Today’s puzzle was perhaps a bit trickier than the average Tuesday—how did you fare? And the theme was surprising, and an impressive bit of construction! Join me for the solve. – If you’d like to directly support this channel, consider signing up to my Patreon to receive exclusive bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/dailysolve
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This is the New York Times crossword puzzle for Tuesday, 10 September 2024:
https://www.nytimes.com/crosswords/
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21A: I find myself adding prefixes like -ESQUE, -IAN, -ISH, -ISTIC, etc. to people's names in order to coin much needed adjectives. Also this last ACROSTIC in the NYT Sunday Mag nearly did me in. Didn't think I could ever finish it, but I stuck to my tenacity. I am indeed thankful for that.
Tri Nitro Toluene – usually trinitrotoluene
Happy Birthday 🎉🎉
Getting hemingwayesque that early was impressive!
Impressive theme.
I do feel like Mr. Fagliano hasn't really dialed in the weekly difficulty curve yet. Will Shortz had it basically perfect.
At first, I thought constructing this theme wouldn't be too bad using code, but then I realized that the three words likely wouldn't be in most dictionaries making it a lot harder.
These are the constructor's notes:
"The theme in this puzzle really blew my mind. Themes are often found by whittling a large set of terms — 200 to 300 thousand, say — down to a smaller subset, using some constraint. Loose constraints may allow hundreds of theme entry possibilities, whereas tight constraints may allow only 10 or so. The constraint in this puzzle was about as tight as I’ve ever seen.
My pool of candidates for this theme didn’t consist of the roughly 275,000 words in my dictionary, but rather all possible combinations of three words from my dictionary that, together, obeyed the constraint. So instead of checking 275,000 terms, I needed to sift through around 3.5 quadrillion possible sets (275,000 choose 3). How? Python, hash tables, tricks, three minutes of data crunching … and voilà! With a pool of roughly 3.5 quadrillion candidates, you might think that no solution exists, or conversely, that many exist … nope. I was stunned to find only 19 sets that satisfied the constraint — and of these, only four that could be laid out symmetrically with the revealer.
That’s four tiny needles in one giant haystack. Happy puzzling!"
How can you tell someone in film, music, or video games? They think SLO is northern California🙂(generally thought of as Central Coast)
Hey! Happy 40th birthday to you, Chris! Hope it’s a great one.
And Hermosa is a beach in California – not an actual word as far as I know. :)
This one wasn’t bad for me, but yeah, there were definitely a few tough clues.