PDF

or solve online (using our beta test of Penpa-Edit tools)

Theme: Frame

Author/Opus: This is the 559th puzzle from Thomas Snyder, aka Dr. Sudoku.

Rules: Fill each cell with an X or O so that (A) no vertical or horizontal group of three adjacent cells contains the same symbol in all cells (i.e., no XXX or OOO) and (B) each row and column contains an equal number of each symbol. Cells separated by an equals sign (=) must contain the same symbol. Cells separated by a cross (×) must contain different symbols.

Solution: PDF and selected animation.

Note: Follow this link for other Number Placement puzzles.

Note 2: Comments on the blog are great! For a more interactive discussion, please also consider using our The Thirteen Days of Tango Discussion post on the GMPuzzles Discord.

Today marks the start of the MIT Mystery Hunt, an event I haven’t played in for five years but that I helped run last year since my team won in 2023. That January 2023, after six months at a job that was not going to work out and where other societal changes had me very hypomanic again, I escaped to Pasadena, California to gather thoughts and maybe play remotely. While walking the streets late at night, sensing the homeless problem and my own poor mental health, I wondered again about a particular set of messages I wrote to my ex-girlfriend in the days, week, and month after my mother’s death from cancer.

Considering my life like a Mystery Hunt puzzle, I wondered if James Joyce the fifteenth and ChatGPT21 came together to try to answer this prompt: “A complicated and solitary man, ‘TS’, trained at {schools} in {subjects} who enjoyed {books/authors}, {movies}, …, struggled with {moral/scientific questions}, has just lost his mother ‘suddenly’ to cancer after about a 15-year battle with the disease. During this time, certain aspects of his relationship to his parents and friends had changed but he hadn’t fully processed them. Present three works TS wrote and sent to ‘his X’, an important relationship from his past, to represent his grieving process. The works are in the style of a lost ‘child’ looking for solace, a scientist trying to analyze the unexplainable, and a friend that has contained (perhaps without processing) the events and returned to an individualistic communication style shared by TS and X. Bonus points for sharing the kind of message X might send to TS to help the transition back to normality.”

Now the prompting needs some work, but maybe there are points when people identify a reference I must know because of a particular sentence or word I use a certain way. Maybe the darker parts aren’t original to me, just subconsciously plagiarized and even that would be interesting as my brain is an aggregator far more than a creator but people ascribe me a huge level of intelligence because I sound like I know what a thousand people think. However it went, I did get checked into a hospital that January over Mystery Hunt weekend as I needed to be sleeping, had not brought the proper medication, and also didn’t understand my condition in anything like the ways I think I do now. There’s a lot more to it than this letter exchange, but so much of my last seven years has been reengaging with the emotions of these three letters and the good and bad they reveal about me. My own struggles and successes have advanced a far bit past this most important event in my life in my last 30s, but there is no doubt this is the most important writing for someone studying my life to consider as I still do.

None of you are probably studying Thomas Snyder in that way, so you should probably not read this deeply sad and possibly profound missive. You could start with tmsnyder FAQ or really just go solve some sudoku. But I need these words to be public and I didn’t start this series without knowing today might be an important conclusion to my oversharing.

The last two “shares” in this series, including today’s, are deeply personal in different ways. And while I didn’t know that I’d get comfortable enough to share all of these, surprisingly it was the “easy” tmsnyder FAQ yesterday that was the most emotional of these pieces for me to revisit this year while preparing for release. This possibly shows how much I miss feeling closer to a real mission in science and working with a team of really great people. Most of the time these days, even when doing my best work, I am incredibly lonely and also feel like I need to tiptoe on eggshells because everyone (ME INCLUDED!) is worried I don’t know how to control my health, watching every sign and signal of my life with a pain and fear I don’t recognize from my loved ones. Even in this corner of puzzles, I didn’t find much of the comfort or joy over Christmas when playfully releasing some sudoku in the world, proving my own test that I may need to be an anonymous designer again if I spend time in puzzles.

But I won’t be an anonymous human being, and will be deliberate in sharing thoughts, writings, and updates at another site to those mature enough to find it and contribute to a dialogue. That site will include some “artifacts” of my life that might be up for revisiting that year, or on permanent exhibition, including all the writings from Ready Layer One and others I’ve shared.

Today I want to share my mask. It was made while in residential care following a third hospitalization (and the second involuntary) in August 2023, and the last time I was not well controlled by medication, therapy, and lifestyle practices depending on how you view this series. The recovery from this episode, still ongoing, was much harder than any of the others, due to the mess of thoughts that came up during it, my lack of confidence in myself following it, large medical bills, legal troubles, and friendships I am scared to even “ping” because of some of the things that might have happened during it. When I had a choice to spend a crazy amount of dollars to go into residential care for a month to start to come to some acceptance with being bipolar, I took it. And acceptance is not just that I am bipolar and have creative bursts and high energy moments, but that it has real real danger with it and however smart someone thinks I am there is no way I can “outthink” my mania or hope to care for this by myself. I need to stay connected and open with doctors, therapists, and loved ones or I cannot be my best self and stay my best self.

Alongside a lot of work during residential care, there was a larger project to make your mask. The prompt was to make a picture of how the world sees you (the outside of the mask), while also capturing how you see yourself (the inside of the mask). My outward look is usually a “mirror” — I try to reflect your thoughts or feelings so except for obvious things I can’t hide like my love of science, puzzles, and games, you don’t get much outwardly most of the time. Even the inside of my mask has a twisted side which is how I think you think I see you. Maybe I am mostly an enigma. Inside my mask on my open side you can see in the emotional mix LOVE is strong but also SAD and LONELY. Around the rim of the mask I wrote an A-Z set of descriptors for me, in the style of some memorable writings from my past and often a changing inventory of adjectives and passions. To help those who want to actually know what those are without working through the video too much:

Amazing, Biotech leader, Compassionate, Diligent, Empathetic, Funny, Grandmaster, Helpful, Integrity, Joyful, Kind, Loving, Marathon runner, No nonsense, Ozymandius-like Observation, Problem solver, Questioning, Radiohead, Sudoku, Team builder, Uncon/venti/onal (written unconventionally), Van Gogh, Worrier, Xoogler, “Yes and,” and Zero to infinity.

