Chez Kray: Kiran's Puzzle Page

I have an unusual (to be charitable) penchant for games and puzzles of various sorts. Here are a few of the sorts. Disclaimer: I retain copyright on original material posted here; please link here instead of duplicating.

Crossword puzzles

I am probably most notable as a solver of American (non-cryptic) crossword puzzles, such as those in the New York Times and other fine publications. I have competed in the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament every year since 1997, scoring several top 10 finishes since 2001, and finishing 2nd in 2006.

The 2005 tournament is documented in the movie Wordplay, so a few of you may have noticed me therein. I finished 4th that year, so I don't appear in the grand finale (for which 3 solvers qualify).

I am technically also a published crossword constructor, but only barely. My first only published crossword appeared Thursday, November 26 (Thanksgiving, but only coincidentally), 1997 in the New York Times. It has been reprinted at least once since then, in of all places Will Shortz's Favorite Crossword Puzzles!

Nowadays, I mostly don't construct crosswords except for specific purposes. For one, I have had a few crosswords in the MIT Mystery Hunt. For another, I constructed a crossword for a memorial conference for the late Julie Kerr; see her parents' beautiful memorial page.

MIT Mystery Hunt et al (puzzle hunts)

A "puzzle hunt" (or "megagame" or "extravaganza") is a collection of interrelated puzzles whose answers must be combined (and sometimes recombined, and threecombined...) in some fashion to yield some larger answer. The mother of all puzzle hunts is the MIT Mystery Hunt, an event held over Martin Luther King Day weekend each year. The last few Mystery Hunts (from 1999 onward) can be found in their near-entirety at the aforementioned web site.

I have participated in the Mystery Hunt every year since 1999, on the team Setec Astronomy founded by Chris Morse. Setec won the 1999, 2001, and 2004. The Hunt is always constructed by the winner of the previous hunt, so we ran the 2000, 2002, and 2005 Hunts; don't look for another Setec hunt anytime soon.

My puzzles (archived at the web site named above) include:

From 2000: "Alternatives", "Recommended Reading", "Pleasures of Poetry", "Cross-Check" (with David Savitt).
From 2002: "Resistance is Fuchsia", "A Nugget of Wisdom", "Giant Star" (with David Savitt), "Go Bye-Bye, Whinging Muchacha!"
From 2005: "From A to B" (with Ray Jones), "Grocery List", "Lost in Translation", "Paint Store" (with David Savitt), "Parallel Universe", "Shift Break", "Square Mess" (with help from Ray Jones and Derek Kisman), "Telephone Pictionary" (with art by Ben Monreal), "The Two Towers" (with Ray Jones), plus vocal contributions to "Cocktail Party" (the Simmons Hall song medley), various small contributions to metapuzzles, and the twist at the end of the final coin trail.

No operation as big as the Hunt happens without lots of uncredited collaboration: I had a hand in various tweaks of other people's puzzles, and vice versa.

Some related constructions of mine, on a smaller scale:

In 2002, David Savitt launched an annual puzzle hunt at the Canada/USA Mathcamp. For that first hunt, I contributed several puzzles and a bit of design assistance.
I was part of a six-member squad that produced Intercoastal Altercations 2: Wild Goose Chase, a National Puzzlers League megagame held nationally via the Internet on May 11, 2002. I only wrote one puzzle, but I also participated in the overall design, promotion, and interacting with teams, e.g., giving hints.
I participated in the construction of a Microsoft PuzzleHunt in 2004, but I'm not sure if it is available online. I'm quite fond of the photo puzzle I constructed (with Roy Leban) for the event; I might post it at some point.

The National Puzzlers League

The National Puzzlers' League (NPL) is a group of several hundred word lovers and game/puzzle enthusiasts; many of the best-known professional puzzle constructors in the US are members. Members swap puzzles of startling quality (except maybe mine) in a monthly newsletter (the Enigma), at regional gatherings, and at annual conventions. In particular, if you like cryptic (British/Canadian-style) crosswords, the Enigma is one of the best sources anywhere.

It is an old tradition for NPL members to adopt pseudonyms ("noms"), as a way of flattening traditional social strata. My NPL nom is "Kray", derived as "K" (my first/last initial) plus "ray" (the meaning of my first name in Sanskrit). Some fake derivations include:

Seymour Cray, inventor of the Cray supercomputers;
The Kray brothers, notorious British gangsters;
Singer Stacy Kray;
KRAY-FM in Monterey, CA;
The Russian word "kray", meaning "edge" or "border" (used to refer to several administrative regions within Russia);
The neighborhood of Kray in Essen, Germany;
The fact that the letters K, R, A, Y occur in order within my (first and last) name.

Here are a few things I wrote in connection with the NPL. Some of these fall into a traditional puzzle category known as "flats" (puzzles in verse); these are explained in the NPL's Guide to the Enigma.

Flat City, a puzzle I wrote for an NPL miniconvention in New York City in 1998. Also, the answers to Flat City, but no fair peeking until you try the puzzle!
Not a puzzle, but: a report on Performance Flats, an experiment from an NPL gathering in San Francisco. Imagine a cross between improv comedy and word games and you're getting close.
The questions of a trivia game (formatted like the TV show "Jeopardy!") I wrote for the 2000 NPL convention. The convention was held at the Canterbury Hotel in San Francisco, so the game has a corresponding theme (but no knowledge of Chaucer is assumed).
I've written a number of flats which are pastiches of various songs. These are now posted on a separate page.

San Francisco Gaming

The San Francisco area has an active puzzling tradition quite separate from anything described above; I got involved with it when I lived in the Bay Area (2000-2003), and still occasionally get to participate. (There is no regular SF puzzle hunt in the sense of the MIT Mystery Hunt, but some SF puzzlers participate in the MIT and Microsoft hunts.)

The signature events among this community are instances of what locals call "The Game", or sometimes "The San Francisco Game" to distinguish it from similar events in other cities (notably Seattle). A typical Game is a linear puzzle hunt (i.e., find one puzzle, solve it to determine the location of the next puzzle) requiring teams to drive upwards of 50 miles over 24-30 hours. Shorter variants also exist, such as Shinteki, BATH (Bay Area Treasure Hunt), BANG (Bay Area Night Game), and so on. There is a decent Wikipedia entry about all of this.

Puzzle tools

I am pretty experienced in writing computer programs to assist in various tasks involved in solving and creating puzzles. I currently use Python as my primarily language for this; other languages I have some experience with include Pascal, C, C++, Java, Perl.

At some point, I wrote a PalmOS program for searching word lists called Word Finder. I haven't touched it in years, though; I'm not sure if I can even find the source code anymore.