Frequently Asked Questions

These are some questions I’ve been asked often. Before asking me a question, please check if it’s already answered on here.

Puzzles

How did you write your puzzles?

Short answer: I thought about puzzles a lot.

Long answer: Before constructing my first puzzle, I did a lot of puzzles from Cracking the Cryptic, noticed a set of ideas that seemed to interest me in particular, and once I’d had a lot of prototypical ideas about bounding, I thought, “now I have this weird bounding idea myself. I wonder if it’d work?” Well, I tried to turn it into a concrete puzzle, and as luck would have it, the idea did work. As I was constructing and testsolving my first puzzle, I realized “Hey there’s another vibe (not even idea at this point) that seems interesting to explore”. So I solidified it into an idea and kept pushing really hard, and when I was done I finished my second puzzle, which is my hardest to this date (Alphabet Soup). (That puzzle literally drained the sanity out of me, I worked on it for 4 hours a day for a whole week straight.)

Basically to get started I got a lot of good examples by solving good puzzles from CTC, and having a good mental model of how a specific idea (bounding) worked led me to daydream about it and helped me construct my own take on it. Then, the process of creating my first puzzle led to leftover ideas for the next, and I kept that ball rolling and now I have 50-something puzzles created.

Math

Do you teach?

Not much anymore, and not contest math. These days, I am far more interested in teaching undergraduate mathematics, particularly abstract algebra.