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This puzzle has an involved history, much of which I’ve forgotten. I vaguely recall spotting DEAD-AND-ALIVE, and noting it had 12 letters, and could describe Schrodinger’s Cat, and, oh, look, SCHRODINGER’S has 12 letters as well, and finally the concept of having the solvers decide how the two states resolved. Somewhere along the line came the thought that solvers needed to corroborate their choice in some way, which led to looking for words where D could be replaced by A to form another word.

But where did the mirror symmetry come from? I can’t remember that ever being an issue, or testing out alternatives. This is quite an old puzzle in terms of the initial grid fill, and it has spent some time in the file waiting for something to happen to it.

To be frank, it started life as a puzzle with ‘Enigmatic Variations’ stamped all over it. It’s generally true that objects with things stamped all over them need a clean before you can see them clearly. Once I’d done that, it was obvious that the multiple solutions with corroborative separate elements made it unsuitable for a newspaper competition - well, possibly The Listener, but it didn’t “feel” like a Listener puzzle. So Magpie it was.

But not before I’d clued it for EV, with a simple gimmick that ignored As and Ds in wordplay. And that, as it happened, didn’t seem right either. So back on the shelf it went for several months.

One thing I happened to know was that STREAM-ANCHOR is an anagram of MARCH-TREASON. Not exactly earth-shattering, and of little use when the zombie apocalypse strikes, but it sent me back to DEAD-AND-ALIVE, with the contrast of activity and inactivity, and hence the idea of anagramming some clue answers to make the entries. So a period of checking how many answers could be anagrammed to other words – yep, certainly enough to give me 20 of each type, so I then weeded out the ones where I felt it might be a little unfair to jump from a ‘dictionary word’ to a proper noun, or vice versa. And so off on another round of clueing.

I do wonder how many solution cats were alive and how many dead. [Answer: 17 dead; 63 alive]

From the setters’ perspective

First of all apologies for this being a bitty late but I’ve been away on holiday.

Can You Guess Where I was?  Of Course You Can!!

Jealous? You bet I am!!

A bit of a giveaway

The best bit about Can You Do Division? M100 was that it had that rare occurrence of a 100% success rate.  There were other bits of the puzzle that I liked - the parity part of odd numbered clues being odd and even numbered clues being even and the being divisible by their clue number for the down clues.  The unsatisfactory parts were the need to give the digit sums for the rows and columns and the clumsy divisibility property for some of the across clues.

I decided to see if I could make use of Piccadilly’s idea of palindromes that were exactly divisible by the number of digits and expand on this whilst still keeping bits of the previous puzzle.  I felt that the parity had to go as it was quite restrictive in obtaining a grid but I kept the divisible by their clue number and the digit sum part could be improved on.  Then came the size of grid and the barring pattern.  I felt that 7×7 was just about right so kept that.  I couldn’t have any 2 digit entries for the acrosses of course so the grid maybe looked a tad strange.  As it was a 7×7 grid I decided that the unchecked cells would sum to 49.

I started by writing a program to calculate the palindromes.  I knew full well that some solvers would just do the same thing and fig jig in their answers which they would probably find to be a fairly unsatisfying solve.  But hey - that’s their choice!!  If they don’t want to solve the puzzle in the spirit in which it was set and the manner it was intended then so be it!  Of course if they applied some logic first as AJ did in his published solution they would find that it would circumvent the need to do lots of laborious calculations and be somewhat more satisfying.

I started setting in the bottom half of the grid.  The reason for this is that there are fewer possible entries for the high numbered down clues.  I had hoped to have all the down entries exactly divisible by their digit sum as well but this proved to be a major stumbling block so relaxed that to just 3 symmetrically located pairs.  I worked steadily upwards in the grid until I encountered a problem at 10ac/2dn and had to give the information about there being an odd number of even digits in the grid. Damn! - ‘The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men gang aft agley’ as we often say up here - or not as the case may be!!

Just in case you’re wondering

‘I see you went to Oxford‘

‘Yes‘

‘What did you do?‘

‘I bought a tie!‘

Thanks Spike.

4 years ago I was looking up magic square in Chambers and spotted magic pyramid. We all know a Rubik’s cube when we see one and I vaguely remembered the Rubik’s triamid and the similar looking pyraminx, however I admit that I have never come across the term magic pyramid before then. Given Rubik’s triamid and magic pyramids have the same number of letters, I set out to create a 13 by 13 square crossword with these on the diagonals in the form of a cross. The title was always Pyramin as this cross signified the X to finish off the other example. It was carte blanche with added bars in the form of “square” rings so it looked like a pyramid if viewed from the top. I then made an instruction to turn each of them a quarter of a turn more than the last so that eventually the phrases were spelt out. I was quite pleased with myself as I hadn’t been setting long, but something nagged at me and so I never sent it off. I revisited it recently with a fresh mind, took one look and it dawned on me that the shape of this pyramid was not a tetrahedron like the real puzzles and therefore flawed. The only way around it was to construct a triangular puzzle with similar instructions. Oh dear, what had I let myself into? The size of the triangle was immediately apparent from the length of the phrases and I remember solving Ploy’s Driving Force in 2009 with triangular shaped cells but I wanted something different than this entry method. I decided on entries around the edges of different sized triangles. I used the perimeters of different shaped triangles, however the cell just in from the corners would not be filled. Plus the fact the fill would require too many three-letter entries, I used the central cell to make four-letter answers. Even so there were going to be too many and so I joined up the corners and made them into eights. The grid fill was actually quite fun, except the blank central cell proving tricky to skirt around. The number of entries decided for me what colours to use for each “triangular” ring; yellow being too long and relegated to the outside. The final part of the puzzle was to think of a “thematic” gimmick. Looking back at my original plan, I had used moving words within the clues and continued with this idea as it was the most thematic gimmick I could think of. This is the point where I need to write that, if the Magpie folded, this puzzle would never have seen the light of day. There is only one outlet for unusual creations like this and I am also glad the editors liked it enough to give it the puzzle of the month. I am really chuffed given it is my first especially when comparing it to the excellent POTM crosswords I have solved in the last 3 years. I would also like to thank AJ for his perfect painstaking reconstruction of my grid.

