Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Posts Tagged ‘puzzle’

Competitive Jigsaw Puzzling

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on May 20, 2026| 4 Comments »

Photo: Sarah Schuler.
Sarah Schuler (left) and Lauren Kautz (right) took home 15th place out of 747 other pairs at the World Jigsaw Puzzle Championship in Spain.

Where I live, there are some very serious puzzle mavens, and I can tell it keeps their brains sharp. Now I learn that some aficionados take those sharp brains to puzzle competitions.

Cathy Wurzer and Aleesa Kuznetsov at Minnesota Public Radio (MPR) interviewed a puzzler from Minnesota who had just won some glory in Spain.

Here’s the part of the transcript from the aficionado telephone interview.

Cathy Wurzer/MPR
“Tickets went live today for one of the largest jigsaw puzzling competitions in the world, and it’s right here in St. Paul at the Winter Carnival. Someone you will definitely see there is Minnesotan Sarah Schuler, and she actually just got back from the World Jigsaw Puzzle Competition in Spain. …

“I’ve got to say, Sarah, I always thought that working jigsaw puzzles was supposed to be relaxing. But I didn’t realize that there are people like yourself who compete, and you’re incredibly good and fast at it. Walk me through how this happened to you. …

Sarah Schuler
“People don’t really know about it. I feel like a lot of Minnesota does puzzle, but not as many people do competitive jigsaw puzzling. …

Wurzer
“I understand that you were competing with a thousand other puzzlers from around the world. What was that like?

Schuler
“It is electric. I know that sounds kind of wild when it’s coming down to jigsaw puzzling, but to be in a room with a thousand other people that have such a passion and love for the same hobby that you do is just such an amazing feeling. …

Wurzer
“Did you make it into the finals? …

Schuler
“I made it in all three categories. There are team competitions, which is a team of up to four people, pairs, which is just two people working on a puzzle, and then individuals, which is just yourself. …

Wurzer
“Give me a sense as to how fast you can go when you’re really clicking.

Schuler
“I typically finish a 500-piece puzzle between 45 minutes to an hour. The fastest people in the world can finish it in 26 minutes. …

Wurzer
“Oh my gosh. I can’t even conceive of it. … How do you tackle a puzzle as a team?

Schuler
“Really the most important thing is communication. You can definitely go into it with a plan, but in a jigsaw puzzle competition, typically you don’t get to see the image until they do ‘five, four, three, two, one, go.’ So you can’t really plan ahead like, if it’s an image with tigers on it, I’m going to take the tigers, I’m going to take the water, I’m going to take these purple flowers. … My team, we have someone that we have do the edge pieces — pretty much dedicated to doing that from the beginning. And then the rest of us just call out like, if we’re seeing a pink carriage and a white horse, they’ll say, ‘Oh, I’m going to take all these white pieces and put together the horse.’ …

“The edge is very important, but sometimes we don’t do it first. So as you practice and do more puzzles, you’ll learn when it’s quicker to do the edge last. …

Wurzer
“Then you’ve got to go fast. … It’s almost like you develop, I would think, some kind of an eye or a sense of where you’re going, larger picture, to go fast.

Schuler
“I feel like a lot of people have different methods … Some people will take a long time and look at the box image and sear that into their brain so they don’t have to keep looking at the box. Some people never look at the box, or they just quickly look at it once and go, OK, I get the idea. Some people hold up the piece to the box and find exactly where it goes and puts it down in the puzzle. So lots of different strategies. …

Wurzer
“I think when you think of a puzzler, you think of someone who might be older, but you’re in your 20s. So how did you get into competitive puzzling?

Schuler
“As you were talking about earlier, Winter Carnival is the largest puzzle competition in the country. … I started going to that to watch my mom and my uncle compete on a team, and eventually one of their team members left their team. And they put me in when I was maybe 12, 13, and that was my first time doing a puzzle contest. And I just fell in love with it.”

More at Minnesota Public Radio, here.

Read Full Post »

Fun with Ciphers and Codexes

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , on March 3, 2026| 3 Comments »

Photo: Art Collection 2 via Alamy.
The Voynich manuscript has never been deciphered. 

We love the French tv series called Astrid, whose autistic heroine can solve any puzzle and has never yet been stumped by a mysterious code. I wish Astrid could apply her unique way of thinking to the puzzle described in today’s article because skepticism about the solution remains.

