To see a PrismaPixels puzzle in all its glory, see this companion article and solve away.

“PrismaPro,” by J. Hunter Johnson

Wired.com: What are PrismaPixels?
Mosconi: They’re logic picture puzzles sometimes called O’ekaki or Griddlers. I chose PrismaPixels for mine because my puzzles are always full-color. All of the other books out are black-and-white, so our three are still the only books with full-color puzzles.

Wired.com: Do you have to make sure that there’s a unique solution? Is uniqueness a problem that you have to solve?
Mosconi: Yes. Whenever there are multiple solutions, the puzzle itself has not been created correctly. Sometimes part of the picture will trail off into a thin line or something like that and you flip it either way. I always end up tweaking something towards the end when it’s almost solved, adding an extra box here or there.

Wired.com: How do you find those? Do you have mathematical or computer assistance or is this just strictly a brute force approach, you then solve the puzzle and find out if it’s unique or not?
Mosconi: Well, how about if I give you a step-by-step of how I make these puzzles? I start with a picture, say a couple of bottles of wine and a goblet. I’ll find a picture on the Internet that has a design that I like. Then I take my graph paper and sketch it, and then I block it out. Now if you just color in a puzzle, it’s a boring puzzle because – in this row of 25, 22 of them are red. That’s just extremely boring.

Wired.com: You have to have some white; the white really makes the puzzle.
Mosconi: Right, because otherwise you might as well do a counted cross stitch pattern or something. So then I tweak it a little bit. There’s a wonderful program, Griddlers Deluxe, which I purchased from Griddlers.net. I input my puzzle into Griddlers and have it solve it. If it’s able to solve it with only one solution, then I know I’m good. But if it has multiple solutions, that’s where the tweaking comes in. So I use that as my first filter.

Wired.com: So Griddlers is unrelated to you – it’s not your site, somebody else put this together for doing this type of puzzle.
Mosconi: Yeah, if you go to griddlers.net, they have a program for working or solving, but you can also input your own, so I love it.

Wired.com: But you were doing these puzzles even before you got Griddlers Deluxe, and you had to check them by hand or through some other mechanism.
Mosconi: Right.

Wired.com: I saw in the Dayton Daily News that you also have these available through Etsy. I didn’t realize Etsy did books.
Mosconi: They weren’t going to allow me to put the books on there, but they asked for a description of how the puzzle books were made. When I described my step-by-step, how it’s all hand-done from beginning to end except for the printing process, they allowed it as a handmade item.

Wired.com: Why are you doing these puzzles? What happened that put you into this business?
Mosconi: It all started with my dad, who was a math geek for as long as we’ve known him. We grew up doing math puzzles. We did all kinds of games like Dots and Boxes with graph paper or he would draw some multi-sided thing and then we would connect all the points. So we grew up doing puzzles, crossword puzzles, playing games, all that kind of stuff. I was living in Spain when my brother Tony was in college. I used to make mazes on graph paper and send them to him to give him something to do, and he loved it! So then I started expanding and making other kinds of puzzles. My sister’s out in California, and she and I both loved doing O’ekaki puzzles. I thought, “Now why can’t you do those in color?” So I started sending her simple puzzles, and you wouldn’t believe the first ones I sent. They were in an email where I listed row-by-row and column-by-column where I wanted the numbers.

Wired.com: So you were sending these to Chris when email didn’t have graphic attachments or embedded images; this is strictly a text-based description of what the puzzle would look like.
Mosconi: Yes, and I painstakingly colored each number the color I wanted it to be. It was just an insane way to do it, but we were both so addicted to the puzzles.

Wired.com: And then at some point you went from sending them back and forth to “I want to publish a book and make a small fortune out of it”? Or at least some large pocket change?
Mosconi: I probably sent her ten or twelve puzzles, and she had sent them back solved and said, “You know what, we should make a book out of this,” just half joking, and that’s when I started researching.

Wired.com: So you’re doing these through email and the Internet, how does that work? Do you do some of the puzzles and she does some, or do you start the puzzles and she refines them and you refine her refinements?
Mosconi: She much more enjoys solving them. I much more enjoy making them. She has made a few of them in a couple of the books but I’ve made most of them. I get it to where Griddler has a single solution, and then I send it to her. She solves it to make sure, and then she rates them easy, medium, or hard.

Wired.com: How does she come up with that rating? Based on how long it took her?
Mosconi: Yeah, it’s partly on time; she does time herself on it. But if there’s a tricky factor—maybe it’s really hard to get started, or there’s something really tricky at the end—those factor in too.

Wired.com: I was reading that some of the strategies that people might use on the black-and-white ones have to be tweaked to solve the color ones. If you’re trying to do it with just the black-and-white strategies, it can be harder.
Mosconi: Well, there is one specific strategy that works on the black-and-white that does not work on the color one. Let’s say it’s a two-color one, red and blue. A red box can be directly next to a blue box and still be two groups. In a black-and-white, you cannot put a black box next to another without becoming one group.