Shark

As many Magpie solvers will realise this was a follow-on from Dumber Muzzle in Magpie 99. That was compiled in the spirit of “can it be done?”.  It had a 7×8 grid with 35 clues. The logic started in a corner and meandered round the grid but at any stage had only a few places to expand to. After the grid was completed I thought about a message and came up with one that used 31 letters in a haphazard order. The puzzle turned out to be hard - the start was not so easy - but was much appreciated by solvers who like their puzzles hard. The most common (correct) criticism was that the message would have been improved by adding a “the” to the message; I was aware of this but very nervous of touching what was a delicate logic structure.

My review of the puzzle was that I liked the idea as it was a logic puzzle rather than a number-crunching slog but any second puzzle needed to:-

1.       Have a larger grid. It had been a real struggle to get all 26 letters decided in such a small grid.

2.       Have a starting point in the middle (allowing expansion in lots of directions) which let solvers make some entry quickly and “shouted” to be used.

3.       Have a good quotation to use.

4.       Use only letters in the clues. (Dumber Muzzle had clues like A^3-B^3).

5.       Use repeated letters in clues more to give solvers extra information.

I had not intended to write a second one so soon but one rainy day I was playing with ideas like A^(B^C) when it became clear that there was only one 5 digit answer for this. A quick look in ODQ for a quotation yielded one and it was off and running.

I have not seen any guidelines on compiling numericals so it is a self-taught process. I do not use a computer or spreadsheets, but I do have a calculator that can run (very basic) programs and I have written one that factorises numbers. The most obvious advice is “Do it slowly and triple-check everything - nothing is too easy not to botch” (see later). Most puzzles are done in one of two ways

1.       If the grid is determined or largely determined by the theme, put in bars (anything goes, I think) and clues. Sit down and try to solve it, fiddle with bars and clues, try to solve it, etc.

2.       If the grid is empty, compile it largely in the order that the solver solves it.

In this case it was obviously case 2 and I started at 18 ac in an exercise book, expanded it in a number of ways until about 8 or 10 letters were determined and then used Sympathy to complete a reasonable looking grid. With A=2, B=3 etc at this stage to keep my sanity, the grid proved a comfortable size to determine all the letters and I was confident (correctly) that I could change the letter allocations to fit in the 20 letter quotation, especially as I had left 11d and 25d free.

I do not have a checker; I have approached one or two people but that never worked out. The Magpie editors can probably confirm that there have not been problems with my puzzles and most discussions have been about preambles. But when I sent this off, it had a logical error near the beginning and a clue error near the end. Despite this, Shane still managed to solve it! When reviewing it to remove these errors, I made it a bit easier so you can imagine Shane’s achievement.

Thanks to the many people that have commented on the puzzle. One issue with the puzzle is that the misprints in a lot of the clues had no significance. Even in retrospect I think it was best to have all clues having misprints as solvers might have tried to use the non-misprint clues to get started. It might have been a good idea though to give solvers the correct letters for those clues in some (anagrammed) phrase. I find that each puzzle is a shot in the dark as to how difficult it turns out to be and how it is received; this seems to be especially the case with numericals. I have no intention of doing another puzzle in the near future with misprints.

Finally, for those who enjoy the numerical puzzles in the Listener, do consider a subscription to the Magpie so that you can get twelve of them a year!

Hedgehog

A month ago, a casual glance at the UK Puzzle Association online forum alerted me to the fact that within a week there would be a Sudoku/Kenken competition taking place as part of the annual Mind Sports Olympiad in London. I had won the only crossword event held at the MSO, back in 2001.

The post said that the inaugural (Sudoku only) event last year had been a one-session ‘exam’ that you could leave as soon as you finished. I looked up the venue, and found it was within ten minutes of my office, on my bike. This would turn out to be a curse, and a blessing.

I paid my entry fee and duly turned up just before 10am on the day. About 16 solvers were in the room, 2 others from the UKPA and the rest who had paid an all-entry fee for the Mind Sports Olympiad. I was very disappointed when it was then announced that this year’s competition would be two 90-minute sessions: an 8-sudoku test at 10am followed by an 8-kenken test at about 11.45, and I scribbled a note on the test paper to the effect that I probably couldn’t make it back for the second session.

