Query

[rhu]

I'm trying to understand the fuzzy boundary between "puzzle people" and "non-puzzle people". So here's a short puzzle. I'm curious about your reaction, especially if you don't consider yourself a "puzzle person." In the comments section, please tell me what you think the answer is, what your thought process is in trying to extract the answer, and whether or not you'd self-identify as a "puzzle person."

CANA YOUB EXTRACTD WORDSC EVENA LACKINGC INSTRUCTIONSD

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Comments

[gnomi.livejournal.com]

I read it easily ("Can you extract words even lacking instruction"). I do consider myself something of a puzzle person.

I then wondered if the extra letters were intended as musical cues.

[sethg]

I am not a “puzzle person” and the first few words “CAN YOU EXTRACT...” fairly jumped out at me from the screen, from which I deduce the answer is “CAN YOU EXTRACT WORDS EVEN LACKING INSTRUCTIONS”. Then I went back and looked at the extra letters “ABDCACD” but don’t see an interesting word there. Maybe those letters are a code to the extracted words? “CAN YOU WORDS EXTRACT CAN EXTRACT WORDS”? No, that doesn’t work... so, yeah, I’m going with “CAN YOU EXTRACT WORDS EVEN LACKING INSTRUCTIONS” as the answer.

[greenlily.livejournal.com]

I got 'can you extract words even lacking instructions' almost immediately. I don't consider myself a puzzle person, but I'm pretty good at word searches.

[cnoocy]

I got "can you extract" and thought "the fact that the extra letters aren't a,b,c must mean something." Then I read the full sentence, and went back and tried using the letters as an index into the words, giving me the correct answer.

[cnoocy]

And yes, I do consider myself a puzzle person.

[cellio]

"Can you extract" jumped out at me, making the rest of the phrase trivial. I noticed that the extras were not A-B-C as I was anticipating, but couldn't find any meaning in ABDCACD. (They're all <= G so possible music notes, but that's not doing anything for me and I only went down that path because it's you.)

I think of my self as "kind of" a puzzle person; I enjoy puzzles that make me think but don't have much patience for ones that require obscure knowledge, and very little patience at all for ones that involve a lot of slogging through. (For example, I know how to solve the class of puzzles of the form "the schoolteacher drives the red car, the Spaniard lives next door to the Canadian..." etc, but I have zero interest in solving another one because I find it tedious. Same with the 100 pirates determining how to split the treasure chest where you have to do 98 levels of recursion -- I can, but I don't wanna.)

[cellio]

Having read the other comments, let me amend "'kind of' a puzzle person", because I am completely "untrained" -- that a puzzle should have a one-word answer never occurred to me and contradicts my experience of (more-casual) puzzles, and I didn't think of indexing (probably should have but because I'm a geek, not because I'm a puzzler).

The icon I instinctively reached for might be relevant too: for me puzzles fall into the "games" bucket. Dunno if puzzlers see that differently.

[squonk-npl.livejournal.com]

My first thought was "Yes", just dropping the last letters. But then I saw the extra letters weren't alphabetical, so I converted them to numbers and extracted the appropriate letter of each word to get what must be the intended answer: CORRECT.

I would absolutely consider myself a "puzzle person", but you knew that.

[tahnan.livejournal.com]

I'm with Squonk and G2znii, perhaps unsurprisingly. Skimming the earlier comments, it looks like one difference between a "puzzle person" and a "non-puzzle person" is that the former will take this and look for a one-word answer.

[tahnan.livejournal.com]

It occurs to me that I could push that distinction one step farther (or back?): suppose you gave people the list of words:

CHALET
LABORATORY
MORTGAGE
EXTRAORDINARY
SALMON
DEBTOR
ILLINOIS

I think the difference is that a non-puzzle person would say "Huh. List of words", and a puzzle person would say "Huh. List of words. Can I get an answer out of it?" That is, someone who doesn't do puzzles wouldn't even think about getting an answer out of a list of words, never mind how to get an answer.

[cramerica.livejournal.com]

cute :)
At first I was indexing again (by number of syllables), but then...