Wired.com: So, is Chris familiar enough with the range of solution algorithms that she’s not going to say, “This one’s really hard,” because she’s not aware that there’s another tweak?
Mosconi: Right. I would say that she’s an expert, because she solves them much better than I do, and much quicker and much more elegantly. She originally wrote the introductions on how to solve them. She goes about it in some ways that I wouldn’t have thought of. Empty boxes are really crucial to the way she solves, and I’m looking for the biggest number because I want to color in a bunch of boxes. She may be looking for whole areas that don’t have boxes, and fill in a whole bunch of Xes. I don’t even think that way. Yeah, I think she has a wider variety of solving methods.

Wired.com: In the book you have them ordered by size and then by difficulty?
Mosconi: Actually I brought all three of them, so that’s the newest; this is what we would consider our easy one, it’s the pocket edition; and then this was the first one.

Wired.com: I’ll open it up to the table of contents and see what we’ve got. … 2-color, 3-color, so you order them by the number of colors…
Mosconi: And then within each grouping of number of colors, we try to go from easier to harder.

Wired.com: Of course the smallest one is at the beginning there…
Mosconi: Just coincidentally.

Wired.com: I see, of these seven 2-color puzzles, you’ve got the biggest ones in the middle, but the last two are medium-sized. Those are the harder ones because of the amount of blank space?
Mosconi: Right, usually more empty space.

Wired.com: And that way, I guess she’s going to work primarily off that negative space in these first, where you want to color – you want to see the picture.
Mosconi: And I think I’m more typical. I think most people would look at this and say well, where’s a really big number? I want to find a 20 in there so I can color some boxes in!

Wired.com: Just reading the ones on your website, you had a nice smiley face on a 10-width grid. There’s one row that has 10 yellow, so you can slap 10 yellow squares down there.
Mosconi: That’s our sample that we use. And this was her original way, an easy way to solve it. Then she had a second example that was more color-critical. In one spot, the only way you knew what to do next was because no yellow could be there; it had to be green, or something along those lines. She has told me that when she solves, it flows in a wave from left to right, from top to bottom, from corner to corner. I’ve tried doing that and I can’t do it. When I solve these, I’ve always been very methodical. I do row-by-row and then column-by-column. My sister says, “Oh my God, how can you do it that way?” That’s why she’s the solver.

Wired.com: I did also see on your website that you have another puzzle book in the works. It’s not PrismaPixels—it’s going to be a different kind of puzzle.
Mosconi: It is a Sudoku variant that, as far as I know, is not out there yet. It doesn’t exist. I have bought several Sudoku books, including one from a friend of mine out in California who has published Mutant Sudoku, a book with a wide variety of variations. Really fascinating stuff he’s come up with. His name is Wei-Hwa Huang [who coauthored the book with Thomas Snyder]. That book really gets your mind off on tangents. You know, you get used to working Sudoku one way and then you go to another section, and you can’t even think that way. So for ours, my brother Tony came up with the initial puzzle and sent it to me. His method was brute-force solving every single square. Well, that’s just not elegant. I definitely go for elegance in my puzzles, if it’s possible.

Wired.com: And elegance makes it more fun for more people. Brute force methods are possible, and for computer guys like me, we’re used to tasking a computer to it. Brute force works just fine for a computer – they don’t get bored, they don’t get tired, they don’t need breaks.
Mosconi: You probably could make a solver that would work it using the way he originally came up with.

Wired.com: But if you’re going to keep people engaged, they might do one brute force, and then they don’t want to do that any more. It’s not “fun.”
Mosconi: You’re just sitting around doing math, and to me that’s just homework.

Wired.com: So, if you were making your elevator pitch to a Hollywood executive to produce this new puzzle book, it’s what? Sudoku meets what? Is there a way to headline it without giving away the end?
Mosconi: You know how Sudoku is pure logic but many people think there’s math involved? They think, “Oh, I don’t want to do Sudoku because I hate math.”

Wired.com: Right, it has numbers, but they’re just items.
Mosconi: Okay, now this has a really mild element of math, but nothing that anybody couldn’t do – it’s basic. I don’t want to give away too much, but if you think of Sudoku, you really have one way of determining how to fill in a box, and that’s by finding what’s in the row, the column, or the quad. (We call them quads.) We’ve added another level, another method of determining a number. Because you have another way to come up with them, it lets you go back and forth between the two methods to make solving, I think, more interesting. My sister’s not a big fan of Sudoku but she does love solving these.

Wired.com: Do you have a name for your Sudoku variants?
Mosconi: Yes.