The test started, and I completed the Sudoku puzzles (a mix of standards, varying from Easy to Super-Fiendish in Times terms) in 25 minutes, handed them in, hopped on my bike, and raced back to the office. Sadly, this was an important morning at work, with the group’s interim results, the preparation of which I was responsible for, being publicly released, and crucial checking of these would definitely prevent me returning to the University of London an hour later.

Once our results had been put out officially at 1pm, I was free for a while, so I went back to find out what had happened in the MSO. I was hoping to pick up a copy of the Kenken puzzles and find out if I had made any mistakes on the Sudokus.

I was rather startled to find that the Kenken competition was still going on! David Levy, the organiser (who also runs the Times competitions) told me I had half an hour left, so I quickly sat down and did the Kenkens. A few people handed in while I was solving, and a few had clearly gone from the room already. I finished, and wondered about hanging around, but figured that marking would take some time, and that I had few prospects - the scoring system depended on finishing order across the two competitions as well as accuracy, so I felt I would need a lot of competitors to (implausibly) have made mistakes on the Kenkens to ‘podium’.

I headed back to work, still a bit bemused to have been able to complete the competition. After work, I headed back to ULU where some other competitors were able to fill me in on what had happened. The second guy to finish the Sudokus had taken about 45 minutes, and very few of the competitors had managed an all-correct script in that part. Some halfway through the Kenken session, a burning smell had started a fire alarm and the building had been evacuated for an hour, so the unfinished competitors (all but one of them) had been re-started shortly before I arrived.

It turned out my 11th place Kenken finish, and being one of only 4 entrants to finish inside the time with all puzzles correct, was enough together with the Sudoku result to earn me a bronze medal, behind David Collison and Roderick Grafton, both of the other UKPA competitors. And I was there in time for the medal ‘ceremony’, so I now have a very nice ‘Olympic’ medal, saying ‘London 2012’ on it! And no, I didn’t set the fire.

Mark Goodliffe

The first version of this puzzle was oh so different from the published version. I had the title Highway 61 Revisited and a 5×5 grid spaced out with arrows in between each cell. The clues gave numbers that went into the 25 cells and solvers had to find the number of routes that went from the bottom left to the top right of the grid that totalled 61 and write the number of journeys made below the grid taking heed of the title. This was the twist that the editors didn’t get in that you had to add 1 onto your answer as the ones you found were revisits! The grid fill was also too easy and searching through all 70 routes left Mark, I think, losing the will to live!! It was therefore rejected.

So it was back to the drawing board for a rethink and some prog rock! I decided to keep the title and have me make a journey on that road in a car that solvers would have to identify which was a bit rich considering I don’t drive!

The car had to be the Concorde of the road the Bugatti Veyron. I started on this version a few years ago and decided to use the letter/number assignment type of clues and have them make words with a motoring connection. In puzzles of this sort I do like to help solvers and so used the hidden locations device that I usually reserved for my prog rock puzzles. As I’d first heard about the car on Top Gear I decided to make the letters form a phrase. The first phrase I considered was TOP GEAR NICK VW but rejected that on legal advice for the longer TOP GEAR CHUMS FIND VW instead!

I required a symmetrical grid that had 26 as the highest clue number and as the digits were to be taken two at a time mod 26, Bugatti Veyron needed 26 cells, and a 10×6 rectangle would allow this to appear nice and symmetrically. That done and with the appropriate digits inserted into the 26 cells the clue writing loomed large.

I stared for ages and eventually came up with the PORSCHE clue. The puzzle was then put aside until the summer of 2011 when after hearing that Tribute to a Horticulturist was to appear I felt that I should finish this one off.

The setting went fairly well as I didn’t have the constraint of a completely filled in grid to start with and about three quarters of the way through I realised that the road trip scenario on Highway 61 was just plain daft! I had chosen the Bugatti Veyron because I’d seen it on Top Gear in one of the amazing Top Gear Challenges, in particular the race with Clarkson and a truffle in the Veyron and May and Hammond in a Cessna light aircraft. I would celebrate this instead and as I couldn’t find my son’s DVD which had that challenge on it and somewhat surprisingly it wasn’t being shown on Dave either I resorted to Google to find the starting point which I knew was a place in Italy. I was surprised to find that it was Turin as I’d thought it was a wee village but Turin was probably the nearest big place as the aircraft had to take off from an airport presumably. The title would be changed and I felt that an anagram of Turin London would be appropriate.

One of my colleagues at work, who had too much time on his hands one day, decided to get anagrams for all the people in the maths department as he’d found a program on the web that did this. He was particularly overjoyed with the one he’d found for me which was ‘ Loutish Scatterbrain ‘. And even although I pointed out that he hadn’t spelt Alastair correctly he still printed it out and stuck it on the wall at my desk in the maths base and it’s still there beside the Shakespearean Insult Generator and a Father’s Day present from my daughter of Beautiful Dance Moves which are mathematical functions!!

I managed to find the same program and typed in Turin London and searched down the possibilities. Old Nit Or Nun just leapt out of the screen at me and how apt. Clarkson, the old nit, and May, the nun. I hope that’s not libellous.

