“Most crossword contributors nowadays use computer assistance like this - although the whole process is much more human-directed than you might think,” he wrote in his NYT column. Shortz, an IU alum, wrote that such programs are often used by the puzzlemakers of today. “He spent day after day over the summer trying to debug it.
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“For someone who was learning how to program, it was a huge task of getting it debugged,” Michael said. For his 12th birthday, he asked for a more sophisticated word list to feed into the program to make more complicated puzzles. Then, Daniel took over, tweaking and adding to the program. But to help Daniel with his project, Michael wrote a simple computer program that helps him find words of the appropriate length with some of the right letters. According to the Times’ crossword editor, the Times gets an average of 75 submissions a week. When Daniel’s father heard he was shooting to get a crossword published in the New York Times, Michael was encouraging, but realistic. You get frustrated sometimes, but that’s just part of it,” he said on Wednesday. Solving a crossword is one thing, he said, but creating his own grids was satisfying on a completely different level.
Not long after that, he decided to submit a puzzle of his own. Soon Daniel was solving the puzzles alongside his father and sister. He was around 11 when he started hovering as his father and 17-year-old sister, Anne, worked on the New York Times crossword puzzle together. He was an avid Scrabble player and word square solver for years before picking up crosswords.
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