Panda #30 solving report
Feb. 20th, 2011 08:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rhuYeah, it took me a month between when Panda issue #30 came out and when I downloaded it and started working on it. Life, Hunt, Work, and all that. But I'm glad I waited, because this past week was the first time I was relaxed enough to really be able to enjoy it, and enjoy it I did.
Four Sets of Gloves jumped out as a likely easy first solve, which it was; although I needed Wikipedia to nail down many of the pop-culture references, it was a quick, clean solve.
Next I turned to Boxes and Boxes of Stuff. It was clear what needed to be done, but it took a little while to get everything sorted out. For a long time, I got hung up on CERIUM which I wanted to be CESIUM instead of CURIUM, and TUNA which I wanted to be TUNA (in the fish group) instead of CUBA (in the countries), but I eventually reasoned my way through. Very elegant puzzle.
After that, Mudflaps. Not too much trouble here, although I only solved about half the individual answers. I was a little uncertain of whether my answer was unambiguously correct -- was there another slogan for the missing state? Was I right in interpreting the set of states as New England? A brief flavortext to reassure me would have been, well, reassuring.
At this point, I dug in to the cryptic clues on Tennis Rackets; this one took me on-and-off a few days before I had enough to extract an answer. I don't have much to say on this one; I love cryptics and it was a fun solve, although I did end up relying more than I would like on TEA to probe for possible answers and ended up with about 20% of the puzzle still blank once I got enough letters to solve the answer.
Then came A Complicated Gadget. This kind of puzzle always grabs hold of my brain, but I think the part of it that hurts my brain is trying to keep straight what direction the transformation at the end of each clue goes. So for example I still don't know what to do with METHAMPHETAMINE but I could still extract an H from it. Got _HIO___SHALLP_SSBA_D and even with O instead of S that was enough for me to get the right answer.
Next was Office Accents. I know that Foggy keeps trying to come up with cryptograms that can't be thrown at a computer, but I hate solving cryptograms so I'm really happy when I can throw it at the computer and get something that's 95% done, letting me worry about the interesting part. This one in particular was a very nice twist. Again, though, I was a little unnerved by the fact that the answer was slightly ambiguous and there was no flavortext to resolve that. (I had four possible answers --- two names for the symbol, and then both with and without the base letter. I tentatively assumed the simplest possible answer, which was correct, but I had a big question mark next to it on my tally sheet for the meta.)
My final puzzle the first night was Worst. Birthday Gift. Ever. As I said to Foggy in email, I really appreciate that this issue had no real Google Droog puzzles; while WBGE required a bunch of IMDB searching, it was not too onerous and the subject matter made me smile. Also, the alternating entries meant that there was plenty of good old-fashioned thinking going on between searches. The colored ribbons were a festive touch. (Although I'm still not sure what kind of clocks there are.)
Second evening, I cracked Bowl of Soup. A fun concept, but I lucked out by getting #6, then #4, then #2, and that was enough to get the answer.
It was at this point, with 7 of 12 answers in hand, that I started to think about the meta. The ordering mechanism was clear, but the extraction mechanism wasn't. So I went back to puzzles, finishing up Rackets and tackling Something Tailor-Made. That was a nice quick puzzle with the expected twist, but it was also one of those elegant puzzles that, even once I had the answer, I polished off. I did find it a little inelegant that Tailor-Made and Gadget had such similar final steps, but sometimes that's how things are.
The next day, I was still getting nowhere with the meta, so I blocked out some time to get crunching on Cold Hard Cash. Worked my way most of the way through it before hitting a contradiction, then it occurred to me to check for any errata -- and there was in fact a correction that changed the flow. So I printed out a fresh copy and started over, and this time I logged every deduction I made along the way and which answers depended on which steps in my logic flow. This was good, because at one point I discovered that I am incapable of reliably doubling a four-digit number with no carrying and had to backtrack everything that depended on 16D. I was worried that the factoring would prove ambiguous but working on the assumption that I'd end up with the coins of each type in each pocket being in the range of 1 through 26 carried me through. As with the "Band that answers this trivia question" pair, the similarity to Gloves (left and right gloves/pockets with five fingers/coin types each) was an unfortunate inelegance; I started to suspect though that this was a way to pair up individual answers for the meta, which of course was a red herring.
So now I had ten answers out of twelve, and no excuse for being unable to extract the final answer. Surprise and Book of the Month Club weren't going anywhere (although looking now at the hints for Book I find that I was getting close to what I now think is the right approach; I was broadening correctly but didn't notice how to re-narrow.
