Thomas Snyder (born c. 1980) [1] is an American puzzle creator and world-champion sudoku and logic puzzle solver. He is the first person to win both the World Sudoku Championship (3 times) and the World Puzzle Championship. Snyder writes a puzzle blog as Dr. Sudoku. [2]
Thomas Snyder grew up in the suburbs of Buffalo, New York. [3] He attended Amherst Central High School before getting chemistry degrees from the California Institute of Technology and Harvard University [3] and doing post-doctoral work at Stanford University's bioengineering department. [1]
Thomas Snyder has contributed puzzles to various puzzle-related publications including GAMES Magazine and Wired. He has also written puzzles for events including the World Sudoku Championship, U.S. Puzzle Championship, the MIT Mystery Hunt, Gen Con, and the Microsoft Puzzle Picnic. [4]
In early 2012, Snyder founded his publishing company Grandmaster Puzzles. On April 9, 2012, he began selling his first title from the newly formed company, The Art of Sudoku. On December 31, 2012, Snyder began the newest version of his puzzle blog The Art of Puzzles coinciding with the relaunch of his Grandmaster Puzzles web site. [5]
Snyder holds several puzzle-solving titles as well, with his 2006 U.S. Puzzle Championship win being the earliest. Snyder has represented the United States ten times at the World Puzzle Championship, including six times when the US won the team competition (2006-8, 2010–11, 2013). He was the top individual at the 27th World Puzzle Championship held in Prague in November 2018. [6]
Christopher Hikaru Nakamura is an American chess grandmaster, streamer, YouTuber, five-time U.S. Chess Champion, and the reigning World Fischer Random Chess Champion. A chess prodigy, he earned his grandmaster title at the age of 15, the youngest American at the time to do so. With a peak rating of 2816, Nakamura is the tenth-highest-rated player in history.
William Roland Hartston is an English journalist who wrote the Beachcomber column in the Daily Express. He is also a chess player who played competitively from 1962 to 1987 and earned a highest Elo rating of 2485. He was awarded the title International Master in 1972, but is now best known as a chess author and presenter of the game on television.
Sudoku is a logic-based, combinatorial number-placement puzzle. In classic Sudoku, the objective is to fill a 9 × 9 grid with digits so that each column, each row, and each of the nine 3 × 3 subgrids that compose the grid contains all of the digits from 1 to 9. The puzzle setter provides a partially completed grid, which for a well-posed puzzle has a single solution.
The World Puzzle Championship is an annual international puzzle competition run by the World Puzzle Federation. All the puzzles in the competition are pure-logic problems based on simple principles, designed to be playable regardless of language or culture.
Ray Robson is an American chess player. He was awarded the title of Grandmaster by FIDE in 2010. Robson fulfilled the requirements for the title in 2009 at the age of 14 years, 11 months and 16 days, making him the youngest ever United States Grandmaster at the time.
Maki Kaji was a Japanese businessman who was the president of Nikoli, a puzzle manufacturer. He is widely known as "the father of Sudoku" for his role in popularizing the number game.
A combination puzzle, also known as a sequential move puzzle, is a puzzle which consists of a set of pieces which can be manipulated into different combinations by a group of operations. Many such puzzles are mechanical puzzles of polyhedral shape, consisting of multiple layers of pieces along each axis which can rotate independently of each other. Collectively known as twisty puzzles, the archetype of this kind of puzzle is the Rubik's Cube. Each rotating side is usually marked with different colours, intended to be scrambled, then solved by a sequence of moves that sort the facets by colour. Generally, combination puzzles also include mathematically defined examples that have not been, or are impossible to, physically construct.
Daniel Naroditsky often referred to as Danya, is an American chess grandmaster, author, and commentator.
