when all other puzzle skills failed was a testament to the puzzly tenacity and deductive reasoning that makes for a truly satisfying puzzle-solving experience.

As always, it’s a real treat to see puzzles incorporated into a narrative like this. Instead of a time-killer or a mere passing interest, they become linchpins of each story. The puzzles create conflict, drive epiphanies, and bring people together.

And in that spirit, I can’t think of a more perfect way to end this entry than this video clip, featuring the episode’s last few moments:

Not in so many words…

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A British reader and friend of the blog passed along this link to me this morning. It’s from the UK publication The Guardian, interviewing filmmaking Steve Simmons about his newest production, Crosswords.

The seven-minute short film takes us into the thoughts of a man puzzling out various crossword clues, even as he’s distracted by an attractive woman who shares his park bench.

Most of the clues are fairly straightforward instead of the more wordplay-based British cluing — “Not right (4)”, for example — but others could give you as much pause as the protagonist. (I admit, “The more you take, the more you leave behind (9)” had my gears turning.)

Seeing synonyms and red herrings pass before the solver’s eyes (and settling onto the screen) was a marvelous touch, reminiscent of some of the visual panache of BBC’s Sherlock.

The silent film style adds a touch of tongue-in-cheek flair and melodrama to the whole affair, making for a thoroughly enjoyable short.

Hmmm. Makes me wonder if PuzzleNation should get into the short film game. Exploring space with the intrepid crew of Starspell Command, or heading into dusty puzzle catacombs in search of treasure with the Crossword Raider…

On second thought, maybe I’ll leave it to pros like Simmons.

A milestone worth celebrating.

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It was #5 on G4’s Top 100 Video Games of All-Time countdown, and has been consistently ranked as one of the top games of all-time by IGN, EGM, and gamers of all ages.

It’s Tetris, and it’s turning 29 this week. Yes, Alexey Pajitnov’s incredibly addictive puzzle game baby is ready to start freaking out about the future because it’s almost 30.

Tetris combines the quick reaction time and coolness under pressure of video games with several aspects of puzzlesolving to create a marvelous puzzle game experience.

Firstly, you have the improvisation and adaptability necessary for other tile-placement puzzle games like Scrabble (or Words with Friends for the app-savvy in the audience). But utilizing pieces very similar to those in a pentominoes puzzle — as I discussed a few weeks ago — you also have a spatial puzzle aspect reminiscent of a Brick by Brick.

(FYI, here’s a sample puzzle, provided by our pals at pennydellpuzzles.com.)

From scientific studies linking gameplay with lessened post-traumatic stress to utterly inspired pranks turning buildings into playable surfaces, Tetris has left an indelible mark on both puzzle culture and pop culture. (Plus, I suspect it’s made us all a little better at packing up the car for long trips.)

Happy Birthday, Tetris.

Sudoku: Every number in its place.

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Sudoku puzzles are as ubiquitous as reality shows these days, and enthusiastic solvers can find puzzles of nearly any difficulty with ease.

Sudoku puzzles are usually ranked from one to five stars, with five star puzzles being the most difficult. Difficulty can depend not only on the number of starting digits, but their placement and the level of deduction involved.

Sudoku enthusiasts were the first to notice that the lowest number of clues required for a unique solution is 17. Puzzles with 16 clues invariably had alternate solutions.

For comparison purposes, the average newspaper sudoku has 25 set numbers. The sudoku puzzles on PuzzleNation vary in difficulty, but our easy puzzles range from 30 to 36 clues and our expert puzzles range from 25 to 30 clues, with medium and hard puzzles clue counts falling in between.

But the 17-clue threshold was all conjecture until a mathematician from University College Dublin named Gary McGuire put in the time (and the computer processing power) to write a mathematical proof confirming the suspicions of sudoku enthusiasts.

He designed a specific computer algorithm to process various sudoku grid patterns, allowing him to cut down on the computing time necessary to verify his conjecture. (Even with the reduced computing time, it took 7 million CPU hours in total, a monumental amount of processing time.)

From the nature.com article:

The idea behind this was to search for what he calls unavoidable sets, or arrangements of numbers within the completed puzzle that are interchangeable and so could result in multiple solutions. To prevent the unavoidable sets from causing multiple solutions, the clues must overlap, or ‘hit’, the unavoidable sets. Once the unavoidable sets are found, it is a much smaller—although still non-trivial—computing task to show that no 16-clue puzzle can hit them all.

Of course, as I said before, difficulty isn’t just about the number of clues. The puzzle widely regarded as the world’s hardest sudoku puzzle has 21 clues, but their placement makes for a much more mentally-taxing solving exercise.