I felt much happier with that change made and completed the clue writing in a few days. The cold solve wasn’t too bad either given that the letters fall into 3 sets. As I’ve said before this device does help setters to write clues which are thematic or it helps me at any rate!

I love Stanley Kubrick’s films, they are visually stunning. Every frame is carefully composed and often carries deeper meaning. I saw a restored version of the film last year at the BFT and I was just as impressed in 2011 as when I had seen it as a teenager in 1968. Its ground-breaking effects earned Kubrick an Oscar for Best Visual Effects. I wanted to make the solution to this puzzle visually attractive so thank you AJ for the care taken with the imagery of the printed solution. This puzzle was my attempt at a homage to a classic film. When I sent the puzzle to the editors I gave the solution as DVD sleeve notes. Below are the expanded Bonus Features which were not printed because they were not necessary to explain the puzzle. Kubrick never explained his films so it was entirely appropriate!

This puzzle is based on the third section of the film (Jupiter Mission Eighteen months later) which begins with collaboration between HAL and the crew and ends in clashes. Differences in the top half of the grid were resolved through collaboration: differences in the bottom half of the grid involved unresolved clashes. Bowman and Discovery are both symbolically positioned under the eye of HAL. The letters of D(ouglas) RAIN (the actor who gave HAL his voice) appear imperfectly in contiguous cells in the eye.

Quotes justifying the title…

HAL: I am completely operational, and all my circuits are functioning perfectly. (MACHINE: I’m Perfect)

HAL: The 9000 series is the most reliable computer ever made. No 9000 computer has ever made a mistake or distorted information. We are all, by any practical definition of the words, fool-proof and incapable of error. (MACHINE: I’m Perfect)

HAL: It can only be attributable to human error. (MAN: Imperfect)

Humans make slips all the time, hence answers to some MAN clues had to lose a letter; they are mixed imperfectly together with the normal clues. Initially HAL appears to function normally but later turns out to be making mistakes, hence MACHINE clues are arranged perfectly with all normal clues followed by all misprints clues. It would have been more accurate to make the grid depicting the HAL interface longer and thinner but the proportions of the sides of the 2D grid are 4:9, the proportions of the 3D monolith in 2001 were 1:4:9 (1²:2²:3²). The misprints in MACHINE clues all shift back by 1, 4 or 9 places in the alphabet to give Stanley Kubrick. Treating a vowel as 0 and consonant as 1, the misprinted clues begin 00011111010001; converting binary to decimal gives 2001.

Welcome to Nerdsville, Croatia and the 2012 World Puzzle Championship. With a grandstand view of the island of Krk, it is a place with no vowels, but for one week only the world’s highest concentration of anoraks. Most of you have been to crossword gatherings so you know exactly what I mean. Compared with some of these guys, I’m actually cool.

As well as the crosswords you know about I also enjoy logic puzzles now and then, although I’m not in Simon’s league, and not a big vanilla Sudoku fan. I had a go this year at the annual online US Puzzle Championship, and a few weeks later an email arrives out of the blue from the UK Puzzle Association, of whom I had never heard, asking if I would be interested in joining the B team for the World Championship.

Sadly money is too short so I will reluctantly have to pass up the chance. Then inspiration strikes and I try a hundred-to-one shot by asking my boss if the company fancy the reflected glory of an employee representing the UK in exchange for sponsorship. In enlightened mood, to my surprise I confess, he agrees. The payback is an article for the in-house magazine - how hard can that be? It is an opportunity not to be missed and within three weeks I’m on the plane to Zagreb.

My airport pickup informs me via hand-signals that he’s just had two teeth out and won’t be very chatty. I’ve only learned six words in Croatian so my own conversation wouldn’t sparkle. On the return trip, by the way, another one has apparently gone.

The hotel is a monument to seventies communist-era concrete, now crumbling, but obviously state of the art and extremely fashionable when built. If M had known about this place, Bond would have found Blofeld much sooner and saved a lot of trouble. There’s even an oil refinery across the bay begging to be attacked by one-man mini-subs. The rooms are basic to say the least. Bare concrete on all sides, a single sheet and blanket with which to make your own bed, and a toilet flushed by turning on a tap.

As I arrive the World Sudoku Championship (WSC) is drawing to a close in an 8-person speed-solving knockout. Sudoku got its own tournament six years ago, whilst the main event is now in its 21st year.

I am surprised by the drama of this normally sedentary and solitary pastime. In one quarter final a solver, already one puzzle (and therefore “match point”) down, finishes first and turns away from his board, relief etched on his face. But the adjudicators declare his solution wrong. It must surely be all over. But it comes to light that the solution sheet is wrong, and he is awarded the point. He is so torn between relief and anger that the stress of it all causes his brain to turn to mush on the final puzzle and he is soundly beaten. In the end the Polish finalist takes his third world title.

We dine that night, between the Sudoku and Puzzle Competitions, in the local town of Trsat (where are those vowels?), and watch the ceremony in which the Polish victor picks up his trophy. On the bus back the most striking member of his team, a man approaching seven feet tall, with jet-black goatee beard and straight hair both down to his waist, weaves down the aisle offering slugs of Polish vodka. I’m not expecting to nudge the top of tomorrow’s league table, so I oblige him whilst others around me disappoint him by staying sober for the competition.

