Dharwad
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Crossword puzzles
Pankaj Mishra, June 15, 2021: The Times of India
While you work that out, let’s tell you about Will Shortz, the crossword editor for The New York Times, who has edited over 10,000 puzzles since he joined the paper in 1993. Editing crosswords is only one part of Shortz’s job; another part is conducting the annual American Crossword Puzzle Tournament (ACPT). The tournament is something Shortz had set up years before he joined NYT, and he has run it every year without fail — till 2020. Last year, the pandemic forced him to cancel.
“When it became clear that this year's tournament would have to be canceled or postponed again if it were held in person, I decided to conduct it virtually instead,” says Shortz. “I made this decision only in February, so there was not much time to plan.”
The ACPT is probably the oldest and largest crossword puzzle tournament in the US; in 2019, it saw its largest participation of more than 700 people. Going online after that was a gamble in more ways than one. “My goal was for the virtual ACPT to have as many features of the in-person ACPT as possible. That included: Friday and Saturday night puzzles and games, eight timed tournament crosswords leading up to playoffs, and $6,000 in prizes (including $3,000 for first),” says Shortz.
The problem was to find a partner who could provide the digital expertise needed to run a complex gamut of puzzles. Shortz’s answer (and the answer to the clue above): Amuse Labs.
Digital crosswords across the world
Amuse Labs is a Bengaluru- and San Francisco-based company that offers a software platform for crossword puzzles (it also has an office in Dharwad, the hometown of its founders, Jaya and Sudheendra Hangal). It sounds simple, but there’s a lot that goes into making a product like this, and software is not all that’s on offer, as Shortz found when he met the founders on February 16, less than 10 weeks before the ACPT was scheduled to be held.
“Amuse Labs was very responsive to the ACPT's specific needs, including creating a countdown clock for the puzzles (they'd had only a count-up clock previously) and adapting their system to ensure fairness to everyone and the near-impossibility of cheating, which is always a worry for an online event.”
Amuse Labs went on to power the ACPT, and tops the sponsors list on the tournament page.
Shortz is one of the many newspaper mavens looking to Amuse Labs for solutions to problems such as reader retention and monetisation. In late 2019, Matthew Janusz, Senior Director of Monetisation at Los Angeles Times, was looking for ways to improve user experience with the paper’s crossword puzzle, and wanted to generate more digital advertising revenue from those pages. “We wanted a customisable solution so the look and feel was more in line with our brand, a more modern and functional user experience, as well as sales rights over our ad inventory so that we could monetise it with our sales team and programmatic ad stack,” he says.
As Shortz discovered more than a year later, Amuse Labs was ready to deliver. “We felt that they truly wanted to help build out a games experience for our users with us rather than simply slap on a solution to set and forget,” says Janusz.
It’s not just the big names in English language media. Telugu, Hindi, German, Urdu, Hebrew...there are crossword puzzles in 20 languages — powered by Amuse Labs. In all, Amuse Labs serves over 100 million puzzles every year. Customers include the likes of The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Guardian, Vox, The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times.
The coders and the wordsmiths In 2014, Jaya Hangal, Sudheendra Hangal, and John Temple, met at Stanford University. Jaya Hangal was part of the core team that developed Java at Sun Microsystems; Sudheendra Hangal was a PhD in computer science, and Temple used to be managing editor of the Washington Post.
Back then, the Hangals wanted to build a crossword puzzle that would challenge players to identify audio clippings of Indian classical music and the artists. They shared their idea with Temple, who was impressed with the richness of the product.
“As a former newspaper editor, I knew how passionate readers were about crosswords and also about how valuable they were to the loyalty and habit of a publication, and what struck me was that this was the first truly digital version of crosswords because it made it possible to use rich media — audio, video and still photos and drawings and illustrations,” says Temple.
The three decided to put their strengths together, and Amuse Labs was born. The flagship product is, of course, the crossword puzzle platform called PuzzleMe. It’s a powerful platform that publishers can use to create crosswords, sudokus, and word search puzzles. Apart from that, the company also produces interactive games to help students learn better. One of their big customers for such educational products is Encyclopaedia Britannica.
Changing habits The world’s first crossword puzzle was created by Arthur Wynne in December 1913, and since then, millions of people across the world have been poring over those black-and-white grids and fiendishly clever clues. Publishers and puzzle masters are now trying to attract the younger generation with a shift to the virtual world. The rise of Amuse Labs across newsrooms and platforms underscores this shift. “We’re contributing to the growth of the puzzle world and there's a renaissance, at least in the United States, in puzzle creation,” says Temple. He points to The New Yorker, where puzzles created using Amuse Labs software are published on the web, and on the back page of the magazine every week. Publishers aren’t the only ones making this shift. During the pandemic over the past year for instance, many US libraries reached out to Amuse Labs.
“Even small libraries in the US, they were asking us, can you provide us some puzzles as a distraction to keep our users engaged, they can't come here, you know, read books or do anything,” says Jaya Hangal.
“There’s also a brewery that uses our software for making puzzles,” adds Temple.
Then, recently, Shopify, which powers millions of merchants to sell their products online, published a print ad as a puzzle in the Los Angeles Times. That puzzle was created by Amuse Labs.
Shortz, who took his contest digital, says he still prefers the old-fashioned way to solve a crossword puzzle. “To me crosswords still work best on paper, because you can see the whole puzzle at once, and you can jump around more easily to different parts of the grid. Also, some novelty crosswords — such as ones with unorthodox numbering or unusual grids — can still be presented only on paper,” he says. The Hangals and Temple may not agree with Shortz that unusual grids are not possible digitally. They’ve created unusual grids — including a crossword with a heart-shaped centre for the Journal of the Medical Association. They say digital crosswords allow for greater interactivity as well as collaboration and competition, all of which adds to the fun. (For the truly impatient, Amuse Labs also offers a “reveal answer” option.)
As much as Shortz prefers the pencil to the mouse, he understands that digital is here to stay in the puzzle space. Not just digital formats, but digital competitors. For close to a decade, an AI crossword solver called Dr Fill, created by Matt Ginsberg, an Oxford-trained astrophysicist, has been competing in the ACPT along with humans. This year, Dr Fill joined hands with the Berkeley Natural Language Processing Group, and beat the humans by a wide margin.
Will the emergence of AI contestants change the shape of the ACPT and crossword puzzles in general? “I don't expect Dr Fill to have any impact on how the event is conducted,” says Shortz. “The ACPT is for human solvers after all.” Meanwhile, Amuse Labs will have to figure out a way of making sure next year’s crossword puzzles will fox Dr Fill but not annoy the humans.
Shortz has the last word: “Whatever the format, crosswords remain the world's most popular puzzle. Amuse Labs' app helps keep it this way.”
