![]() They don’t stop playing themselves just because NBA star LeBron James is so much better than them. “You just go as far as you can,” said Shortz, who also serves as the puzzle master on NPR’s “Weekend Edition.” “You go as far as you find the puzzles pleasurable and when they’re no longer fun, you stop at that point in the week.”īut could a high Difficulty Index - alongside fast times registered by puzzle experts on the leaderboard - discourage some people from solving a particular puzzle? Leban said no, likening the situation to people who love playing pickup basketball. He thinks people know what they can do and what they can’t. Shortz said he hears all the time from solvers who can’t get beyond Monday, or can solve up to Wednesday or Thursday but can’t do Friday or Saturday. The Thursdays are tricky and they can take a while to do, but I think more people can finish a Thursday than can finish a Friday. “A second measure is whether people can do a puzzle at all, and by that measure I think our Friday puzzles are harder than Thursdays. And that’s one measure of difficulty,” Shortz said. “The one little surprise to me in Roy’s analysis was that Friday was slightly easier than Thursday, and I pointed out to him that he was measuring difficulty only on one scale - the amount of time it takes a solver to finish a puzzle. While agreeing that Leban’s work “corroborates” what he does, Shortz was intrigued by the data related to Thursday puzzles, and had his own theory. But if you do the puzzle long enough, the trend shows that it does get harder as the week goes on.” Will Shortz of The New York Times. If you do the puzzle on a daily basis through the week, the Wednesday may not always be harder than Tuesday, Thursday may not always be harder than Wednesday. I’m proud of myself for editing and presenting crosswords that generally do increase in difficulty through the week. “I’m impressed,” said Shortz, who has been the crossword editor at the Times since 1993 and is just the fourth in the paper’s history.
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