I knew there was a World Scrabble Championship, but not a World Puzzle Championship. TIME magazine recently wrote about the 21st WPC (here is the URL http://wscwpc2012.org) .. the latest one was held October of last year in Croatia. (The East Europeans like their puzzles, but the American team did very well, with Thomas Snyder and Palmer Mebane placing second and third after the winner Ulrich Voigt, a German). The instructions for the puzzles are very simple .. but the method to the madness needed to solve them, another matter. One cannot solve the puzzles by brute force, since humans are not computers (and the puzzle solvers have none at hand). So they have to come up with the heuristics – the process or method – out to solve the problem.