I guess it just goes to show the old real estate cliche is true: it’s all about location, location, location.

Puzzles in Pop Culture: Futurama

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Not so long ago, I wrote a post about cryptography in the real world, highlighting moments where codebreaking made a difference in crime solving and espionage, and sometimes changed the course of history.

And while the encryptions featured in today’s entry aren’t quite as world-changing, they just as interesting.

I’m talking about the alien languages that were featured in the background of the animated television show Futurama.

At least two ciphers have been employed by the writers and animators of the show — a third is rumored to have appeared in the fourth season of the show, but there hasn’t been confirmation of that — and they’ve proven to be an engaging Easter egg for puzzle fans.

The first is called Alien Language One, or Alienese, and it appeared in the background of the show from the pilot episode onward. It’s a simple one-to-one code, with symbols for all 26 letters and 10 digits in standard English. (Supposedly it was solved by some enterprising puzzlers within a half-hour of the show’s premiere.)

A second, far more complex encryption started appearing during the show’s second season, and it’s called Alien Language Two, or Alienese II, and it’s based on an autokey cipher.

Autokey ciphers are more involved than a standard encryption, because there’s no one-to-one organizational structure. Instead, the symbol for a given letter or number can change based on the symbol that precedes it.

I’ll let the folks at the Futurama Wiki explain:

Each symbol has a numerical value. To decode a message, the first symbol’s value is translated directly into a character (0=’A’, 1=’B’, and so on). For the remaining letters, you subtract the previous symbol’s numerical value. If the result is less than zero, you add 26. Then that number is converted into a character as before.

This is some high-level puzzling, considering it’s a background joke-delivery system on an animated show. (But, considering the show does jokes about Schrodinger and throwaway gags based on mathematical principles like taxicab numbers, I’m not at all surprised.)

Of course, those puzzle-lovers at The Simpsons couldn’t help but get in on the fun, using Alienese as a background gag in a reference to the show Lost.

The masterminds at Futurama are definitely puzzlers at heart, and more than worthy of recognition in the Puzzles in Pop Culture library.

PuzzleNation Book Review: Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore

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Welcome to the fourth 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 Robin Sloan’s novel Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore.

Clay Jannon just lost his web-development job, and on a whim, he stumbles into a strange bookstore looking for a new night clerk. With stories-high shelves loaded with strange books that aren’t for sale, Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore is more like a library for an eccentric smattering of visitors who come and go at all hours, checking out a single book at a time for reasons that elude Clay.

As Clay’s small circle of friends is drawn into the mystery of Mr. Penumbra’s store, Clay discovers a curious pattern dictating which book each visitor will select next, unintentionally taking the first step into tackling far greater and more peculiar secrets.

Whimsical yet still grounded in a believable world, Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore is never what you expect. Wrapped in layers upon layers of curiosities — a puzzle within a puzzle about a puzzle, you could say — the book incorporates elements of urban fantasy, coming-of-age stories, and old-school mysteries to tell a wonderful story about the irresistable allure of a quest.

Every character in the book, from Clay’s friends to Mr. Penumbra’s patrons, falls into a situation plenty of puzzle devotees are quite familiar with: confronting a puzzle that seems unsolvable. That thread, that idea of a challenge awaiting if you’re just clever enough to conquer it, is a tantalizing one, and it drives a good chunk of the book’s plot.

What’s truly engaging about Sloan’s story, though, is its willingness to acknowledge the potential for disappointment from both sides. After all, some puzzles are too tough, some answers will elude us, and that’s part of what makes the challenge so enticing. But there’s also the disappointment that can follow victory. After all, if the unsolvable puzzle turns out to be solvable after all, will you be satisfied with the answer? And what comes next?

This double-bladed sword of possibilities elevates an already-intriguing plot and a thoroughly likable cast of characters into something truly enjoyable. This is a book rich in detail, setting, and charm, and even in the slow moments, your interest never flags.

The modern setting also added depth to both the mystery and how the characters confronted it. The book could’ve easily condemned paper books as old fashioned or e-readers as an obnoxious affront, but instead, it charts the highs and lows of the crossroads between print publishing and electronic media, allowing the best of both worlds to shine as the characters delve deeper into the mysteries surrounding Mr. Penumbra’s bizarre bookshop.

You know, the puzzle world can seem like such a secret society sometimes, working by its own weird rules and internal logic, and to see a book tackle that idea with such charm and lightness was a real treat. I look forward to seeing what Robin Sloan cooks up next.

Well, that’s it for the latest installment of PuzzleNation Book Reviews. I hope you enjoyed the post and look forward to more book discussions in the future. In the meantime, keep calm, puzzle on, and I’ll catch you later.