As in previous years, I’m giving my solving times for the Indy crossword for 2013 showing the average for each setter. Also info is given on solving times for each day of the week.
The analysis covers both the weekday Independent and Independent on Sunday. There were 364 puzzles i.e. every day except Christmas Day. My average solving time in 2013 was 35 minutes – exactly the same as in 2012. I correctly solved all but 23 (by coincidence this was also the same as in 2012). In those I either made an error or could not finish. As in last year’s analysis I include the time spent at those puzzles adding five minutes for each error or answer I could not find. The hardest was 101 mins for an Anax puzzle on Saturday 22 June. The easiest was 11 mins twice, both times for Quixote puzzles.
Thirty setters appeared in 2013. My average solving times, in order of difficulty, were: Anax 66, Bannsider 66, (Anax a tiny bit longer, when one goes to the first place of decimals!), Nimrod 59, Monk 57, Tyrus 57, Nestor 53, Rorschach 53, Hob 45, Donk 45, Jambazi 44, eXternal 42, Tees 41, Kairos 41, Scorpion 41, Morph 36, Crosophile 33, Radian 33, Alchemi 31, Eimi 30, Punk 30, Phi 28, Klingsor 27, Nitsy 24, Dac 23, Hypnos 23, Poins 22, Commoner 21, Hieroglyph 19, Quixote 17.
By day of week, the hardest was Saturday (55), followed by Thursday (46), Tuesday (39), Sunday (27.7), Friday (27.6), Wednesday (26), Monday (25).
Appearances by setters: Phi 52, Dac 40, Quixote 27, Anax 14, Crosophile 13, Hypnos, Klingsor, Nestor, Poins, Radian, Raich, Scorpion (all 12), Monk, Punk, Tyrus (all 11), Kairos, Morph, Tees (all 10), Alchemi, Bannsider, Donk (all 9), Hob 8, eXternal 7, Commoner, Eimi (both 6), Jambazi, Nimrod (both 5), Rorschach 4, Nitsy 2, Hieroglyph 1.
I do not approach puzzles in ‘race the clock’ mode (no fun in that for me) but find it interesting to note solving times esp to compare the setters. As solving these (and similar puzzles) for many years which generally use familiar vocabulary as answers, I start with the aim of solving without consulting anything and I generally succeed in solving the full puzzle that way. When completely stuck I go for help in any way I can get it (short of simply looking up the answer which is sometimes available – e.g. by using ‘Reveal’ on the Indy website). I consult dictionaries, word lists, crossword helpers etc. I usually find that the answer (or element of wordplay) is a word I did not know or had forgotten.
I’ve produced a spreadsheet giving all the details with some further analysis (e.g. median, standard deviation, fastest and slowest). I’m sending this spreadsheet (a) to all the Indy setters whose email addresses I know and (b) to the Indy bloggers on this site, again those whose email addresses I know. If anyone else would like a copy, please indicate an email address and I’ll send it.
I’d like to finish by wishing all the best for 2014 to the Indy crossword editor, all setters and solvers, all the bloggers on this site and those who comment on or just read the blogs, with a particular thanks to Nimrod for his help over the course of the year.
A fascinating read, nmsindy. This sort of overview is very helpful as a setter to see how we fit into the overall picture. It must have been pretty time consuming so I’m hoping it was a labour of love.
Many thanks. By the way, how long does it take to solve a Raich? 🙂
NMS is himself a setter as well as an experienced solver, so I wonder why my puzzles are taking him as long as 17 minutes. As for some of my colleagues, fine as their puzzles may well be, I wonder how many potential daily solvers will find their puzzles simply far too difficult and move on. For all our papers we need a wider perspective than the blogosphere can offer. The Indy needs more readers — are we in danger of generating fewer? Maybe eimi can offer that wider perspective?
I’m not sure 17 minutes is all that long, if one is not in “race the clock” mode.
I’m also not sure how one achives a wider perspective than the blogosphere, whioh I believe is increasingly representative of the “thinking” solver, as opposed to the solver who looks at the clue without attempting to parse it, and writes in an answer based on instinct as much as anything (before resorting to Answerbank 🙂 )
As someone situated at number two in the charts just behind the Anax Christmas Number One, I’d be horrified to think that my puzzles were driving readers away from the paper, especially when the Indy itself has already done a pretty good job in that respect by retiring from my native land (!)
But as Don says, maybe the boss can comment?
Thanks to NMS for the fascinating study. I’m interested to see that his average solving time matches the previous year’s. A credit to the editor there perhaps.
