A post for those waiting too anxiously for the next puzzles here; some unexpected and potentially fun puzzles will soon be coming but this public service message on how puzzles and other stimulants may affect your brain seemed more important today.

At SudokuCon, I told a story about how after the WSC2 in Prague the first interview was with a sex advice columnist asking how I use sudoku in a relationship or even in the bedroom. I did not then have examples as I do now of a marriage proposal sudoku, or a witty joke about having too much experience as a “naked single” to know a lot about “naked pairs”. The doku in sudoku comes from dokushin meaning “lonely” or “bachelor” after all. And I got into Sudoku soon after a break-up and have been in a twenty year relationship with Sudoku without being willing to put a ring on it because making puzzles is not my life mission. Anyway, I keep a log of good answers for the future when an unexpected media request comes to me.

The most frequently repeated answer is how does Sudoku connect to my life and/or to my work in science, and that is about problem solving. I am a great problem solver even if you think of me as a great Sudoku solver. In sudoku, all puzzles should have one answer and we should agree on it when we see it. Many different techniques might be taken and it might take an open mind to find something hard when stuck, so stepping away from the problem and coming back with fresh eyes can help. Those problem-solving techniques also apply to science and medicine, but in a space where there may or may not be an answer and we have to use the scientific method to assert a rationale, test it, and advance from there. The problems of science take teams and different perspectives and not just fifteen minutes and a pencil. But being a great problem solver starts from something as simple as figuring out Sudoku, and I enjoy coming back to the places of comfort when the rest of the world feels too difficult to solve so puzzles are also part of my mental health journey.

The newest logged answer comes to the question of what to do if you are “addicted” to sudoku. It was first asked to me by a comedic podcaster who takes unique approaches to solving people’s problems. The remaining words are pure, crystal blue Snyder, and I know I’ll at least come back to these a lot because being an addict and having a bipolar brain is a dangerous mix:

We talk about someone “addicted” to sudoku in quotations as if it is not a drug. I am here, as a huge drug addict from hardcore puzzles, to tell you that you can actually be addicted to sudoku, when you abuse it too much. In a world in which there are a lot of problems and none of them seem solvable, you might first find comfort in a simple number puzzle that you slowly work your way through until there are just ten and then five and then fourthreetwoonedone digits left and it feels good. Dopamine rushing through your brain. You go a little further and get a little better at Sudoku and now you can do even the “hard” ones better and the rush is even higher with the hard grids. You start losing track of time, you forget to eat, you stop being intimate with your partner, your brain is thinking everything is right because all the pleasure neurotransmitters are signaling but they are not firing for the right reasons and you haven’t eaten and your partner has left you and that only makes you want to solve even more.

Sudoku may sometimes be a medicine and make you happy, but too much of it can be an addiction and that is bad. Now Sudoku is weak sauce compared to the drugs the FDA regulates, but it is hitting many if not all of the same processes in the brain at a fundamental level. We don’t live in a world where someone running naked in the streets screaming “Will Shortz” is instantly identified as a crossword addict, and police don’t check for graphite residue on your fingers when they pull you over for driving under the influence. But you do need to do some of the same things an addict might in the more extreme situations to get better because they know best how to treat an addiction. First, detoxify. Stop solving any sudoku puzzle that Thomas Snyder wrote that might activate your brain a lot — go to the uninteresting ones that still look like sudoku but are boring like a computer-generated very easy. Or go to something sudoku-adjacent. Maybe word searches are something that detoxifies you with the letters A-Z over fifteen minutes in a safer way than Sudoku did with 1-9. Find an accountability partner. Have them limit your supply of sudoku so you do not overdose in a day. If still in trouble, seek professional help. As someone smart once said, moderation in all things, even sudoku itself.

It has been awhile since messages here, but I’m working on a lot of things in life as I rebuild to achieve a larger mission. My jigsaw is slowly being assembled, and I think the last 100 pieces came together when I met 100 new friendly faces at SudokuCon in Boston. People to whom I can tell the truth about Snyder Notation, not “Snyder Notation”. Where I even shared stories of solving a puzzle in a playoff that included Tetsuya Nishio, someone who sometimes thinks as far as his head can with a contradiction before placing a sure number down into the grid. The same way I do. But not at all “Nishio logic”, which has a reputation as guessing in the sudoku community when I won a playoff puzzle that also eliminated Tetsuya Nishio because he never guessed. Sometimes our intuitions are the smartest and fastest ways to do things but they cannot be distilled into rules and that is how both “Nishio chains” and “Snyder notation” and whatever are named after two great sudokumasters and have some of the bits right but not the essence of what their namesakes did or do.

