Puzzling

Sir, Your articles purporting to suggest that the world’s most difficult word puzzle had been solved (Dec 1 and 3) were replete with errors. A ten-square should consist of ten ten-letter words, one per row, so that column one reads the same as column two, and so on: however, the effort you published had only seven genuine ten-letter words as the other three were mixtures of four, five and six-letter words. You reported that one of the other rows was rejected by two top experts, Ross Eckler and Jeff Grant: both they and I actually reject three rows.

Moreover, you quote them as believing that the puzzle, the Holy Grail of logology, is waiting to be solved. Again, this is untrue: we all believe that this most difficult problem was solved by me — I have produced over 2,000 such squares -— and that the best today is my “Descendant” square. Indeed, I have solved the much harder eleven-square (albeit in a multilingual version) and many other large word-square challenges: that makes me the foremost practitioner in this field. Apart from stealing my credit for this discovery, you owe Dr Eckler and Mr Grant an apology.