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CiSRA Puzzle Competition 2010 - Solutions

5A. Identikit

The first step is to identify the names of the actors that our confused stool pigeon has attempted to describe. Paragraph 1 describes:

Paragraph 2 describes:

Paragraph 3 describes:

Next, as suggested by the title "Identikit" and other hints scattered through the puzzle — "look at him", "look closely", "picture that", "picture her", the confused Taxi Driver quote "lookin' at me?" (the famous line is actually, "You talkin' to me?") — you should look at pictures of each of the actors. After looking at a few of them, you will probably notice a common feature: they all have prominent facial moles. It should be possible to find all of them using your favorite image search engine. Some are obvious (Marilyn Monroe), some are sometimes concealed (Elizabeth Taylor). Ewan McGregor has several facial moles.

If we draw the moles in sequence (as indicated by "join it with", "join her with", "and then", "next") for each paragraph onto a common face, we get the following:

5A. solution 1

The name "LEO" is spelled out. Written all over their faces, as it were. But that's not quite the answer yet - from the first paragraph, "I know you want his full name".

LEONARDO DICAPRIO is the actor most frequently associated with the nickname Leo, and is the answer. He played a police mole (or snitch, depending on your perspective) in the Mafia in the Oscar-winning film The Departed (we also accepted the name of his character BILLY COSTIGAN or WILLIAM COSTIGAN, as well as just the surnames DICAPRIO or COSTIGAN).

Puzzle design notes: During test solving, we identified all the actors, then thought, "Well, the puzzle title is 'Identikit'. Wouldn't it be cool if you had to assemble bits of their faces somehow to get the answer? Yeah, that would make a great puzzle! But that's so impossible, it's never going to be the way to solve this."

So we didn't look at the actors' faces and instead proceeded to try all sorts of things with anagramming their names, finding movies they'd been in, checking their birthdates, and so on. When the puzzle creator hinted that we should actually take a look at the faces (after three days of frustration) we said, "No. What? Really? No way."

Then we looked at the faces, and solved the puzzle in under 2 minutes. Congratulations to all the teams who actually bothered to look at the actors' faces before the first hint!