You may remember Tyler Hinman '02, who became the youngest ever winner of the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament in 2005. Not only did he win it again this year, but he has also featured in the movie, WORDPLAY, selected for the Sundance Festival.
Director Patrick Creadon, an avid crossword puzzler himself, wanted to make a movie about the world-famous New York Times puzzle and its addicts. He filmed Tyler at home, at school, and at the tournament.
We caught up with Tyler to find out more.
I'd known Will Shortz (New York Times editor), Merl Reagle and my fellow solvers well before the film, so it was just a matter of us congregating in Utah, as opposed to the tournament in Connecticut. I never got to meet any of the celebrities in the film.
Doing Q&As with an audience that had just seen me on the big screen was really bizarre at first. Doing press at Sundance was great and truly unique.
It was a Friday afternoon tutorial. Ms. Tingley, in addition to being my Ancient and Medieval World History teacher, was also the supervisor for this period.
She always had a large backlog of unsolved New York Times puzzles from the International Herald Tribune. Immensely bored, I asked her if I could try one. Friday is not the day to start out on the Times puzzle as it is very hard. So I was pretty bad at it.
I began cutting the puzzle out of my family's International Herald Tribune every day. I succeeded on Monday and was overjoyed before Ms. Tingley informed me of the Times' difficulty curve, which places the easiest puzzles on Mondays . . . I finally had a successful solo effort on Friday about a year after I started solving.
I like both crosswords and language-neural math/logic puzzles, of which Sudoku is one example in an incredible ocean of variety. I think I like the concrete nature of these puzzles. You are given information (grids, clues, numbers, arrows, what you have to do), and a goal you must achieve. there is only on way to reach that goal, and anything else will contradict your given information. When a puzzle is completed, you are sure of it. You have brought order and definition to a series of unknowns.
My puzzlemaking has fallen off of late; I've been solving a lot more. I like to construct when my muse comes, and she has been absent for a while. Plus I have a gigantic backlog of puzzle books and magazines in which I have to start putting some dents.
As for the bond trading, I was on course to be a computer programmer. One of the associate producers on WORDPLAY runs a bond trading group in Chicago. In the film he saw in me the qualities needed to be a good bond trader: good with math and computers, competitive to the point of psychosis, etc., and he offered me a job. I decided it was a really exciting opportunity, and I'd be a fool not to take advantage of it. So here I am.
I'm hoping to make it onto the US team, drawn from the top four in the Google US Puzzle Championship, which competes in the World Puzzle Championship every fall. I have finished in the top ten of the US competition a couple of times, and last year was on the unofficial B-team for the 2005 competition in Eger, Hungary.
As for my career, I'm looking forward to getting down and dirty in the bond trading, and hopefully carving out a comfortable living from it, although the path will not be easy. I'm still settling into my new life in Chicago. I think I'm going to like it here, and I'm excited.
I look back on my TASIS England life with great fondness, particularly senior year, when I became a boarding student after my family moved back stateside. I had plenty of fun in college and I am very optimistic about this next phase of my life, but that year has a special place in my soul, because it was so unique. I hope the current members of the TASIS England community immerse themselves in it and get as much out of it as I did.
Written by Liz Carr
This article first appeared in the TASIS England Today magazine, Fall 2006 issue.