One way of getting beyond the thinking blog solver is to have a social contact who is distant from our in-groups. Dr Maggie down the road does my Times puzzle as does an old publishing contact and Gordon at church does my Telegraph for example. They give me feedback, sometimes the same as on the blogs, but they would generally be slower solvers. These are keen everyday solvers who wouldn’t go within a million miles of a blog. One of my authors use to say that when she wrote a chemistry text book she had one of her pupils in mind. Our ‘pupils’ are all around us, and maybe we need to find a few more in the wider world. It’s very hard to keep everyone happy and the Indy has a fine range of styles, but we do perhaps need a few more puzzles at the Telegraph end!
A very interesting study. Ignoring the setters whose puzzles I see before they reach the paper, I would definitely agree that Anax is the most difficult – I have worked hard and am getting on the Bannsider and Monk wavelengths better lately (still whispering that fact though, in case they notice!).
I don’t approach Indy puzzles in race the clock mode (for two entirely different reasons I only do that with DT and Times puzzles) but would agree that 17 mins isn’t long for an Indy puzzle at all. As someone who solves all the daily cryptics, I do think quite a lot of the Indy puzzles are at the harder end of the solving spectrum, but there are enough easier ones to get people hooked on them and give us ‘old-timers’ a feeling of satisfaction too.
Happy New Year and thanks to NMS, Eimi and all the Indy setters.
re my comment @5 – I don’t actually mean ‘race the clock’ what I mean is ‘time myself’.
Dear Don,
I appreciate your concerns but you must remember Churchill’s adage about lies, dammed lies and statistics. The operative information is the frequency of appearances. Yourself, Dac and Phi are all in the quicker half which means on average 3 out of 5 of the week days are at the easier end of the spectrum. The rest of us have a lot longer to write our puzzles so we tend to theme them (one of the remaining slots is generally considered themed anyway) which adds to difficulty I reckon.
Thanks Naill! Pretty useful as always. Ive dropped a few places which is what I aimed for so here’s to a year of more accessible puzzles.
Fascinating as ever. Many thanks for the efforts you’ve put in, Niall.
And I’m slightly depressed now.
Happy New Year all!
Solvers are pupils. Don is a don. Only you could have come up with THAT one old bean!
What I like is that all the papers are different, with regard to their daily service at least. Personally I find that after allowing for the intense difficulty of some compilers (not in the ST, which is ALWAYS easy once you get the hang of their slightly quirky cryptic vocab), there’s not much difference across the spectrum: I’m as crap a solver in The Times as in The Indy.
Many thanks, as ever, to Niall for his excellent work.
That’s right: I said that the papers are all different, but not different.
I blame Belgo.
I can vouch for the strength of some of those Belgian beers, as potent as wine a lot of them, so don’t worry (if that’s what you were doing? I’ve assumed so).
Thanks to Niall for an interesting diversion.
I was doing exactly that. One of them was 11%!
I was using ‘pupil’ as a parallel. An author needs to know his or her audience and potential audience — to know the market, if you want to put it another way. Textbook authors write for pupils; setters write for solvers. I am still not convinced that the Indy is hitting the right average. All responses here come from the creme de la solving/setting creme, who may well choose to be defensive. We can talk among ourselves as much as we like, but we do need much more external evidence. If our hardest setters are taking an hour for an experienced solver to solve, the everyday solver will soon give up. If that sort of elitisnm is what we want, so be it, but it won’t sell papers to lots of people for whom the crossword may be a critical purchasing factor.That is really all I have to say (for now).
We would be really disappointed if the Indy altered their range of setters to ensure quicker or more consistent solving times as a way of attracting new readers! Our main reason for buying the Indy is the crossword ever since it first started. We remember with horror when it appeared that new i readers (many of whom were ex-Telegraph readers) were complaining about the difficulty of the puzzles. Thankfully the Indy saw sense and returned to their policy of recycling old puzzles in the i!!
Please eimi – if you are reading this, we love the Indy puzzles! New setters are very welcome but please don’t alter the range of difficulty.
Thanks Niall for the information – Happy New Year!
First, thanks to Gaufrid and those who blog and comment.
I see Quixote’s point, but would respectfully disagree. I don’t know anyone who’s changed their paper because the crossword is too hard. I know several who have changed because they now found the crossword in their previously regular paper to be too easy.
When I started solving The Times in the early 70s, it took me three years before I solved one unaided. By my early 20s, I could solve it 80% of the time. Then came Wapping and I moved to the Guardian. I feasted on Crispa, found Pasquale difficult and Araucaria nigh-on impossible. But he kept three of us going for an hour in the pub at lunchtime, and sometimes we finished him – and boy were we elated. Years later, I stopped buying the Guardian of a Monday if Crispa was the setter, because there were better things to do than waste 4 minutes on one of hers. And the only thing that would induce me to actually pay for a copy of The Times would be the knowledge that Bannsider had set the day’s challenge. (I just take my chances on whether there’s a copy floating about my local coffee place: and the best puzzle I solved all year was a Times Jumbo I correctly guessed to be one of his. It took me two days – off and on – and was sheer delight.)