So more experimentation incoming with Sudoku. In new ways a person who paints in Sudoku might tell his autobiography, but also a person who might have a brain like Van Gogh when self-asylumed at those moments of painting too. I also stopped at the MFA for the Roulin family portrait show this week, and the letters from Roulin to Van Gogh’s relatives after his hospitalization for cutting off the ear are the things that stuck with me the most and kept me grounded through an overstimulatory weekend.

I recognize outside the Classic Sudoku that most of the more experimental late 2024 “Twelve Days of Sudoku”/”Ready Layer One” work looks uninterpretable without me; at SudokuCon I was overjoyed to have a first solve of a younger life photo collage puzzle (one of the Motivational Posters) by watching people try and sometimes answering questions and giving light nudges. I also led a group play of an improved Just One Cell Sudoku from that period of my “dangerous” art making and other brainstorming with a storming brain.

This puzzle can be graded on a 0 out of 5 scale, and that is how a group with shared ideas was able to get all the way to the perfect answer by going one point at a time. I hope it shows that there is more than one way to do something interesting with Sudoku, and I don’t have to write down any rules for this puzzle for a viewer of any age, even if I would score the answers from a child and an adult and a SudokuCon member differently.

So to my new friends from SudokuCon, join our Discord (link in a lot of other obvious places) and slowly find my threads if you want to be a part of this conversation. Bring me something interesting with legos, for example, that only an intellectually adult person should see.

Today LinkedIn is launching a new daily game, Zip, which is their third logic game alongside Queens and Tango where we’ve helped design/edit the puzzles. Zip is a path-drawing game with simple rules: draw a path through all cells starting at 1, going up in order, and ending at the highest number. Some puzzles have a fully open grid while others, like this puzzle, include walls to embed different logical and visual themes.

PDF

or solve online (using our beta test of Penpa-Edit tools)

Theme: Trail of Logic

Author/Opus: This is the 562nd puzzle from Thomas Snyder, aka Dr. Sudoku.

Rules: Draw a path through all cells in the grid by moving horizontally or vertically between adjacent squares. The path cannot cross itself or cross over any given walls. The path must start at the cell with 1, proceed through the other numbers in ascending order, and end at the cell with the highest value.

See also this example:

Solution: PDF and selected animation.

Note: Follow this link for other Loop/Path puzzles.

Note 2: Comments on the blog are great! For a more interactive discussion, please also consider using our General Blog Puzzle Discussion post on the GMPuzzles Discord.

I wanted to share a quick note to this community that I am a speaker at the first (to my knowledge) sudoku convention, SudokuCon, to be held in the Boston area early in April.

I will be contributing to two sessions:

Just One Cell Sudoku on Friday the 4th at 2 PM:
Like chess puzzles compared to full games of chess, Just One Cell Sudoku are short, bite-sized snacks of Sudoku logic where each grid has just one cell where a logical placement can be made. The “winning move” can be anything from a basic single to a more advanced chain of logical steps that finally unlocks the answer. We’ve created a playful set of these puzzles as a contest for everyone to enjoy.

and also
How to Solve Sudoku Like a World Champion closing out Saturday the 5th from 5:30-7 PM:
Thomas Snyder, aka Dr. Sudoku, won three world sudoku championships (’07, ’08, ’11) in the early years of the Sudoku craze. Come hear stories from many years of competing, including what different sudoku championships entail, how to identify your strengths and weaknesses in solving sudoku, and ultimately train to get faster at solving under pressure. From tales of catching a sudoku cheater to the origins of Snyder’s own solving notation, this talk will take you deep inside the world of speed-solving and how top competitors think.

See more info including the full schedule at sudokucon.com. While I’m not as connected with the sudoku streamer community organizing the convention as you might expect, I look forward to meeting old friends and making some new ones in Boston.