Wired.com: In addition to the puzzle books, you are also doing a board game?
Mosconi: Yes. The original intent of this business was to make games. I’ve been designing games for years – even back in college I designed games. I’m talking about taking a piece of cardboard, gluing paper on it, and hand-drawing things. This gets back to Tony. Tony also has designed games over the years. He mostly just calls me up and says, “Hey, I’ve got a new idea for a game,” and then I add it to my list. We have something like 54 right now. Currently in the works we have one that has gone through several layers of inside testing and then one level of outside testing (as in not family, not friends) and still needs some tweaking. That one’s going to be a party game.

Wired.com: Is that the one mentioned on your website?
Mosconi: Yes, that’s that one. And then another one, which also needs more tweaking, is going to be more of a strategy game, and then a third one is just a hilarious family card game. And that’s the one we’re probably going to go with first, because producing a deck of cards is a whole lot cheaper. I’m hoping to have that out before summer next year.

Wired.com: Let’s talk a little about your non-puzzle self. You’re an entrepreneur in other areas as well. What’s your title? What do you tell the IRS that you do? Do you have a day job, as I call it?
Mosconi: This is my main business. I’m a publisher. The other stuff, for example, the knitting and crocheting and spinning, all that I’ve been doing for about 25 years … 29, almost 30 years, wow. I did originally start that as a business, that was when my sister still lived in Ohio.

Wired.com: What’s your art background?
Mosconi: I took four years of art in high school and more art in college. I was going to minor in art until a really misguided guidance counselor told me that I couldn’t. So I switched to an education minor and started taking education classes, and then later found out that I could have.

Wired.com: When you were growing up, what was your plan? People don’t typically say, “You know what? I’m going to publish puzzle books.” That wasn’t your goal coming through it. You said that your father was a mathematician. Was he a professional mathematician?
Mosconi: He was an engineer. Mechanical, I think it was. He worked on ground support equipment for airplanes out at the base.

Wired.com: Where were you headed with your life back before whatever random things brought you to where you are today?
Mosconi: You’re asking me to go back, way back. Probably really young I started out with the typical girly things, a ballerina, at one point I wanted to be a veterinarian. That was back when I was not so much into people, more into animals. I’ve never been real sociable.

Wired.com: So between the math background of your engineer father and the anti-social aspects, then you’re ready to be a geek, aintcha?
Mosconi: Totally. Pre-computers, but I was ready. Anyway, after that, I majored in Spanish because I really have a love for foreign languages, and I thought I was going to be a tour guide. I thought it would be a cool way to travel around to different countries. But you can’t make a living at that, and then life inserted itself, so that didn’t happen. I lived in Spain for a while teaching English, and then when I came back home, my dad had an Apple IIe, and I was fascinated! That was the coolest thing ever. In college in my junior year I took BASIC programming, and that was just in the transition from punch cards to printouts, but pre-monitor. If I had taken programming two years earlier, I think I would have been a programmer, totally. I loved that class. Anyway, so I came back and there was the Apple IIe, and playing all those games, like Sokoban. That’s when I truly became a geek I guess.

Wired.com: What’s your work day like? Do you have a particular routine?
Mosconi: Yes, I have a routine. I have my coffee, catch up on email ([whispers] and Facebook), and make sure I’m all caught up on all that. Then I shift to websites. I check out Amazon sales, how that’s going.

Wired.com: On a daily basis?
Mosconi: Daily! And I have all the Etsy sites, I check those out and see if any sales have been made, and then if so, I need to fulfill them. Then I pull up any puzzles that I’ve been working on, designing, or tweaking, because I have several stages of puzzles that I go through. If I’m working on one of my Sudoku variant puzzles, I actually test them myself before I send them to her, because there is no tester for my kind of puzzles. At the moment, very time-consuming, because it’s all manual. So I probably spend anywhere from one to four hours a day just working on puzzles.

Wired.com: Wow.
Mosconi: And it’s fun job. I’m always trying to go for the elegant-solution puzzle. But sometimes when it gets to the end, you have what I call a wraparound, like there’s a 2 and 5 over here and a 5 and a 2 over here, and the only way to solve that is to add one more clue in, and I’m thinking, “Oh, I had the perfect elegant puzzle until I had to add that one more clue in there!”

Wired.com: Are you also then looking at moving any of the PrismaPixels to some of the electronic platforms?
Mosconi: Tony and I talked about that early on, probably a year and a half, maybe two years ago, and he started designing one, but now, why reinvent the wheel, because Griddlers already exists.

Wired.com: You didn’t have to do anything to make it work for your color puzzles?
Mosconi: Right. Since first starting the business, in February 2008, I’ve designed eight to nine different kinds of picture logic puzzles that do not currently exist. And I’ve been designing puzzles and sending them to Chris for testing, so we have a little stock of these other kinds waiting in the wings for the next book. We were thinking of actually publishing a children’s book, but there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of demand for that, so we’re thinking that after this Sudoku book in the fall, our next book is going to be a PrismaCompendium of all these other kinds of puzzles. Just spring them on the world.

Images courtesy of Ann Mosconi

Authors: Mike Selinker

to know more click here