Wei-Hwa Huang (born August 4, 1975 in Eugene, Oregon) [1] is an American puzzler, member of the US Team for the World Puzzle Championship, [2] and game designer. [3]
Huang was a member of the United States International Math Olympiad team in 1992 and 1993, where he was awarded a Silver Medal both years. He was a Putnam Fellow in 1993. [4] Huang has won the annual World Puzzle Championship on four occasions: 1995 and 1997–1999. [5] [6] He also won the 2008 Sudoku National Championship. [7] With team Left Out, he won the 2019 MIT Mystery Hunt. [8]
With Tom Lehmann, Huang designed the board game Roll for the Galaxy released in 2014 by Rio Grande Games. Roll for the Galaxy is a dice-based adaption of the award-winning card game Race for the Galaxy with deck-building mechanics. Huang and Lehmann also designed Roll for the Galaxy: Ambition, an expansion released in 2015. Roll for the Galaxy was nominated for three Golden Geek Awards and an International Gamers Award. [9]
Huang graduated from Montgomery Blair High School [10] and the California Institute of Technology [11] and was an employee at Google until July 2008. [12] One of his most famous projects was the Da Vinci Code Quest on Google, which was a set of 24 puzzles launched on April 17, 2006, in cooperation with Columbia Pictures. [13]
Huang submitted a crossword puzzle to The New York Times newspaper which was published on Tuesday, September 10, 2002. [14] In 2012, Huang co-authored a book with Will Shortz, the editor of The New York Times crossword puzzle. [15]
Huang is an investor and co-producer of the Broadway musical The Lightning Thief. [16]
A puzzle is a game, problem, or toy that tests a person's ingenuity or knowledge. In a puzzle, the solver is expected to put pieces together in a logical way, in order to find the solution of the puzzle. There are different genres of puzzles, such as crossword puzzles, word-search puzzles, number puzzles, relational puzzles, and logic puzzles. The academic study of puzzles is called enigmatology.
William F. Shortz is an American puzzle creator and editor who is the crossword editor for The New York Times. He graduated from Indiana University with a degree in the invented field of enigmatology. After starting his career at Penny Press and Games magazine, he was hired by The New York Times in 1993. Shortz's American Crossword Puzzle Tournament is the country's oldest and largest crossword tournament.
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.
The American Crossword Puzzle Tournament (ACPT) is a crossword-solving tournament held annually in February, March, or April. Founded in 1978 by Will Shortz, who still directs the tournament, it is the oldest and largest crossword tournament held in the United States; the 2023 event set an attendance record with more than 750 competitors.
Wordplay is a 2006 documentary film directed by Patrick Creadon. It features Will Shortz, the editor of the New York Times crossword puzzle, crossword constructor Merl Reagle, and many other noted crossword solvers and constructors. The second half of the movie is set at the 2005 American Crossword Puzzle Tournament (ACPT), where the top solvers compete for a prize of $4000. Wordplay was the best reviewed documentary film of 2006, according to Rotten Tomatoes.
The New York Times crossword is a daily American-style crossword puzzle published in The New York Times, syndicated to more than 300 other newspapers and journals, and released online on the newspaper's website and mobile apps as part of The New York Times Games.
Howard Garns was an American architect who gained fame only after his death as the creator of Number Place, the number puzzle that became a worldwide phenomenon under the name Sudoku.
Merl Harry Reagle was an American crossword constructor. For 30 years, he constructed a puzzle every Sunday for the San Francisco Chronicle, which he syndicated to more than 50 Sunday newspapers, including the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Seattle Times, The Plain Dealer, the Hartford Courant, the New York Observer, and the Arizona Daily Star. Reagle also produced crossword puzzles for AARP: The Magazine and the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament.
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.
"Homer and Lisa Exchange Cross Words" is the sixth episode of the twentieth season of the American animated television series The Simpsons. It originally aired on the Fox network in the United States on November 16, 2008. In the episode, Lisa discovers that she has a talent for solving crossword puzzles, and she enters a crossword tournament. Lisa's feelings are hurt when she discovers that Homer bet against her in the championship match.
Race for the Galaxy (RftG), or simply Race, is a card game designed by Thomas Lehmann. It was released in 2007 by Rio Grande Games. Its theme is to build galactic civilizations via game cards that represent worlds or technical and social developments. It accommodates two to four players by default although expansions allow for up to six players, as well as solo play. The game uses iconography in place of language in some places, with complex powers also having a text description. While appreciated by experienced players for being concise, some new players find the icons difficult to learn and to decipher.
Parnell Hall was an American mystery writer. His works include the Puzzle Lady and the Stanley Hastings series, as well as the screenplay to the 1984 cult classic C.H.U.D. He collaborated with Manny Nosowsky for crossword puzzles and with Will Shortz for sudoku puzzles incorporated in Puzzle Lady stories.
Helene Hovanec is a former elementary school teacher who has authored 66 puzzle books, 59 of which are for children.
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.
Thomas Snyder 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 and the World Puzzle Championship. Snyder writes a puzzle blog as Dr. Sudoku.
David Steinberg is a crossword constructor and editor. At 14, he became the then second-youngest published constructor in the New York Times, and at 15, the youngest published constructor in the Los Angeles Times and the youngest known crossword editor ever for a major newspaper.
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.
Roll for the Galaxy is a dice game of building space empires for 2 to 5 players. Designed by Wei-Hwa Huang and Tom Lehmann, it was published by Rio Grande Games in 2014. Player dice represent their empire's populace, whom the players use to develop new technologies, settle worlds, and trade. It is a dice version of an older board game Race for the Galaxy.
The New York Times Games is a collection of casual print and online games published by The New York Times, an American newspaper. Originating with the newspaper's crossword puzzle in 1942, NYT Games was officially established on August 21, 2014, with the addition of the Mini Crossword. Most puzzles of The New York Times Games are published and refreshed daily, mirroring The Times' daily newspaper cadence.
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