The description above scratches the surface of the mask’s meaning, in the same way it scratches the surface of me at this moment in my life. But I am open to anyone who wants to see more.

Video of the artwork

I have a lot more therapy art, but nothing else that I am sharing this year or that is more directly “me”. I look at this many nights on my bed stand to understand which of the alphabet of problems and possibilities is the one for today.

PDF

or solve online (using our beta test of Penpa-Edit tools)

Theme: Wedges

Author/Opus: This is the 558th puzzle from Thomas Snyder, aka Dr. Sudoku.

Rules: Fill each cell with an X or O so that (A) no vertical or horizontal group of three adjacent cells contains the same symbol in all cells (i.e., no XXX or OOO) and (B) each row and column contains an equal number of each symbol. Cells separated by an equals sign (=) must contain the same symbol. Cells separated by a cross (×) must contain different symbols.

Solution: PDF and selected animation.

Note: Follow this link for other Number Placement puzzles.

Note 2: Comments on the blog are great! For a more interactive discussion, please also consider using our The Thirteen Days of Tango Discussion post on the GMPuzzles Discord.

I wanted* to share some more foundational documents, that are not at all for solving my puzzles but are about understanding me as a person as I turned/turn/will turn 45. This is “tmsnyder FAQ“, a document I wrote for the most incredible team of computational biologists and software engineers (and other collaborating team members) to know better how to interact with me. Within its structure are certain lessons like all of our superpowers and also our main weaknesses (and vice versa). Please read and comment if you are interested in knowing me better. My former team members still ask to see this every once in awhile so figured the world should have it.

—

*in the world of Ready Layer One, the leading player mars, either an AI, a team of testsolvers I pay to be ahead of everyone else, or who knows since there aren’t a flock of players building out the mythology so we don’t need an IOI, has traded in some of their earned items for extra info on harder content than anyone else has seen. Other foundational documents are expected to be released as they have actually traded everything in their search for the second door, having found the second keyword last night in the form of a time-traveling fox. So the leaderboard has some big changes coming soon, if it even exists.

Since there is no puzzle here for most solvers, I’ll share the easter egg directly of a photo from when I was 37 and our Parkinson’s team got to meet a special funder of neurodegenerative research (cropped from a larger group photo).

PDF

or solve online (using our beta test of Penpa-Edit tools)

Theme: Surrounded

Author/Opus: This is the 557th puzzle from Thomas Snyder, aka Dr. Sudoku.

Rules: Fill each cell with an X or O so that (A) no vertical or horizontal group of three adjacent cells contains the same symbol in all cells (i.e., no XXX or OOO) and (B) each row and column contains an equal number of each symbol. Cells separated by an equals sign (=) must contain the same symbol. Cells separated by a cross (×) must contain different symbols.

Solution: PDF and selected animation.

Note: Follow this link for other Number Placement puzzles.

Note 2: Comments on the blog are great! For a more interactive discussion, please also consider using our The Thirteen Days of Tango Discussion post on the GMPuzzles Discord.

PDF

or solve online (using our beta test of Penpa-Edit tools)

Theme: Sunshine

Author/Opus: This is the 556th puzzle from Thomas Snyder, aka Dr. Sudoku.

Rules: Fill each cell with an X or O so that (A) no vertical or horizontal group of three adjacent cells contains the same symbol in all cells (i.e., no XXX or OOO) and (B) each row and column contains an equal number of each symbol. Cells separated by an equals sign (=) must contain the same symbol. Cells separated by a cross (×) must contain different symbols.

Solution: PDF and selected animation.

Note: Follow this link for other Number Placement puzzles.

Note 2: Comments on the blog are great! For a more interactive discussion, please also consider using our The Thirteen Days of Tango Discussion post on the GMPuzzles Discord.

PDF

or solve online (using our beta test of Penpa-Edit tools)

Theme: Backslashes

Author/Opus: This is the 555th puzzle from Thomas Snyder, aka Dr. Sudoku.

Rules: Fill each cell with an X or O so that (A) no vertical or horizontal group of three adjacent cells contains the same symbol in all cells (i.e., no XXX or OOO) and (B) each row and column contains an equal number of each symbol. Cells separated by an equals sign (=) must contain the same symbol. Cells separated by a cross (×) must contain different symbols.

Solution: PDF and selected animation.

Note: Follow this link for other Number Placement puzzles.

Note 2: Comments on the blog are great! For a more interactive discussion, please also consider using our The Thirteen Days of Tango Discussion post on the GMPuzzles Discord.

More as an artist’s note or Easter Egg, since it is unclear what if anything actually went in row 4, column 4 of the Ready Layer One piece, I’m sharing today two zoom ins that are somewhat possible from the high-res form but greatly clarified here. The first is the 4 question mark view showing something in the middle, and finally full detail of that middle cell of the bigger grid in row 4, column 4. I still sometimes think of R4,C4 as being the empty cell, or having infinite empty cells, or being full.

To those “layers” still “laying” their minds to Ready Layer One and the Twelve Days of Sudoku series, thanks for playing and stay in touch. We’d like to at least know how your experience went before we transition away from the first season on January 19.