M2M Day 263: This is a really useful insight

Max Deutsch
Jul 22, 2017 · 3 min read

This post is part of Month to Master, a 12-month accelerated learning project. For July, my goal is to solve a Saturday New York Times crossword puzzle in one sitting without any aid.

A few days ago, I started adding non-Saturday crosswords (i.e. “easier puzzles”) into my training routine. The goal, according to my three-part training framework, is to use these easier puzzles to develop a more mature strategy for the end of a puzzle, which I can then apply to my Saturday crosswords as I (hopefully) start getting to that point.

Today, to continue training for these end of puzzle situations, I focused on solving a couple of Friday puzzles (which are close enough to Saturdays for the insights to be relevant, but easy enough where I can actually generate the necessary “end-game” insights).

Here’s one of the Friday puzzles that I completed today…

You’ll notice that I botched eight of the squares on my first try, as denoted by the black triangles.

Retrospectively, there’s no reason that I should have incorrectly filled in these squares: When I clicked the check button, to confirm my answers, I knew there were a handful of words in the puzzle that I didn’t recognize.

Sure enough, these exact “words” just happened to contain the error-filled squares.

Upon fixing these squares, all the previously unidentifiable words magically became pretty standard words (i.e. emote, sickos, churchy, gods, quiches, agree).

I don’t remember what nonsense words I had in place of these normal-looking words, but they were certainly nonsense.

I had convinced myself that “A Saturday puzzle is a hard puzzle. Therefore, it’s going to contain hard words. Some of these hard words I just won’t recognize”.

But this is actually rarely the case: The NYT increases puzzle difficulty almost entirely with its cluing difficulty, and not with the obscurity of its answers.

So, if I see a word that I don’t recognize, it probably contains an error.

This insight now seems obvious, but, before explicitly recognizing it, I continued to make this same kind of error (i.e. submitting unrecognizable words) over and over again.

Anyway, my end-of-puzzle approach is starting to come into focus: Once I’ve filled in the entire puzzle, I should read through and find any word that I don’t recognize. Then, I should assume this answer is incorrect, and try to figure out how to make the answer into a real word by changing one or two of the squares (before ever looking at the clue). Finally, once I’ve determine the most reasonably likely real-word answer, I should check the clue and see if I can use it to justify the answer . If so, great. If not, it’s still likely correct.

Read the next post. Read the previous post.


Max Deutsch is an obsessive learner, product builder, guinea pig for Month to Master, and founder at Openmind.

If you want to follow along with Max’s year-long accelerated learning project, make sure to follow this Medium account.

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Max Deutsch

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Founder at https://LearnMonthly.com. Blogging at http://MonthToMaster.com. Get in touch at http://max.xyz.

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