April 2026: Can U Dig It?

With very little information to work with, this puzzle was yet another classic case for collaboration between me and Fred Vu. We tried our hand at it at the beginning of the month, thinking we had a very good chance of placing highly, but we didn’t really get anywhere at the time. Busy as we both are, we set the puzzle aside until the final weekend of April when we both had some spare time to return to it and see if anything new jumped out at us. It took a couple of hours, but by passing ideas back and forth we eventually found the key — a process that was both highly fun and synergistic as usual. This was one of the hardest Jane Street puzzles I’ve seen, requiring us to truly think outside the box. As such, I’m proud just to have solved the puzzle despite not placing particularly highly. Well done to anyone who solved this month’s puzzle, especially all the solo solvers!

Stats:

Difficulty: 8/10

Enjoyability: 8/10

Leaderboard Placing: 67/94

The approach:

A few things jumped out at us immediately, as they probably did to most teams who looked at this month’s puzzle: firstly, the word “find” in the top row of the grid, which can be continued to “find the” and even “find the start” if one makes a sequence of king-moves rather than just reading horizontally; secondly, the bottom row of the puzzle, which looks suspiciously like “twenty-six” when read left-to-right. We couldn’t find anything obvious to do with this information, so the natural next move was to write some code to do king-move word searches for us. After finding nothing particularly helpful, we were curious what the longest word in the grid was, to which our code gave the answer “hexadecimals”. This seemed important; after all, when a puzzle gives very little explicit information, the title is usually very important, and “dig it” seemed interpretable as “digit”. Searching for other digit-related words, we found several examples: “integer”, “base ten”, and “binary”, for example. Thinking outside the box, I even went looking for words that could mean “digit” in other ways and found “thumb”, “pinky”, and “pointer finger”. It turns out that we were actually very close to solving the puzzle at this point, but we saw no way to connect these words and dismissed the fingers I was finding as likely coincidence. A hurdle for us was that we were very entrenched in the mindset of trying to find one long-running sentence one word after the other, and we couldn’t find anything that could be continued sensibly.

Returning to the puzzle at the end of the month, we once again focused on all the digit-related words we could find (ignoring finger-related words, which we’d largely forgotten). Something that had bothered us up until that point was our inabiltiy to extract information from the entirety of the puzzle’s title: we had a potential interpretation for “dig it”, but no interpretation for either “can” or “U”. However, I pointed out that a lot of the digit-related words we’d found in the grid vaguely formed U-shapes, an observation which I mostly dismissed as wishful thinking since not all of the words fit this pattern and it seemed like quite a stretch. That was until Fred made two key observations: firstly, if shortened from “hexadecimals” to “hexadecimal”, this word formed a tilted U-shape and therefore matched the pattern, and secondly, the U-shapes we’d found so far could all be closed off on their open sides by purely horizontal, vertical, or diagonal words. Not only that, but some examples of the closing words were “spray”, “paint”, and “aluminum”. Once we realised these words all pertained to the “can” part of the puzzle’s title, we knew we’d finally cracked the code and had found a way to use all the information in the puzzle’s title! Before long, I remembered all the finger-related “digit” examples we found at the beginning of the month, and we saw that they too formed U-shapes that could be closed off by words pertaining to “can” (though in some cases, we also had to think outside the box to connect the words to the “can” theme).

We set about finding as many digit-can pairs as we could, some of our favourites being “hallux” as a digit (the medical term for the big toe) and “Ege Bamyasi” as a can (the name of an album by a band called Can). Before long, we could see that very few letters of the grid would be left unused, and when read left-to-right, top-to-bottom, these spelled “find the twentieth smallest number with digit total twenty-six”, which gave the answer 3599.

In retrospect, it’s funny how close we were to solving the puzzle right at the beginning when we still thought we knew almost nothing. That’s what made this month’s puzzle so hard: you had to notice several key things in conjunction to understand what was really going on, and you could notice one or even two of those things and still not even be sure if you were on the right track. This was one of my favourite Jane Street puzzles yet, and I had a great time as always solving this puzzle with Fred. Looking forward to hopefully more puzzles like this in the future!