[tahnan.livejournal.com]

Don't look at me; those are the answers to Round 1 of the Matrix hunt. :-)

[530nm330hz.livejournal.com]

So obviously this is a little skewed, in that puzzle people will be expecting a one-word answer and will be used to indexing as one of the first things to attempt.

I am noticing one trend in the answers from the non-puzzlers, which is not what I expected but which is illuminating regarding the question that I was hoping this little experiment would answer. I'm going to let this play out a while longer before posting my other observations.

[jadelennox]

I saw the phrase, realised the excess letters probably meant something, and decided I couldn't be bothered to figure out what. Which is why I don't consider myself puzzle people.

(To amend, I find word puzzles to be worth solving only if there's a point; a hunt, or a group panda solve, or some such. Number and logic puzzles I'll solve just for kicks and giggles, although since nobody on my friends list ever posts them randomly I don't know if I'd feel inclined to follow through had this been number-based instead.)

[acroarcs.livejournal.com]

Got it quickly - but then, puzzle person.

[acroarcs.livejournal.com]

Oh, and the thought process was roughly similar to the other puzzlers, although it didn't occur to me that the immediately readable message was "extracted" and thus never thought that was the answer at all.

[(Anonymous)]

I am a sort of puzzle person, but at a much lower level than you. As you might infer from your knowledge of my spelling history, I have a great facility with words and patterns associated with them, which was actually of little help here. I had no big trouble with this, though I haven't seen a puzzle like it before. Ignoring the extra letters, the content of the sentence suggested to me that there was a word (or words) to extract, and it struck me as most likely that the only clue about what the word might be was from the extra letters. I reasoned that the most sensible place to start was to use those extra letters as a numeric key, especially since they were all from the beginning of the alphabet. My first instinct, which was correct, was to count letters from the start of each word. By the time I got to "wordsc" I was able to extrapolate correctly that the answer was "correct."

[(Anonymous)]

Oh, forgot to put my name in. It's none other than M. Balish.

[jeffurrynpl.livejournal.com]

Same as Squonk, G2znii, and Tahnan, though it took me longer to do the last step than I would have liked.

[lucretia-borgia.livejournal.com]

Well, I looked at that and thought, ok, what does "CB" have to do with anything?

I guess I'd consider myself a puzzle-ish person, meaning that while I'm happy to take on a puzzle, there are specific puzzle types out there that all the puzzle people have learned from experience or specific teaching to solve or write, and I don't know those. And I don't care enough/have enough otherwise unoccupied brain space to bother learning the types and their typical solution methods. I note that the very term "extract" appears to have a technical meaning that a puzzle person is aware of and nonpuzzlers aren't.

Had you not declared this to be a puzzle, I would have just read the English words and moved on. Would puzzlers and nonpuzzlers approach that mess of letters differently in the absence of a specific clue that it's a "puzzle"?

even lacking instructions

[(Anonymous)]

The "hidden" question came though automatically, without any effort to decode. But ABDCACD might be a letter pattern (although I don't know why D would come before A). Thinking this really isn't your intention, I just used a tool to find words matching the pattern (didn't mind "cheating" for an objective I thought was my own alone). 1243134 matches ACETATE and PITAPAT, also RIDERED. Less-standard words and phrases include DIERDRE, ICENINE, MINEMEN, MIRAMAR, and a few less-interesting things.
===Dan

Re: even lacking instructions

[tahnan.livejournal.com]

Yeah well to tell you just how good a puzzle person I am, I read this and thought, "There's no way he found 1,243,134 matches. What the hell word list is he using?" Some days it doesn't pay to get out of bed.

CORRECT

[kirisutogomen.livejournal.com]

So, I do a fair number of crossword puzzles, sudoku, et cetera -- puzzles that are tightly circumscribed by an unambiguous set of rules and clearly defined solution criteria.