The World Sudoku Championship (WSC) is an annual international puzzle competition organised by a national member of the World Puzzle Federation. The first event was held in Lucca, Italy, in 2006. National teams are determined by local affiliates of the World Puzzle Federation. The competition typically consists of 100 or more puzzles solved by all competitors over multiple timed rounds, including classic sudoku, variations and other puzzle types, normally followed by a playoff for the top qualifiers to determine a champion. Examples of rounds include the Relay round, where an answer from one puzzle contributes digits to the start of the next sudoku, and the "World Record" round, in which solvers competed to set a Guinness World Record for fastest sudoku solution.
Robert Lee Hess is an American chess player who received the FIDE title of Grandmaster (GM) in 2009. In May 2012, his FIDE rating was 2635, fifth in the United States. Hess is a commentator for Chess.com, covering events such as the World Chess Championship and Candidates Tournament. He also streams chess content on his Twitch channel GMHess, which has 73,000+ followers.
Kayden William Troff is an American chess grandmaster. He was World U14 Chess Champion in 2012.
The Philadelphia Inquirer Sudoku National Championship, hosted by puzzle master Will Shortz, was an annual sudoku competition run by The Philadelphia Inquirer and held at the Pennsylvania Convention Center in 2007–2009.
Susan Polgar is a Hungarian-American chess grandmaster. Polgár was Women's World Chess Champion from 1996 to 1999. On FIDE's Elo rating system list of July 1984, at the age of 15, she became the top-ranked female chess player in the world. In 1991, she became the third woman to be awarded the title of Grandmaster by FIDE. She won eleven medals at the Women's Chess Olympiad.
Google Goggles was an image recognition mobile app developed by Google. It was used for searches based on pictures taken by handheld devices. For example, taking a picture of a famous landmark searches for information about it, or taking a picture of a product's barcode would search for information on the product.
Nazí Paikidze, sometimes also referred to as Nazí Paikidze-Barnes, is a Russian-born Georgian–American chess player. She holds the titles of International Master (IM) and Woman Grandmaster (WGM), which FIDE awarded her in 2012 and 2010 respectively. Paikidze was twice world girls' champion and four-time European girls' champion in her age category, and is a twice U.S. women's champion.
Rohan Rao, who goes by the name vopani, is an Indian sudoku and puzzle solver, widely considered as the best sudoku solver of India. He is the reigning Indian Sudoku Champion and Times of India Sudoku Champion. Rao has won 18 national championships, an all-time record, and has been one of the best Indians at the World Sudoku Championship (WSC), World Puzzle Championship (WPC) and Asian Sudoku Championship (ASC). He won the Indian Sudoku Championship nine times, in 2010, 2011, 2012, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021 the Indian Puzzle Championship five times, in 2010, 2011, 2012, 2015, 2017, and the Times National Sudoku Championship four times, in 2012, 2015, 2016, 2019.
The Indian Sudoku Championship is an annual national contest held in India to crown the Indian Sudoku Champion and to select the national team for the Asian Sudoku Championship and World Sudoku Championship. It usually consists of multiple rounds of solving various classic sudoku and its variants, and the scores of players are aggregated for the final rankings. It is conducted by Logic Masters India, which is the Indian affiliate of the World Puzzle Federation.
Rishi Puri is a distinguished Indian sudoku solver, renowned for his achievements as a two-time Indian National Sudoku Champion. He is recognized as one of the top three sudoku solvers from India, alongside Rohan Rao and Prasanna Seshadri, excelling in both national and World Sudoku Championships. Rishi clinched the Indian Sudoku Championship titles in 2014 and 2015, and the Times Sudoku Championship in 2013.
Mackenzie "Mac" Molner is an American chess grandmaster and chess instructor. Chess coach Michael Khodarkovsky helped Molner develop his competitive chess play. Molner won the Denker Tournament of High School Champions as a sophomore in 2004. He completed his final grandmaster norm in 2013, tying for first in the U.S. Open Chess Championship, held near Madison, Wisconsin that year.
Cracking the Cryptic (CTC) is a YouTube channel dedicated to paper-and-pencil puzzles: primarily sudoku, but also cryptic crosswords and other types of number-placement, pencil, and word puzzles. They occasionally stream puzzle games on YouTube.