——

In terms of other site news, we’re still working hard on some external projects that will launch later this year, and we also hope to get back to releasing a few GMPuzzles collections of unreleased puzzles in ebook form in 2025 too. So keep occasionally checking here for news on what we are doing!

PDF

or solve online (using our beta test of Penpa-Edit tools)

Theme: The Lonely One

Author/Opus: This is the 561st puzzle from Thomas Snyder, aka Dr. Sudoku.

Rules: Fill each cell with an X or O so that (A) no vertical or horizontal group of three adjacent cells contains the same symbol in all cells (i.e., no XXX or OOO) and (B) each row and column contains an equal number of each symbol. Cells separated by an equals sign (=) must contain the same symbol. Cells separated by a cross (×) must contain different symbols.

Solution: PDF and selected animation.

Note: Follow this link for other Number Placement puzzles.

Note 2: Comments on the blog are great! For a more interactive discussion, please also consider using our The Thirteen Days of Tango Discussion post on the GMPuzzles Discord.

PDF

or solve online (using our beta test of Penpa-Edit tools)

Theme: Overlapping Squares

Author/Opus: This is the 560th puzzle from Thomas Snyder, aka Dr. Sudoku.

Rules: Fill each cell with an X or O so that (A) no vertical or horizontal group of three adjacent cells contains the same symbol in all cells (i.e., no XXX or OOO) and (B) each row and column contains an equal number of each symbol. Cells separated by an equals sign (=) must contain the same symbol. Cells separated by a cross (×) must contain different symbols.

Solution: PDF and selected animation.

Note: Follow this link for other Number Placement puzzles.

Note 2: Comments on the blog are great! For a more interactive discussion, please also consider using our The Thirteen Days of Tango Discussion post on the GMPuzzles Discord.

PDF

or solve online (using our beta test of Penpa-Edit tools)

Theme: Frame

Author/Opus: This is the 559th puzzle from Thomas Snyder, aka Dr. Sudoku.

Rules: Fill each cell with an X or O so that (A) no vertical or horizontal group of three adjacent cells contains the same symbol in all cells (i.e., no XXX or OOO) and (B) each row and column contains an equal number of each symbol. Cells separated by an equals sign (=) must contain the same symbol. Cells separated by a cross (×) must contain different symbols.

Solution: PDF and selected animation.

Note: Follow this link for other Number Placement puzzles.

Note 2: Comments on the blog are great! For a more interactive discussion, please also consider using our The Thirteen Days of Tango Discussion post on the GMPuzzles Discord.

Today marks the start of the MIT Mystery Hunt, an event I haven’t played in for five years but that I helped run last year since my team won in 2023. That January 2023, after six months at a job that was not going to work out and where other societal changes had me very hypomanic again, I escaped to Pasadena, California to gather thoughts and maybe play remotely. While walking the streets late at night, sensing the homeless problem and my own poor mental health, I wondered again about a particular set of messages I wrote to my ex-girlfriend in the days, week, and month after my mother’s death from cancer.

Considering my life like a Mystery Hunt puzzle, I wondered if James Joyce the fifteenth and ChatGPT21 came together to try to answer this prompt: “A complicated and solitary man, ‘TS’, trained at {schools} in {subjects} who enjoyed {books/authors}, {movies}, …, struggled with {moral/scientific questions}, has just lost his mother ‘suddenly’ to cancer after about a 15-year battle with the disease. During this time, certain aspects of his relationship to his parents and friends had changed but he hadn’t fully processed them. Present three works TS wrote and sent to ‘his X’, an important relationship from his past, to represent his grieving process. The works are in the style of a lost ‘child’ looking for solace, a scientist trying to analyze the unexplainable, and a friend that has contained (perhaps without processing) the events and returned to an individualistic communication style shared by TS and X. Bonus points for sharing the kind of message X might send to TS to help the transition back to normality.”