And so to the puzzle tournament proper. Since the call-up I’ve been frantically looking at previous competition material, and then depressing myself with my efforts at solving the puzzles. The puzzles themselves are carefully language- and culture-neutral, designed to test the best brains, with only the top performers having a chance of finishing any given round, so the likes of me at least have the luxury of choice. There are dozens of types of puzzle, and I’ve not had the chance to practise most of them, so I set myself the aim of at least attempting one of each before kick-off with a personal target of not coming last. A big bonus would be not to come last in the British team, but I daren’t hope for that much. I fear I will still be wasting solving time reading instructions whilst everyone else will be ploughing in, pencils blazing.

Speaking of pencils, I have brought pens, pencils, markers and highlighters, even a sharpener and eraser. Mentally patting myself on the back, I walk in to the arena (a conference room set up as if for school exams), where other people’s desks are entirely covered by pencils, all sharpened like rapiers. Surely this is over the top? Then I remember the likely incidence of OCD in the room. A big song and dance is made about everyone’s table being levelled and un-wobbled by sticky wedges. I am amused by this until five minutes into the first round when I get the point as elbows all around me fly into furies of error-correction.

We start with a gentle round of domino-hunting (a grid full of numbers which is a complete set of dominoes with no edges – all we have to do is pair them back into rectangles). Simple enough, I think, but of course some numbers are missing and have to be deduced, so the pressure racks up. I’m quite pleased that as the half-hour draws on I’ve managed three puzzles, out of nine, but then people start putting up hands and shouting that they’ve finished. What, really? It turns out that this is a “bonus” round, where in addition to full marks for solving, any competitors finishing within the half-hour get extra points.

The pattern is set for the later rounds. Some go well, some less so. I do particularly badly on rounds where practice and speed are key. One in particular has quite a few of the “paint cells black to make a shape” type, where the clues around the edge give variants on the number of black cells in that row/column. I’ve not done more than half a dozen of these since childhood, and I don’t know the techniques that I later find out the über-geeks have developed. But in puzzles that require intense logic, where practice does not play such a part, I fare better. I’m transported back to school and college days as I sit what amounts to a series of exams, with invigilators and strict rules. It’s much better in that I chose to be here, and the “tests” are things I’d do for fun anyway, but worse because I’m an also-ran, never getting close to finishing a paper.

Scripts are checked and marked surprisingly quickly, considering the effort involved (three checkers have to sign each one, apparently). But of course it’s never quick enough for those at the sharp end who want to know whether they’re in contention for the playoffs. Every time a round is marked, the noticeboard is mobbed and everyone checks their returned papers for possible marking errors that could have denied them a vital few points. I wait patiently until the crowds have subsided, and read from the bottom up. After two days of competition I am relatively pleased to have finished 104th, about two-thirds down the field, after a high of 88th equal at one point. I’m frustrated that I might have been comfortably inside the top 100 if I had not made two careless tiny slips, but then all those around me probably did similar things. I am overjoyed, though, to be fifth of eight in the UK team, finishing above one of the A team, which is way beyond expectation.

For all but the top eight finishers who must prepare for the morning’s playoff the competition is now over and we retire to the bar. I gather that several of the UK team have appeared on Countdown and other TV quiz shows. As we relax on the terrace outside the bar an old friend of some of my teammates rolls up. He is Turkey’s equivalent of a Countdown Octo-Champ and multiple grand-final winner. For entertainment (we know how to have a good time, as you can tell) we read out some numbers, but every time, before the final syllable of the target number dies away, he has a solution. And he doesn’t bother with simple addition and subtraction; the route is always the most complex possible. It’s breathtaking to watch. Honest.

These puzzle champions just don’t have brains that are wired normally, as I’m assuming my readers already know. Mind sports are different from physical sports. The brains of talented sportsmen are no different from average (in some cases much worse than average, which can get them into hot water), so apart from the fame and money they’re “normal”. But there seems to be no room in the head of a person with stupendous mental agility for any of the cares and desires of everyday life. Someone asked me whether it’s fair to compete against such people, but we’re all somewhere on the scale of various mental syndromes, and as long as nobody is cheating or on drugs, the best puzzler wins.

And so to the final of the WPC. The format is knockout, like the Sudoku, with the higher finisher in the regular rounds getting to choose his preferred puzzle first. There are a myriad different types of puzzle, certain people being stronger in certain types, so this amounts to a “serve”, and the outcome will depend on the ability to “break”, or finish first on a less favoured puzzle type. After much further drama (Marker Pens Run Dry in Puzzle Championship Shock!), we have a worthy champion, a German winning his eighth world title, over Americans second and third. Despite having no-one else in the quarter finals, the German team is strong enough to take the team title as well. Needless to say, almost all of my after-round insights into techniques I should have been using came from the German team, who have a thriving online community and practise like the world-beaters they are. Luckily I speak German (so it’s useful to me at least that the champions aren’t Thai or Nigerian). I feel better about my own performance when I remember that I knew nothing of this world a month ago.

