We know very little about the demographics of those of you who do the Guardian
crosswords, beyond that you seem to be pretty much 50:50 male and female and that your ages are spread pretty evenly from, say, 25 upwards. I meet from time to time one or two punters who regularly do the Cryptic puzzles and am by now more or less inured to their barbed comments. But, as I think I have written before, the only Quick solver who I see regularly is a stepson, a Brighton and Hove primary school teacher, who is so pleased when he manages to complete a Quick successfully that he tears out the page and dances round the room, wearing it and singing.
So it was a delight to get an email from Jessica Spake, an astronomer at Warwick University, passing on the following information. Every weekday at lunch time a group of about 10 astronomers at Warwick print out and try to solve the Quick crossword together. If they manage to complete it without Googling (or otherwise cheating), they put it up, using Blu-Tack, on a 'Victory Wall' in their office.
In the photograph Jessica sent last month as evidence, there were 31 trophy Quicks displayed on the wall, next to a dramatic image of NGC 3603 (for non-astronomers, New General Catalogue of Nebulae and Clusters of Stars). No 3603 is an open cluster of stars in the Carina spiral arm of the Milky Way, about 20,000 light years away from the solar system, and was first observed by Sir John Herschel, the German-born British mathematician and polymath, on a visit in 1834 to Cape Town to study the sky of the southern hemisphere.
The Warwick group consists of around 10 PhD students and researchers, ranging in age from 22 to 30 years old, with one older outlier of about 45. Two professors also occasionally pop in to help.
As to the data, Jessica did not say over what period the 31 hit results were accumulated and the images are too small for me to be able to read the puzzle serial numbers. However, she volunteered the information that, when the group first started, a puzzle took them most of their lunch break, but now, with practice they have got their best time down to seven minutes. That kind of timing puts them in the same league as those who claim to have done the Quick online by 00:05 and then comment under the grid (the puzzle having gone up, on a good day, at midnight but, in practice, often several minutes later) that they found that day's puzzle a bit harder than usual!
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A final related fact about astronomers: the professional crossword world is deeply in debt to one Antony Lewis, who invented and runs Crossword Compiler, which is by far the best crossword software package on the market. His day job is as a cosmologist, formerly at Cambridge, Toronto and Harvard, but now at Sussex University.
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I apologise for not being able to give you the final number of those who sent in entries for the last month's Genius (No 139 set by Brummie) but I still do not have access to the 'temporary' file to which your entries are going. However, congratulations to the January winner, Jane Gore of St Felix de Villadeix in France.
Some of you also noticed that there was an error with the originally published grid for the February Genius (No 140 set by Paul), which was not corrected until Wednesday 4 February. Entries made on basis of the original grid may, therefore, be difficult to check. So those who sent in entries before noon on Wednesday 4 February are invited to submit second entries. Everything submitted after noon that day on the basis of the correct grid will be OK.
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