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1 Across: Name the place where puzzles have found a new home

Updated on: Aug 3, 2024, 13:53:36 IST
By Kabir Firaque
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PREMIUMSpot an iron magic square from Ancient China and a stamp from Macau bearing the same game; the Bakhshali manuscript; Sam Loyd’s Trick Donkeys; a visual puzzle from Henry Dudeney’s Amusements in Mathematics; the 1913 crossword (it was diamond-shaped); a 15 Puzzle, a Wordle; tangrams, and Mukul Sharma’s Mindsport. (Images: Wikimedia Commons; British Museum; Shutterstock; Science Museum Group; mukulsharma.org.in)
Spot an iron magic square from Ancient China and a stamp from Macau bearing the same game; the Bakhshali manuscript; Sam Loyd’s Trick Donkeys; a visual puzzle from Henry Dudeney’s Amusements in Mathematics; the 1913 crossword (it was diamond-shaped); a 15 Puzzle, a Wordle; tangrams, and Mukul Sharma’s Mindsport. (Images: Wikimedia Commons; British Museum; Shutterstock; Science Museum Group; mukulsharma.org.in)
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We’ve been piecing them together for centuries, passing them on via birch bark, manuscripts, newspapers. HT puzzles editor Kabir Firaque traces the boom online.

For several decades, they have come folded into the newspapers. A crossword or sometimes two, perhaps one cryptic and the other quick. A bunch of anagrams with circled letters in each word leading to a final bonus anagram. And the relatively recent sudoku, which started appearing in newspapers about 20 years ago.

New generations, and many among the old, are now going online to fill in a crossword, solve an anagram or crack a sudoku grid. And it’s quite the

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kabir Firaque

Puzzles Editor Kabir Firaque is the author of the weekly column Problematics. A journalist for three decades, he also writes about science and mathematics.

HT Wkndht weekendDwight Wheatley
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