TITLE: Brains, Patterns, and Persistence
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: June 24, 2009 8:13 AM
DESC:
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BODY:
I like to solve the
Celebrity Cipher
in my daily paper. Each puzzle is a mixed alphabet
substitution cipher
on a quote by someone -- a "celebrity", loosely
considered -- followed by the speaker's name,
sometimes prefixed with a title or short description.
Lately I've been challenging myself to solve the
puzzle in my head, without writing any letters down,
even once I'm sure of them. Crazy, I know, but this
makes the easier puzzles more challenging now that I
have gotten pretty good at solving them with pen in
hand.
(Spoiler alert... If you like to do this
puzzle, too, and have not yet solved the June 22
cipher, turn away now. I am about to give the
the answer away!)
Yesterday I was working on a puzzle, and this was
the speaker phrase:
IWHNN TOXFZRXNYHO NXKJHSSA YXOYXEBUHO
I had looked at the quote itself for a couple of
minutes and so was operating on an initial hypothesis
that YWH was the word the. I stared
at the speaker for a while... IWHNN would be
IheNN. Double letters to end the third
word, which is probably the first name. N
could be s, or maybe l.
s... That would be the first letter of
the first name.
And then I saw it, in whole cloth:
Chess grandmaster Savielly Tartakower
Please don't think less of me. I'm not a freak. Really.
How very strange. I have no special mental powers. I
do have some experience solving these puzzles, of course,
but this phrase is unusual both in the prefix phrase and
in the obscurity of the speaker. Yes, I
once played a lot of chess
and did know of
Tartakower,
a French-Polish player of the early 20th century. But
how did I see this answer?
The human brain amazes me almost every day with its
ability to find, recognize, and impose patterns on the
world. Practice and exposure to lots and lots of data
is one of the ways it learns these patterns. That is
part of how I am able to solve these ciphers most days
-- experience makes patterns appear to me, unbidden by
conscious thought. There may be other paths to mastery,
but I know of no other reliable substitute for practice.
What about the rest of the puzzle? From the letter
pairs in the speaker phrase, I was able to reconstruct
the quote itself with little effort:
Victory goes to the player who makes the next-to-last
mistake.
Ah, an old familiar line. If we follow this quote to
its logical conclusion, it offers good advice for much
of life. You never know which mistake will be the
next-to-last, or the last. Keep playing to win. If
you
learn from your mistakes,
you'll start to make fewer, which increases the
probability that your opponent will make the last
mistake of the game.
Even when in non-adversarial situations, or situations
in which there is no obvious single adversary, this is
a good mindset to have. People who
embrace failure
persist. They get better, but perhaps more importantly
they simply survive. You have to be in the game when
your opportunity comes -- or when your opponent makes
the ultimate mistake.
Like so many great lines, Tartakower's is not 100%
accurate in all cases. As an accomplished chessplayer,
he certainly knew that the best players can lose without
ever making an obvious mistake. Some of my favorite
games of all time are analyzed in
My Sixty Memorable Games, by Bobby Fischer himself.
It includes games in which the conquered player never
made the move that lost. Instead, the loser
accreted small disadvantages, or drifted off theme, and
suddenly the position was unfavorable. But looking back,
Fischer could find no obvious improvement. Growing up,
this fascinated me -- the loser had to make a mistake,
right? The winner had make a killer move... Perhaps
not.
Even still, the spirit of Tartakower's advice holds.
Play in this moment. You never know which mistake will
be the next-to-last, or the last. Keep playing.
At this time of year, when I look back over the past
twelve months of performing tasks that do not come
naturally to me, and looking ahead to next year's
vision and duties, this advice gives me comfort.
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