CISRA Puzzle Competition 2012 - Solutions3D. Pyramid TrapFirst, solving the cryptic clues yields the following set of 78 words:
While solving these clues, it may become clear that some words seem to belong together, grouped into several sets following some themes. Indeed, this may help to solve some of the cryptic clues. Grouping the words partitions the cryptic clue answers into a set of one word, a set of two words, a set of three words, and so on up to a set of twelve words. Furthermore, the words in each set can be ordered following a canonical ordering, and each has one item missing. Often, we are just looking for a single word from a longer name, in which case the word tends to be the most significant noun. The sets of words are as follows, with the missing words inserted in italics, in the correct place in the ordered sequence:
The set of Holst's The Planets includes the later addition of Pluto, the Renewer, composed as a supplement to the suite after the discovery of the (now former) ninth planet; while the set of Star Trek films includes only those released at the time of the puzzle competition, and not the film currently in production.
Now, to use the information in the pyramid. The levels of the pyramid correspond to the sets of words, where each set is assigned to the row containing one less word than the set, because of the missing word. Noticing that each set of words is strictly ordered (but were supplied non-sorted), it is reasonable to sort them before using the numbers. Using the numbers to index into the ordered words gives one letter per word, which combine to form one new word per row of the pyramid. All of the new words come from various ordered sets of their own!
These words can be formed by anagramming, but this is not necessary. The original clues were supplied in a scrambled order, but that order was not random. Reading the extracted letters in the same order as the clues were originally presented produces the unscrambled words without the need to do any anagramming. Using the sequence position of each of these words, and indexing into the missing word at each level of the pyramid gives the final clue: FIRSTMESSIER The Messier objects are a numerically ordered list of astronomical objects. The first one, and hence our answer, is the CRAB NEBULA. This is related to the puzzle title, as a pyramid trap is a type of trap used to catch small aquatic creatures, in particular crabs. Puzzle design notes: We originally had the idea for this puzzle about two years ago. The raw idea was to use multiple ordered sets of items, each set having a different number of items, and provide clues to discovering them. This idea was tossed around several times in collective brainstorming sessions, but for a long time we couldn't think of a mechanic to add to it that would lead to a puzzle. A few times we tried something, but discovered that the sets we had were far too constrained to do anything interesting with. In the run up to the 2012 competition, we suggested attacking this idea again. We came up with the idea of using letters from each word in each set to spell out a new thing, which also came from an ordered set. We also hit the idea of removing one item from each set, because it could be filled in once you know what the other items are. This slowly got hammered into a working version of most bits of the puzzle. The difficult parts were the small sets: each of the sets of two, three, and four were particularly difficult. It was only when we hit on the ordered set of "flotsam and jetsam" and the idea that we could spell "A" as the first letter of the alphabet to indicate the number 1, that we became confident that we could get the entire puzzle to work at all. The set of eight was also tricky, and it was only when some research turned up that Holst's The Planets suite had an additional eighth member added by a later composer that we finally had somethig workable. The most difficult set of all was the set of four. We initially wanted to use "ark, temple, crusade, skull", referring to the four Indiana Jones movies. But for the next step of the puzzle we had decided that we needed to produce a letter "R" from this set. This meant we had to find a word that was: (a) three letters long; (b) that could be spelled using one letter each from three of these four words, leaving out either "ark" or "crusade"; and (c) that was canonically the second element in an ordered set. Despite long and hard searching, we found nothing compelling. So we had to look for a different set of four items, under the constraints: (a) it had to be a canonically ordered set of four; (b) letters from three of the words could be used to spell out a word that was a member of an ordered set, that indexed into the remaining word to produce the letter "R"; and (c) none of the words in the set matched any of the words already being used in the puzzle from the other sets. Even finding ordered sets of exactly four objects is a difficult task. For a while, the best choice we had was "Rheingold, Walkürie, Siegfried, Götterdämmerung". This would have worked, using them to spell out ETA, the 6th letter of the Greek alphabet, to index into "Siegfried". But these words would have been difficult to write cryptic clues for, and would have stood out like sore thumbs against all the other words in the puzzle. Eventually we found the set we used, but the by-this-time three of us working on constructing this puzzle were not particularly compelled by them. Alas we never managed to find anything better, so we went with it. By this time we'd invested several weeks of intensive work on the puzzle, plus about two years of back-burner time. We thought that the overall the puzzle was strong enough to withstand one or two slightly more obscure sets of words. In the end, we think this puzzle turned out pretty well.
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