Tom Metcalfe writes at Live Science, “A unique cipher that uses playing cards and dice to turn languages into glyphs produces text eerily similar to the glyphs in the Voynich manuscript, a new study shows. The finding suggests that an equivalent cipher could have been used to create the mysterious medieval manuscript.

“The new cipher — called ‘Naibbe,’ from the name of a 14th-century Italian card game — does not decode the medieval Voynich manuscript, but it offers an idea for how the manuscript was made.

“The Voynich manuscript, which has been radiocarbon-dated to the 15th century, contains roughly 38,000 words written in glyphs that have never been translated. Despite more than a century of intense scrutiny, the manuscript has not been explained conclusively. However, it continues to intrigue people, with its bizarre and inexplicable illustrations of plants, astrology and alchemy, including supposedly ‘biological’ depictions of bathing naked women.

“In the new study, published Nov. 26 in the journal Cryptologia, science journalist Michael Greshko investigated one way the manuscript may have come together. He told Live Science that he got the idea for the Naibbe cipher while researching stories about the Voynich manuscript. …

“Naibbe first uses the number from the throw of a die to break a block of Italian or Latin into single and double letters — so “gatto” (Italian for “cat”) could become “g”,”at” and “to.” The cipher then uses the draw of a playing card to determine which of six different tables is used to encrypt the letters into ‘Voynichese’ — the strange and undeciphered glyphs that are apparently grouped into words in the manuscript. The tables are ‘weighted’ by the corresponding number of cards so that the statistical occurrence of the mock-Voynichese glyphs is the same as seen in the manuscript itself.

“Greshko’s effort is among the leading attempts to explain how the manuscript was made. But it still only approximated Voynichese text, rather than fully replicating it, he said. …

“The manuscript now lies at a nexus of attempts to understand lost languages, yet experts are not entirely sure if Voynichese is even real.

“One theory, taken seriously, is that the manuscript is a medieval hoax, illustrated with suitably mysterious and salacious drawings, and that the text of Voynichese glyphs is completely meaningless.

“The hoax theory has grown stronger in recent years as more attempts to decipher Voynichese — some of which have used machine learning and other computerized artificial intelligence methods — have failed to crack the code, if there is a code.

“But theories that Voynichese is based on a real language and can be deciphered are still prominent, and Greshko’s Naibbe cipher is one of the closest attempts yet.

“The mock-Voynichese output of the Naibbe cipher has several important similarities to true Voynichese. … Those commonalities suggested that a similar method was used to create the original Voynich manuscript, Greshko said. …

” ‘Dice and playing cards were chosen as sources of randomness because it was essential for the cipher to be ‘hand-doable’ with the technology of the time. …

” ‘My hope is that this becomes adopted as a computational benchmark,’ Greshko said. ‘The points of difference between the cipher and the manuscript may point the way to how the text was actually created.’

“Former satellite engineer René Zandbergen, a renowned expert on the Voynich manuscript who was not directly involved in Greshko’s study, said he appreciated Greshko’s efforts to create an encoding method to approximate Voynichese.

“But Greshko ‘also makes it clear that he is not suggesting that this is how the manuscript text was generated,’ Zandbergen said in an email. ‘He just demonstrates that such a method can be found, and we may assume that there may be others.’ Zandbergen added that he is ‘essentially undecided’ about whether the Voynichese text is meaningful or a hoax.”

More at Live Science, here.

Read Full Post »

Jigsaw Puzzles Come to Life

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on April 30, 2012| Leave a Comment »

When I take my early morning walk, I always go through town because I like looking in shop windows.

The Toy Shop is a never-ending source of entertainment. Today one window featured puzzles that, once finished, can be looked at through some kind of app that adds sound and movement to the picture. It’s called augmented reality — a pretty funny concept for one who has her hands full with ordinary reality.

Gizmag.com is enthusiastic: “Where once we would have had to use our imaginations to bring such scenes to life, the new augmented reality puzzles just need dissectologists to download a free app onto an iPhone or iPad 2 and point the device camera at the completed puzzle. The iDevice user can then take a virtual 360 degree tour of Paris, watch sea creatures swim around and play a bonus game, go on an animated photo safari in Africa, or make their very own Norwegian snow globe onscreen.”

I’m exhausted already. Though intrigued, I’d rather use my imagination.

P.S. Happy May Day.

Read Full Post »