The point here is that those who actually base their decision on which paper to buy on their estimation of the crossword are far, far more likely to be (or at least be becoming) crossword devotees than not. Unless you’re buying for the specific pleasures of that paper’s puzzle, which means that crosswords are *important* to you, what matters is the paper’s ideological stance and choice of stories to cover. If you find the crossword too difficult, then what happens is that you don’t get into doing crosswords.
The blogosphere isn’t as unrepresentative as you might think, either. I’ve met several solvers at S&B gatherings who are pretty hopeless, but they’ve been bitten by the bug and are going to solve a whole puzzle on their own one day even if it bloody well kills them.
I’m lucky enough to have good test solvers, and (not so luckily) don’t have outlets for all the puzzles I set, and the ones I submit to Eimi or Big Dave are the ones which get the most favourable reactions, which seem to be only slightly related to level of difficulty. Easy can be fun and tough can be boring, or it can be the other way around. What it really comes down to is the quality of the clues: are they interesting to try and solve, are they funny, do they cause speculation on what might have happened just before that sentence, are they peculiarly apposite for some reason, are they elegant, and so on.
Where the blogosphere is unrepresentative is in the minute technical dissection of clues. When I was an average daily solver, I didn’t much care whether a set of arcane rules were being followed to the letter: I was engrossed in whether or not I could work out what the answer was. And often there was the “well, it must be *that*, but I haven’t the faintest idea why”. It didn’t stop me buying the paper, because I reckoned that one day I would be able to understand. And now I usually do – unless it’s Bannsider or Tyrus. (For some reason, I find Anax fairly straightforward.)
Oh not the ‘arcane rules’ wagon. What is wrong with decent cryptic grammar anyway?
I’m not attacking good cryptic grammar. I was pointing out that the blogosphere is unrepresentative of solvers in general because a lot of solvers aren’t particularly concerned about the technicalities. If you’re the sort of nerd who gets into technicalities, then you get to appreciate how good cryptic grammar tends to make for more satisfying clues. Those with a deep technical appreciation of music theory might be able to explain precisely what it is about the weird ways in which Little Feat constructed their songs that makes them the best band ever, but I don’t have to know that as a consumer – though obviously I would have to if I wanted to try and play like them.
Before the thread goes cold, I will have my two penn’orth (since I’m among careful users of English I hope that’s how you spell it).
I’ve been a regular solver of the Indy puzzle for about four years now, and I do the Guardian when I have time. Never done the Telegraph or Times, so I can’t comment. I wouldn’t put myself in the crème category that Don defines; I can fully solve four out of five Indy puzzles a week and just because I comment here regularly doesn’t mean that I’m any different from the other thousands of folk who solve the Indy and have never heard of Fifteensquared. So where the difference is between me and Dr Maggie, I don’t know. Feedback is feedback.
Do I want the Indy to have five Quixotes a week? No. Am I frustrated when I can’t get anywhere near solving a Nimrod, Anax or Bannsider? Only briefly. It’s just (sorry to setters) a crossword, not the article on page five about starvation in sub-Saharan Africa. And I’m not convinced that large numbers of people switch their paper because of the puzzle.
Look at the exchange between me and a contributor called Bamberger on today’s blog of the Dac puzzle. Here’s a guy who is happy to comment here when he’s only filled in half a dozen clues, which I think is commendable. In that sense, Don is right: people who tend to comment on the Indy puzzles are people who generally finish them and have something to contribute to the discussion. But does that mean that we should be making the Indy puzzles generally ‘easier’. I don’t think so.
I think I have spent my tuppence now.
Hmm, I take it those times are minutes not days?! I usually just do the Saturday one as I can take all week over it. Having found this site I’m hoping to learn by looking through the commented solutions and get better 🙂
re how hard they should be:
Those of us who struggle always have the five-clue one to fall back on. The answer therefore seems to be to print several – good news for the setters & their bank ballances!
Re DaveF at #19, I think it is important to remember that cryptic crosswords seem very mysterious to the outsider and take quite a bit of getting used to in order to understand what is going on. It was a very long time after I attempted my first puzzle, that I was able to solve a full one – I still remember the thrill to see I’d all the right answers though I’d no idea how I’d got there in many cases. I’d recommend looking at ‘how to solve’ books in a slow and leisured way – there are quite a few more of these about now than when I started solving.