The more open-ended sort of puzzle, like this one, is not my cup of tea. I've done occasional rule-bending crosswords; I particularly remember a NYT crossword that used a blank square to substitute for the letters s-p-a-c-e (so a clue of "astronaut" could map to " MAN). There was no hint in the crossword that there was going to be any rule-bending, but I appreciated the cleverness of it.

To me, anyway, I don't think someone counts as a 'puzzle person' unless they really enjoy the more ill-defined genus of puzzles (so I'm not a puzzle person, even though I regularly spend time doing puzzles).

On this puzzle, I almost stopped at the point some of the other non-puzzle-people stopped; having discarded some noise, I had a legitimate English sentence, which seemed like a plausible answer criterion.

But of course, there's those pesky extra letters, and they don't really look like noise. They're one per word, always at the end, and all very early in the alphabet. Most importantly, unlike most of real life, puzzles tend not to have superfluous elements just extraneously floating around. So maybe I haven't solved the puzzle yet.

OK, let's look at the leftover letters. Well, they're clearly not being used as actual letters. They look more like uh, I dunno, numbers? Not digits -- 1243134 isn't anything. Counting something. (aha!) I had no idea that 'indexing' was a particularly common technique in puzzling, but it didn't take me long to think of it; it doesn't seem like terribly arbitrary or esoteric puzzle-culture knowledge.

[abbasegal.livejournal.com]

OK, I am a pseudo-puzzle person. I like crosswords (regular and american cryptic -- British cryptic I don't have the patience for), sudoko, logic puzzles, etc. But the only enigmas I've tried to solve are the ones you have written and shared, and I don't in general search out other sorts of word puzzles to solve. I (presumably like everyone) immediately read the prefix-sentence and then got the ABDCACD string, but then didn't know what to do with that (and then read the other comments). The thought of using them as an index into the words didn't cross my mind. Of course, now that I have seen that trick, I expect I'd be more likely to try it out if I am in an obvious word-puzzle situation (especially presented by you... ;-) ).

[rubrick.livejournal.com]

I'm a puzzle person. I quickly listed the extraneous letters and sought a pattern, but failed to try indexing — not for the first time on such a puzzle. This may be in part because using letters as indexes into other strings of letters feels slightly inelegant to me.

Among answers I considered but rejected:
- B, which is the only letter of ABCD to not appear twice in the extras.
- CAB DB, the missing letters from ABCDABCDABCD. Meaningless, alas.

[tahnan.livejournal.com]

"Meaningless"? You don't spend enough time on the Internet Taxi Database, clearly.

[(Anonymous)]

I don't consider myself a puzzle person. I read the surface text immediately, then thought both that that was too trivial and that the trailing letters were suspiciously pattern-like. The self-contradictory embedded instructions ("extract words") were another clue to look further and find the correct answer. Finally I considered how to avoid giving spoilers in this comment.

[(Anonymous)]

(The preceding comment, as well as this one, were written by Pam G.)

[rikchik.livejournal.com]

The message is trivial to read. The leftover letters are ABDCACD which doesn't mean much to me (had the thought that they could be music or maybe use the missing letters, like C and then maybe B twice, but yuck). Just as I was about to move on I realized that the letters could be indexes and thought "let me try that - oh, sure enough, there you go." CORRECT. Before that I was going to go with "Yes" as an answer.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

It says, "Can you extract words, even lacking instructions?"

There was no thought process. I just looked at it, and read it.

It wasn't until I was already reading "Can you extract words, even lacking instructions" that I even noticed that the format is "word followed by an extraneous letter."

Now that I've noticed that, I'm curious as to if there's any significance to the particular extraneous letters, or if they're just random.

I don't think of myself as either a puzzle person or not. I'm somewhere in the middle.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

Looking over the other comments, I think this clearly puts me into the "not a puzzle person" category.

[mabfan.livejournal.com]

Let's see. I started by extracting the sentence "Can you extract words even lacking instructions."

Then I looked at ABDCACD. What could that be? It's not a word, it's not good poetry rhyme scheme.

So then I thought maybe the letters were coding something in each word. If A=1, B=2, then...

I get

CORRECT

which seems too much of a coincidence not to be the right answer.

