Last year's Puzzle Day participants work on their puzzles. This year's Silicon Valley Puzzle Day takes place Saturday and Sunday at the Morgan Hill Library, 660 W. Main Ave.
Dan Schoenholz, a participant in Morgan Hill's 2009 Silicon Valley Puzzle Day, attended a Puzzle Day crossword puzzle creation workshop with amazing results. The Fremont engineer was so motivated by the workshop that he created his own crossword puzzle and submitted it to Will Shortz, the famed puzzle page editor of the New York Times. Amazingly, Shortz accepted Schoenholz's first effort at crossword creation. (According to Shortz's blog, the Times receives more than 250 crossword puzzle submissions each week.)
"I've played word games since I was a kid taking on my older brother in Scrabble," Schoenholz said. "I still enjoy them for the mental stimulation and as a way to escape my day-to-day concerns for a little while. Making a puzzle is essentially a word game - just a time-consuming and intellectually challenging one."
Schoenholz said he saw the documentary film "Wordplay" when it was released in 2006 and thought it would be fun to participate in a crossword contest similar to the one in the movie. That's why he attended Puzzle Day. He described his reaction when he learned that Shortz would publish his puzzle.
"I got a nice e-mail note from his assistant congratulating me," Schoenholz says. "My first reaction ... I let out a loud whoop and my 10-year-old daughter, Eva, came running to see what the racket was all about."
The fourth annual Silicon Valley Puzzle Day will be held this weekend and will feature a host of renown puzzle gurus in person at the event and unpublished crossword puzzles edited by New York Times puzzle editor Will Shortz.
"We're excited to have experts and puzzles of such a high caliber in our annual tournament," Silicon Valley Puzzle Day co-chair Lisa Pampuch said. "Every year, we draw Sudoku and crossword puzzle enthusiasts from all over the San Francisco Bay Area - and from the Los Angeles area - to Morgan Hill. It's a great event for puzzle fans of all ages and ability levels."
Silicon Valley Puzzle Day is a Sudoku and crossword puzzle tournament, featuring youth (ages 8 to 15) and adult (ages 16 and older) divisions. It's a project of the Morgan Hill Library Foundation, a group dedicated to assisting the library meet the long-term needs of the community. Puzzle Day will be held at the Morgan Hill Library, 660 W. Main Ave., Saturday and Sunday.
Puzzle-themed workshops will be held Saturday and exciting Sudoku and crossword puzzle tournaments are set for Sunday. Workshops are free, and donations of $20 for adult tournament competitors and $10 for youth tournament competitors are suggested.
Saturday features a great variety of free workshops:
- Cryptarithms, presented by Josh Bloch, Google's chief Java architect. Get a taste for these mathematical puzzles in which digits are replaced by symbols (usually letters).
- Crosswordese, presented by cruciverbalist and lexicographer Mark Diehl, takes on those words that you see in puzzles all the time but you never hear in regular conversation.
- Solving in the Finals: Tales from the Championships, presented by five-time American Crossword Puzzle Tournament champion Tyler Hinman and two-time World Sudoku champion Thomas Snyder. These two champs discuss how solving puzzles on the finals stage of a tournament different than solving the puzzles usually, how they prepare for tournament finals, and what really happened at the National Sudoku Championship in Philadelphia.
- Constructor Panel: From Ideas to Publication, moderated by constructor Andrea Carla Michaels, and featuring constructors Hinman, Dan Schoenholz, Wei-Hwa Huang, Diehl and Byron Walden. Get tips, ideas and advice from some of the best constructors around, including one inspired by previous Silicon Valley Puzzle Day workshops.
- What Next?, presented by Snyder, addresses sudoku variations and other logic problems that can become your new puzzling addiction.
- Nikoli puzzles, presented by Hinman, explores the puzzles at www.nikoli.com like nurikabe, heyawake, and more. Learn about the other kinds of puzzles crossword champion Tyler Hinman likes to try his hand at.
- Cryptic Crosswords, presented by Huang, is a chance to prep for Sunday's cryptic crossword bonus round with tricks and strategies for solving these popular puzzles.
- Sudoku for Kids, presented by American Institute of Mathematics educator Dave Holmstrom, helps young novices improve their sudoku skills.
- Word puzzles for Kids, presented by Holmstrom, reviews the different kinds of puzzles that will be used in Sunday's youth word tournament, as well as other types that might tickle your brain.
Sunday's tournaments get under way at 10 am with the Sudoku preliminary rounds, with Sudoku puzzles designed just for Silicon Valley Puzzle Day by Snyder. Watch the top three finishers compete on the big boards at noon. The crossword tournament starts at 1:30 p.m., with yet-to-be published New York Times crossword puzzles provided by Will Shortz. Crossword finals start at 4 p.m..
Puzzle Day benefits the Morgan Hill Library Foundation.
Details: visit the Web site at http://svpuzzle.org or contact event organizers via e-mail at info@svpuzzle.org.
Morgan Hill Staff Got a question or a comment? Send us an email.
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