In the evening there’s a celebratory final dinner, medal presentations and sad farewells from those who have to be up at five for flights. Everyone promises to keep in touch, mostly via puzzle blogs and online competitions. I promise too but with fingers crossed behind back. I will wait until the dust settles to work out whether I have any spare minutes I could eke out of my week for such pursuits. Mash’s output is already suffering, so it’s a tough call. Next year is Beijing, so I’m unlikely to be able to go anyway. It was great fun, but on the whole I think I prefer to do a puzzle without someone to tell me to put my pen down half way through, and someone else to put me to shame by finishing three harder ones in the same time (Mark Goodliffe for example, in a much more impressive recent piece of solving).

Then there is a final speech of the evening. Will Shortz stands up. As you will know in the crossword community this is the nearest we have to a superstar. As well as being the long-time editor of the New York Times crossword and star of a feature film, he is also – which I didn’t know until this week – board member of the WPF and founder of the WPC. An all-round hero and nice person to boot, whose acquaintance I have managed to make during the week off the back of my contacts in the crossword community.

So the big news is: the 23rd WPC, and 9th WSC in 2014 has been awarded to … London. Get practising now.

I understand that several setters create their crosswords, leave them and solve them again some time later. They then can rewrite those clues that they feel are below the mark and only then send off the puzzle for publication. I have never been one for that, but here we have the second puzzle in a row where it has been shelved, as I was not fully happy with the outcome.

In SHArK’s case the “man’s” legs were illustrated in a kind of semi-splits position and there were a few double lettered elements over 50 placed scattered around the grid outside of the illustration. I felt the latter could be accepted, although I desperately wanted to change them, but the legs just didn’t look right.

So, I picked it up again earlier this year, scrubbed out the lower half, as well as the over-50 elements and started setting it again. Luckily the face, body and arms did not need to be reworked. I managed the fill a few days later, even more content that the legs had feet. Another aspect that made no difference to the puzzle was the appearance of MR (or Mr) as the eyes. It also spanned the shoulders, but now also spanned the body vertically from the mouth. I suppose one could argue rightly that the shape is disproportionate, with a big head and short arms and looking back I could have tried to extend the arms vertically by a cell each side.

HJ Muller gained a Nobel laureate in physiology or medicine in 1946, and I had aimed to keep NOBEL unclued. However, the quotation did not allow that scope.

I wanted to do something different when writing the clues and wondered how easy it would be to have letters inserted (or removed) but ensuring that no other occurrence of that letter appeared in the rest of the clue. I could even use several of the same letters to spice it up, but I was finding it too tough to keep them the same and found some ideal clues using the other gimmick. I therefore used both types, which may have created a less than obvious change from merely spotting words that required a letter to be removed (or added). I was a little surprised when it came back as a D grade, as I thought it might have been a C…I will await the feedback regarding this point.

I was also surprised to see it as the POTM again, so perhaps I should shelve puzzles away for a rehash more often.

Shark (or SHArK)

Here Mark Goodliffe, Times crossword solving champion and Magpie editor, gives a little insight into the thought processes that led him to his sixth championship win in 2012.

Many of you will know Neil Talbott, if not in person then at least by reputation. Neil’s crossword-solving skills are pretty good, as a glance at the Magpie stats will show, and a glance at the Listener stats will confirm. Like many of us, Neil has interests outside crosswords. Unlike many of us, those include taking on strenuous activities involving such unpleasantness as synthetic fibres and the outdoors.

Neil is currently planning on running the Marathon des Sables, which as you probably know is a sort of E-grade ultra-marathon run in the desert over several days. If it was a crossword, it would be set by Pieman.

That’s all very well, but why am I telling you this? Firstly, because Neil hasn’t given any feedback on this year’s puzzles so far (or indeed solved any) and feels their setters deserve to know why – and secondly because he is asking, very politely, and without making a big deal of it, for sponsorship.

His charity is The Brain Tumour Charity. He says “As well as offering invaluable support to people like my uncle Michael, who was diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumour two years ago, this charity funds world-class research and clinical trials into the causes and best treatments for brain tumours as well as promoting awareness of signs and symptoms which can lead to earlier diagnoses and therefore better prospects for sufferers.”

For people hungry for more information, there is a blog to read and a fund-raising page to visit, making giving simple! There is also a Marathon Des Sables web site, and a race page where no doubt it’s possible to track Neil’s progress throughout the race by GPS. Or if not, you’ll be able to get updates from Sunday.

Note: the race starts on the 6th of April.

Pedro has provided some insight into the setting of After the Outing, and also his own identity, at his web site.

Those of you who followed the news of Neil Talbott’s Saharan adventure might be interested in this post-script.

Neil says, of his ultramarathon preparations, that “I thought you might like to know that with a self-imposed limit of 5 grams, my luxury was four puzzles from February’s Magpie (compressed onto one sheet of 3g paper), plus a pencil (2g)”. Well, who wouldn’t want a 3 gram Magpie for company?

We are pleased to be able to publish a couple of Neil’s photos, as a contribution to our collection of exotic Magpie sightings. Here they are

This time, in France. Darren Roberts, who took the picture, says “There are 4 magpies perched and ready, whilst the fifth magpie remains always present despite being behind the scenes.” Captions welcome.