[(Anonymous)]

I got the question and noticed the extra letters without thinking too much about them. (Then I saw the comments and figured out what you were supposed to do with the extra letters.) I don't think I'm much of a puzzle person, although it could just be that I don't spend time doing them and I would be a puzzle person if I spent time on them. :-) I do like puzzles like Sudoku and Mastermind, though.

JCBC

convention

[danchall.myvidoop.com (from livejournal.com)]

What does it mean to be a "puzzle person?" It might have something to do with a tendency to solve, to seek patterns, etc. But the fact that the word "index" came to mind so readily suggests that some of the participants here have experience with a particular puzzle form, or a standard list of things to try based on what it means to be a "puzzle" to those with some shared knowledge. Maybe there's a cultural component.
===Dan

[foggyb.livejournal.com]

I'm a puzzle person and I got the CORRECT answer.

[cazique.livejournal.com]

Same as G2 and Tahnan. I think Tahnan's idea (it looks like one difference between a "puzzle person" and a "non-puzzle person" is that the former will take this and look for a one-word answer.) is right on.

[ennienyc.livejournal.com]

I'm a puzzle person, but a non-MIT Hunt puzzle person. That explains why I easily read the sentence, did not notice the extra letters were the LAST letters, started reading the comments and checked if the extras were a recognizable song, saw Squonk's comment, thought "Huh?" and then thought "Ohhhhh."

[tahnan.livejournal.com]

Which is actually a pretty relevant distinction. Please don't ever put me up against Ellen on a crossword puzzle, but I've got far more experience at Mystery-Hunt-style puzzles.

IT'SA PRETTYB EASYC BUTA ...

[(Anonymous)]

It was trivial to read the text, but it left me wondering why the "extra" letters are "A B D C A C D". Something musical perhaps? I'm *not* a puzzle person, though, as you noted, the boundary is fuzzy. I enjoy working on, and occasionally solving puzzles, but when I think of the term "puzzle person," I think of someone like ... well, you, for instance. -pd

[vettecat.livejournal.com]

See the phrase easily but not sure why you chose those extra letters. Not curious enough to spend time trying to figure it out, though. I like jigsaws but I don't think that's what you mean by "puzzle person"...

[tinhorn2.livejournal.com]

Same as the various "same as"'s up there. Indexing using the leftovers was the 4th thing I tried to do with them -- transpose them, try them as notes (including names of those notes), rearrange the given words and look for patterns, then indexing.

[cramerica.livejournal.com]

Dittoes, except I didn't try transposition/rearrangement

[dougo.livejournal.com]

I consider myself a "puzzle person". I did not think there was an extra step until I read cnoocy's reply. Oh well.

Thought Process

[euphud.livejournal.com]

I'm not a puzzle person. I love Sudoku and the occasional logic puzzle. Not a fan of crosswords at all.

I disregarded the obvious "Can you extract words..." message as a red herring, and tried to make sense of the "ABDCACD" pattern. I wasn't looking for the "one word" answer, which seems to be obvious to the puzzlers. Instead, I was trying to sing the letters to myself to figure out a tune. What's in A-minor? Then I was trying to use the letters as number to rearrange the words to create a new phrase.

Then the temptation of 40+ previous comments overrode my curiosity, and I found out what the answer was.

[ertchin.livejournal.com]

I believe the answer is CORRECT.

For a few moments I thought the puzzle was as simple as reading the phrase minus the trailing letters--maybe you were testing something by posting such an incredibly easy puzzle? Then I considered sorting the words by their trailing letters for a moment, and then the "correct" method presented itself. I think the sorting letters being close to "ABCDABCD" in order threw me off for a bit.

I consider myself a puzzle person. Also someone three weeks behind on LJ.

[thnidu.livejournal.com]

I'm sort of a puzzle person, and I only got as far as the extracted sentence. Like sethg_prime (http://530nm330hz.livejournal.com/369445.html?thread=1179685#t1179685), I thought that was it and didn't try to follow through on the extra letters any further than stringing them together.