Finally, after staring at a four-letter answer and running through every possible way to extract a letter from it, I saw what needed doing and the meta fell just under a week from when I started.
Very nice, Foggy. I'm looking forward now to doing the "cool down" puzzles at the front of the issue, and perhaps next month I'll be able to start early enough to have a shot at the top-ten list.
And if any of you have been considering subscribing to Panda, let me recommend that you buy this issue. I expect you'll be hooked.
Four Sets of Gloves jumped out as a likely easy first solve, which it was; although I needed Wikipedia to nail down many of the pop-culture references, it was a quick, clean solve.
Next I turned to Boxes and Boxes of Stuff. It was clear what needed to be done, but it took a little while to get everything sorted out. For a long time, I got hung up on CERIUM which I wanted to be CESIUM instead of CURIUM, and TUNA which I wanted to be TUNA (in the fish group) instead of CUBA (in the countries), but I eventually reasoned my way through. Very elegant puzzle.
After that, Mudflaps. Not too much trouble here, although I only solved about half the individual answers. I was a little uncertain of whether my answer was unambiguously correct -- was there another slogan for the missing state? Was I right in interpreting the set of states as New England? A brief flavortext to reassure me would have been, well, reassuring.
At this point, I dug in to the cryptic clues on Tennis Rackets; this one took me on-and-off a few days before I had enough to extract an answer. I don't have much to say on this one; I love cryptics and it was a fun solve, although I did end up relying more than I would like on TEA to probe for possible answers and ended up with about 20% of the puzzle still blank once I got enough letters to solve the answer.
Then came A Complicated Gadget. This kind of puzzle always grabs hold of my brain, but I think the part of it that hurts my brain is trying to keep straight what direction the transformation at the end of each clue goes. So for example I still don't know what to do with METHAMPHETAMINE but I could still extract an H from it. Got _HIO___SHALLP_SSBA_D and even with O instead of S that was enough for me to get the right answer.
Next was Office Accents. I know that Foggy keeps trying to come up with cryptograms that can't be thrown at a computer, but I hate solving cryptograms so I'm really happy when I can throw it at the computer and get something that's 95% done, letting me worry about the interesting part. This one in particular was a very nice twist. Again, though, I was a little unnerved by the fact that the answer was slightly ambiguous and there was no flavortext to resolve that. (I had four possible answers --- two names for the symbol, and then both with and without the base letter. I tentatively assumed the simplest possible answer, which was correct, but I had a big question mark next to it on my tally sheet for the meta.)
My final puzzle the first night was Worst. Birthday Gift. Ever. As I said to Foggy in email, I really appreciate that this issue had no real Google Droog puzzles; while WBGE required a bunch of IMDB searching, it was not too onerous and the subject matter made me smile. Also, the alternating entries meant that there was plenty of good old-fashioned thinking going on between searches. The colored ribbons were a festive touch. (Although I'm still not sure what kind of clocks there are.)
Second evening, I cracked Bowl of Soup. A fun concept, but I lucked out by getting #6, then #4, then #2, and that was enough to get the answer.
It was at this point, with 7 of 12 answers in hand, that I started to think about the meta. The ordering mechanism was clear, but the extraction mechanism wasn't. So I went back to puzzles, finishing up Rackets and tackling Something Tailor-Made. That was a nice quick puzzle with the expected twist, but it was also one of those elegant puzzles that, even once I had the answer, I polished off. I did find it a little inelegant that Tailor-Made and Gadget had such similar final steps, but sometimes that's how things are.
The next day, I was still getting nowhere with the meta, so I blocked out some time to get crunching on Cold Hard Cash. Worked my way most of the way through it before hitting a contradiction, then it occurred to me to check for any errata -- and there was in fact a correction that changed the flow. So I printed out a fresh copy and started over, and this time I logged every deduction I made along the way and which answers depended on which steps in my logic flow. This was good, because at one point I discovered that I am incapable of reliably doubling a four-digit number with no carrying and had to backtrack everything that depended on 16D. I was worried that the factoring would prove ambiguous but working on the assumption that I'd end up with the coins of each type in each pocket being in the range of 1 through 26 carried me through. As with the "Band that answers this trivia question" pair, the similarity to Gloves (left and right gloves/pockets with five fingers/coin types each) was an unfortunate inelegance; I started to suspect though that this was a way to pair up individual answers for the meta, which of course was a red herring.
So now I had ten answers out of twelve, and no excuse for being unable to extract the final answer. Surprise and Book of the Month Club weren't going anywhere (although looking now at the hints for Book I find that I was getting close to what I now think is the right approach; I was broadening correctly but didn't notice how to re-narrow.
