Guardian Cryptic solvers – this may interest you.
Posted on behalf of Dr Chris Wheadon, Founder & CEO of No More Marking Ltd
I plan to conduct a study analysing the difficulty of the Guardian Cryptic crossword over time. This research will be modeled on the study I co-authored, “Fifty Years of A-level Mathematics” (Jones, I., Wheadon, C., Humphries, S., and Inglis, M.), which was published in BERJ (Volume 42, Issue 4, pp. 543-560) and won the BERJ Editors’ Choice Award in 2017.
The methodology is simple. I have chosen a sample of 5 clues from every puzzle in the book “A Clue to our Lives” and included one puzzle per year from the point where the book concludes to give me a sample spanning 1930 to 2026. I will present judges with a series of pairs of clues along with their solutions and ask them to choose: “The harder clue?”
Ideally I hope to recruit around 50 judges to complete 93 comparisons each. The analysis will reveal any broad trends in difficulty over time.
The study was stimulated by simple curiosity after completing the puzzles from “A Clue to our Lives”, and having been a regular solver since the early 1990s. I don’t have a strong directional hypothesis, but my feeling is that, contrary to our finding on A-level mathematics, the puzzle has not become easier over time!
To take part, solvers simply need to click on this link, which will ask them for an email address before they begin: https://au.