Now the prompting needs some work, but maybe there are points when people identify a reference I must know because of a particular sentence or word I use a certain way. Maybe the darker parts aren’t original to me, just subconsciously plagiarized and even that would be interesting as my brain is an aggregator far more than a creator but people ascribe me a huge level of intelligence because I sound like I know what a thousand people think. However it went, I did get checked into a hospital that January over Mystery Hunt weekend as I needed to be sleeping, had not brought the proper medication, and also didn’t understand my condition in anything like the ways I think I do now. There’s a lot more to it than this letter exchange, but so much of my last seven years has been reengaging with the emotions of these three letters and the good and bad they reveal about me. My own struggles and successes have advanced a far bit past this most important event in my life in my last 30s, but there is no doubt this is the most important writing for someone studying my life to consider as I still do.

None of you are probably studying Thomas Snyder in that way, so you should probably not read this deeply sad and possibly profound missive. You could start with tmsnyder FAQ or really just go solve some sudoku. But I need these words to be public and I didn’t start this series without knowing today might be an important conclusion to my oversharing.

The last two “shares” in this series, including today’s, are deeply personal in different ways. And while I didn’t know that I’d get comfortable enough to share all of these, surprisingly it was the “easy” tmsnyder FAQ yesterday that was the most emotional of these pieces for me to revisit this year while preparing for release. This possibly shows how much I miss feeling closer to a real mission in science and working with a team of really great people. Most of the time these days, even when doing my best work, I am incredibly lonely and also feel like I need to tiptoe on eggshells because everyone (ME INCLUDED!) is worried I don’t know how to control my health, watching every sign and signal of my life with a pain and fear I don’t recognize from my loved ones. Even in this corner of puzzles, I didn’t find much of the comfort or joy over Christmas when playfully releasing some sudoku in the world, proving my own test that I may need to be an anonymous designer again if I spend time in puzzles.

But I won’t be an anonymous human being, and will be deliberate in sharing thoughts, writings, and updates at another site to those mature enough to find it and contribute to a dialogue. That site will include some “artifacts” of my life that might be up for revisiting that year, or on permanent exhibition, including all the writings from Ready Layer One and others I’ve shared.

Today I want to share my mask. It was made while in residential care following a third hospitalization (and the second involuntary) in August 2023, and the last time I was not well controlled by medication, therapy, and lifestyle practices depending on how you view this series. The recovery from this episode, still ongoing, was much harder than any of the others, due to the mess of thoughts that came up during it, my lack of confidence in myself following it, large medical bills, legal troubles, and friendships I am scared to even “ping” because of some of the things that might have happened during it. When I had a choice to spend a crazy amount of dollars to go into residential care for a month to start to come to some acceptance with being bipolar, I took it. And acceptance is not just that I am bipolar and have creative bursts and high energy moments, but that it has real real danger with it and however smart someone thinks I am there is no way I can “outthink” my mania or hope to care for this by myself. I need to stay connected and open with doctors, therapists, and loved ones or I cannot be my best self and stay my best self.

Alongside a lot of work during residential care, there was a larger project to make your mask. The prompt was to make a picture of how the world sees you (the outside of the mask), while also capturing how you see yourself (the inside of the mask). My outward look is usually a “mirror” — I try to reflect your thoughts or feelings so except for obvious things I can’t hide like my love of science, puzzles, and games, you don’t get much outwardly most of the time. Even the inside of my mask has a twisted side which is how I think you think I see you. Maybe I am mostly an enigma. Inside my mask on my open side you can see in the emotional mix LOVE is strong but also SAD and LONELY. Around the rim of the mask I wrote an A-Z set of descriptors for me, in the style of some memorable writings from my past and often a changing inventory of adjectives and passions. To help those who want to actually know what those are without working through the video too much:

Amazing, Biotech leader, Compassionate, Diligent, Empathetic, Funny, Grandmaster, Helpful, Integrity, Joyful, Kind, Loving, Marathon runner, No nonsense, Ozymandius-like Observation, Problem solver, Questioning, Radiohead, Sudoku, Team builder, Uncon/venti/onal (written unconventionally), Van Gogh, Worrier, Xoogler, “Yes and,” and Zero to infinity.

The description above scratches the surface of the mask’s meaning, in the same way it scratches the surface of me at this moment in my life. But I am open to anyone who wants to see more.

Video of the artwork

I have a lot more therapy art, but nothing else that I am sharing this year or that is more directly “me”. I look at this many nights on my bed stand to understand which of the alphabet of problems and possibilities is the one for today.