Finally, after staring at a four-letter answer and running through every possible way to extract a letter from it, I saw what needed doing and the meta fell just under a week from when I started.
Very nice, Foggy. I'm looking forward now to doing the "cool down" puzzles at the front of the issue, and perhaps next month I'll be able to start early enough to have a shot at the top-ten list.
And if any of you have been considering subscribing to Panda, let me recommend that you buy this issue. I expect you'll be hooked.
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(no subject)
Date: 2011-02-21 03:19 am (UTC)I also really love Complicated-Gadget-like puzzles. I think you might have gotten a little lucky on METHAMPHETAMINE (and I'm not sure how you got an O from the fourth answer).
WBGE was easily my favorite puzzle of the issue. (It helped that I only needed to actually look up one or two of the names.)
I disagree with your feeling about one pair of puzzles having similar final steps. While it did happen to be the case that two answers were bands, one final step involved identifying a band based on a song it recorded, and the other involved its members. "Two of these answers are bands" is certainly something noteworthy; "two of these answers are bands that you got from clue phrases" doesn't seem to be so to me. (I'll admit that two different "a letter per finger on two hands" puzzles is sort of striking, though I didn't for a moment notice it during testsolving.)
"Surprise" is hard. "Book of the Month" didn't seem hard to me at all, but some II&Fers who gathered to solve at one point also had that as one of their last two unsolved puzzles, so maybe it's harder than I thought.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-02-21 04:19 am (UTC)I'm sure I got lucky with METHAMPHETAMINE, and I got an O by taking LINCOLN (which Wikipedia assures me is the correct president) and bigram-beheading it to the nonsense entry NCOLN and taking the third letter. The fact that it's a nonsense entry was why I was perfectly happy to disregard it. If I'd not been able to get the answer from the other letters, I'd have reworked this one.
The thing about the bands is that not only were there two bands (which could have been avoided by using OKLAHOMA or OKAPI or OKRA as the tin answer), but that my attention was drawn to that by the fact that those two puzzles used clue phrases. I might not have noticed if one of them had come directly out of leftover letters. And again, if it had been the only coincidence I would have disregarded it; when there were two puzzles that could plausibly be paired up and I was stuck on the meta for four days, that coincidence started to look awfully enticing.
With Book of the Month, I think the difficulty issue is that unlike most of the other puzzles here, it's an all-or-nothing "aha" moment; you can't make partial progress (as you might with Bowl of Soup) and then see what develops. Even if you have the right general idea (what else did this author write?), even with a list of other titles, you either think to look for that specific relationship or you don't. Yes, I looked at every book Amazon had listed for George "W" Bush, Charlotte Brontë, Ariane Dewey, and Kate Mosse, and nothing jumped out at me, so I went back to combining the correct and incorrect letters mathematically as well as I could. I tried using them as a key to Caesar-shifting the authors' names, etc.
And I should have said up front: these are my notes from while I was solving. Just because I didn't spot the right solution to a particular puzzle is not an accusation that the puzzle is flawed, unfair, or anything except something that I didn't get. It's just my personal reaction to the red herring of the answer pairs that they tarnished my enjoyment of the puzzle suite in much the same way that noticing a cue dot throws me out of suspended disbelief when watching a movie. And I can't say often enough how much I enjoyed this issue.
The main reason I go into this much detail is because I hope that it helps Foggy (and you) to correlate your expectations of the experience for the middle-of-the-pack solver with what I actually went through. (I think I'm middle-of-the-pack because I've cracked the top-ten list once, which feels nice and middling to me, but perhaps I flatter myself.) This will, I hope, be of use in increasing everyone's satisfaction with the process and the product.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-02-21 04:31 am (UTC)There's no doubt that Book of the Month is an all-or-nothing aha; I was just surprised that it was hard to get, since the flavortext suggested looking for a more appropriate title, and there's only one book by Charlotte Brontë that...no, wait, there's kind of only one book by Charlotte Brontë. So that leapt out to me.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-02-21 09:08 pm (UTC)As far as answer choice, there were other OK answers I could have used...OK CORRAL, e.g. When it was possible to have the first part be a separate word, I tried to make that happen. The one I used I like because it was so short, there was a limit to what you can do with it.
Surprise, once you get the A-ha, is I think a fun puzzle to solve. But much like BotM, it's a "get-the-aha-or-stare" sort of puzzle. Book of the Month would have been helped by doing more with the changed letter...making it so that the 13 letters (either before or after) gave something clueful.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-02-21 09:22 pm (UTC)