Puzzles that stem from the setting partnership that is Rood occur out of desperation. I (RO) asked for OD’s help as I was stuck with my tesseract Listener puzzle and this time it was OD’s return to plead for assistance. An email came through in February 2012 suggesting a theme based on the wall game from the Only Connect quiz show. Sixteen 9-letter anagrams in 3 x 3 squares making up four groups. OD’s words “may be impossible to achieve” looked extremely likely but it was a challenge I couldn’t resist. After a quick attempt my reply to OD was “this is scarily difficult”. An early grid fill started with Oxbridge colleges, battles and capes (with Worcester and Trafalgar linked with more than one group) but the grid came to a swift dead end. It would have been nice to have a “twist” where an anagram could be a member of more than one group, as often occurs in the real game, but our priority at this stage was to get a full grid.

It was time to take a step back and make life easier. We had to come up with as many “long” lists of related 9 letter words as possible. A rather large Excel spreadsheet was devised from a number of sources. Luckily OD has a library full of useful references, whilst I only had the computer for assistance (obviously the modern age setter needs to invest in a library). Some of these lists e.g. animals, plants and writers had a reasonable number of options and were worth a stab, but time and time again the grid could not be finished often getting to the last 3 x 3 square usually in one of the lower corners. We decided that if we had to revert to jumbled entries the puzzle was not worth pursuing, but realised early on that symmetry had to be abandoned; the priority now was getting this elusive full grid. Oil struck but the word count was pathetic to say the least and the grid was scrapped. Finally, after at least 30 fresh attempts between us a grid was filled with castles, dances, carriages and woods/trees; the latter was not an ideal group because of the linkage of two similar themes, but hey I am sure the editors would be understanding enough to give us leeway.

At this point another idea struck as I scanned through the grid; it just so happened with a slight tweak that the conversion of 11 letters into clashes gave us ONLY CONNECT across the grid. Well almost – the 11 columns were slightly out of sync with ONLYC ONNECT, but there seemed no remedy for this. We were therefore content to start work on the clues.

OD is often after a thematic device, so we wondered about having four of them akin to the four groups in the wall. By removing a few bars and altering a couple of entries with the help of OED we had 48 entries, giving us 12 in each cluing group. We decided on clues with moving words, missing letters (akin to the missing vowel round from the show), anagrams and a gimmick utilising connections. It also seemed we had given ourselves another tough task. Although there is a slight leeway as we had 4 clues in every set of gimmicks, we still had to pick our phrase carefully. At this stage we chose USE FOUR COLOURS TO GROUP SIXTEEN THREE BY THREE ANAGRAMS. (Actually our very first, similar, phrase had TWELVE anagrams, which somehow satisfied both of us … only when we were having the puzzle tested did we recall that 4×4 does not actually amount to twelve, so a few clues had to be rewritten to accommodate the infant school maths correction). The puzzle then went off to the Magpie editors. What could go wrong…in a word: rejection!

Not for the OED words, not for the abstract castles, not for the plural of one of the trees, not even the strange connection cluing gimmick (although they preferred something different), it was because of a type of wood called CALIATURE. Listed in OD’s Bradford’s we included it, but given it is in Chambers under the headword caliature-wood, the editors felt it was not precise enough to allow the puzzle to be published. A panic look at the caliature square meant there was no way we could rectify the situation – back to the drawing board.

Solvers may be able to complete a thematic puzzle in a couple of hours, but this had already taken an inordinate amount of time to set, but now we had to start again. How were we going to get a full grid, let alone one with 48 entries, and clashes to make the fortuitous inclusion of ONLY CONNECT? I had more matters pressing than Pieman at that stage and handed the baton back to OD. There is no point prolonging the history of Fourplay mentioning the same difficulties as before, but OD managed to start a grid with four categories (the same four as you solved in the final puzzle) and I took over to see if I could finish off the grid fill. Luck or judgement, sometimes I cannot tell, but this time we had no ambiguity, no plurals and ONLY CONNECT worked with the space in the fifth column, perfect…or not! The clues seemed impossible using the previous phrase. With a slight tweak of the phrase, together with a different cluing gimmick (the editors were not keen on the shifting connections gimmick), we came up with a final edition of the published puzzle.

Setting as individuals in the Magpie as well as all of the other advanced thematic crossword outlets that appear in the national newspapers, this has to be our toughest challenge yet (together or individually). Despite that it is the most satisfying puzzle we have set so far. We hope you have enjoyed the ride although you may not see a Rood puzzle for a while…unless desperation hits again.

If you want to know more about the process of setting this puzzle, just have a look at Phi’s blog post on the subject.

Ever since my Listener puzzle Odd One Out [L3984] put the ‘fear of God’ into one of the Magpie editors I’d wanted to replicate that but with a scary title instead. I thought about words that had scary connotations. Apocalypse – now that was scary after all there are The Four Horsemen of that ilk.  I decided that the title would be Four Setters of the Apocalypse.  I am, along with other setters, constantly trying to think up new ways for clueing entries. There’s not much that can be done with letter/number assignments so it’s the number properties/definitions that offers the most scope.  I hit on the idea of each setter coming up with a function. The clues would be the output from the function and the entries in the grid would be the input. So what setters would I choose? As I was using mathematical notation I started with the Greek alphabet – α,  β, γ and how fortuitous as we have the mathematical triumvirate of setters Arden, Brimstone and Googly. So who to have for the 4^th? Well as this was going to The Magpie an obvious choice had to be one of the editors as it might improve its chances of publication hence Mr Magoo!

