Crossword puzzles often employ wordplay to challenge solvers. Standard approaches such as approximating, locally linearizing and iterative solvers all apply. We help our students to develop as thinkers, problem solvers, and explorers. Newton's second law gives equations of motion which can be solved via standard ODE solvers. An alternative approach uses constraint solvers and idealized contacts. Unfortunately, semidefinite programming solvers have a high computational cost. GAMS allows the users to implement a sort of hybrid algorithm combining different solvers. Commercial simplex solvers are based on the revised simplex algorithm. A few crosswords have achieved recognition beyond the community of crossword solvers. Eikonal solvers on triangulated manifolds are. This algorithm is efficient and still forms the basis of most complete SAT solvers. Current approaches use unit propagation and CSP solvers. The reduction immediately enables the use of highly optimized SVM solvers for Elastic Net problems. It does not specify the direction of optimization which is handled differently by solvers. With parallel portfolios, multiple different SAT solvers run concurrently.