Digit sums and digit products have been used in puzzles and I decided to combine the two with Arden’s function being their sum. Brimstone’s function would output the number of distinct digits and Mr Magoo’s would give the sum of all possible single digit products. Googly’s function was going to throw a spanner in the works ( something that his puzzles often do! ) as it would be either the digit sum minus the digit product or the digit product minus the digit sum according to whether the input was odd or even and this would be confirmed by decoding the grid taking the digits two at a time mod26.

So I had an already filled in grid and the clues were very easy to write as all I had to do was put each entry into each function in turn. I did the cold solve and wondered if I could give the outputs in a random order for each clue. Brimstone’s ones were an easy spot as were some of Googly’s. I found that that could be done but forgot to type it up in the summer of 2011.

I didn’t send the puzzle away though and came upon it again in the spring of 2012. By now Olympic fever had gripped the country. You couldn’t go anywhere without hearing Vangelis’ haunting opening theme music to Chariots of Fire. The opening scenes were filmed on the West Sands here in St Andrews and at the time I was doing my Ph.D in theoretical/computational chemistry.

Such was the Olympic fever that our SMT deemed that the S2 in school would have a whole fortnight of Olympic themed lessons. Now that’s all well and good for subjects that only had the kids a couple of periods a week but in maths it was 4 periods a week! We rose to the challenge and managed to come up with 8 topics, the best of which was a mini Olympic games where they had to see how far they could putt the cotton wool ball, how far they could throw the drinking straw javelin and the paper plate discus!! The fortnight culminated with the S2 going down to the West Sands on the Friday afternoon to recreate the opening scenes of the film and the rangers on the Old Course suspended play, briefly I hasten to add, so that the pupils could cross the course safely.

Hang on a minute Vangelis had been the keyboard player in the Greek prog rock group Aphrodite’s Child and one of their hits had been Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse with Demis Roussos  on wailing vocals. Could I perhaps bring this into the puzzle in some way?  A quick letter count revealed that Aphrodite’s Child had 15 letters – great a 5×3 rectangle. I don’t know what I’d have done if it had been prime.

I decided to have a central rectangle that would have to be decoded mod10 to reveal the group and that the corner cells would have to be coloured according to the lyrics in the song which were taken from the Book of Revelations. The digits in the corner cells would use the same code as the central rectangle and as the track was from their album 666 – how good was that? – that number too would appear.

I took the opportunity to redo the functions and change them to rules. Arden’s rule stayed the same and Mr Magoo’s rule became Brimstone’s as I had a better idea for Mr Magoo!!  In issue 72 of The Magpie the numerical puzzle was Manual Cipher by Mr Magoo and here you were given clues that gave the number of prime factors of the entry along with their sum.  So I made Mr Magoo’s rule the sum of the prime factors of the entry just to keep things correct.  I ditched Googly’s over complicated rule and made that the other rule that had appeared in M72.

Since the grid was only partially filled in I had a bit more latitude than before in that now I could chose some of the entries. To give solvers a bit of help I made one entry a prime which would give them a way in via the rules provided by Googly and Mr Magoo.

With puzzle set and solved I sent it away and waited. At Christmas time I set another puzzle and sent that in and asked what was happening regarding Four Setters of The Apocalypse.  I was informed that it had been solved but that the ending was too obvious given my preamble and title and that they had come up with some changes. A new title was one along with a completely different preamble. As these were a vast improvement, I was more than happy to go along with it.

I realise that some, perhaps many, solvers will not have appreciated the dénouement and preferred to have just had the puzzle without it or worse still no puzzle at all!

The puzzle was an attempt to try something different in the clueing department and in the lyrics of ‘I Believe’ by Asia is the line ‘How can I contribute if I just don’t try?’.  Well I tried and I contributed. You can’t do any more than that. Whether it was worthwhile or not will be decided by the feedback but rest assured regardless of the positivity or negativity I will keep on trying.

Eclogue’s thoughts on the setting of Bow End

The Magpie was sent a review copy of Two Girls, One on Each Knee (7) by Alan Connor. Here is our review.

This Christmas marks, almost exactly, the 100th anniversary of the crossword, and here is an ideal Christmas present for the crossworder in your life. There is something in this book for everyone who at least understands the attraction of filling in empty white squares, from crossword editors to members of occasional lunch-break collectives.

Magpie subscribers will already know many of the anecdotes that fill the pages. But it is nice to be reminded of the provost of Eton, GEGS, the D-Day crosswords, Arthur Wynne’s word-cross puzzle, and other old friends. Connor writes well, and the story of the Simpsons crossword, for instance, has not been told better. There are also some surprises. My favourite discovery is the letter from P.G. Wodehouse to the Times in 1934.

The book is organised so that you can read the chapters in any order, and the contents page itself is a crossword, so you can even solve along if you like. If you prefer an element of surprise, the index is comprehensive, including such beguiling entries as Run-D.M.C (band); diddybums (word); toads, lack of hopping; grocers, infuriated. What is more, at least five Magpie subscribers are listed, along with one editor-in-chief. You’ll have to get hold of the book to find out who.

Chris Lear