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CISRA Puzzle Competition 2012 - Solutions

M. Metapuzzle

The metapuzzle consists of twenty parts; each piece contains a mini-puzzle that produces a short answer when solved. The answers arising from the individual metapuzzle pieces are:

  • 1A. barn
  • 1B. dac
  • 1C. halifax
  • 1D. rooftop
  • 2A. tenerife
  • 2B. atik 8
  • 2C. 51 (or fifty-one)
  • 2D. tutankhamun
  • 3A. vulcan
  • 3B. arrav
  • 3C. boadrum
  • 3D. acre
  • 4A. krakatoa
  • 4B. skaro
  • 4C. the bambino
  • 4D. woodstock
  • 5A. live aid
  • 5B. chernobyl
  • 5C. no kishi
  • 5D. cruciatus

Solutions for the individual puzzle pieces appear below, and are linked from the following table:

1A. Follow the Leader 1B. Who Really Shot First? 1C. The Question of Infinity 1D. Labyrinth
2A. Relation 2B. Joe Nobody 2C. Word Sets 2D. Danger Looms
3A. Scintillant Sparkler 3B. Take Sides 3C. Shape Sorter 3D. Pyramid Trap
4A. Take More Sides 4B. Caverns 4C. Blaiseing Sun 4D. Fabrication
5A. Grid Plan 5B. Upper Class Rail 5C. Cloorsu 5D. Animals

The resulting 20 terms can be grouped into five related sets:

The groups lead to a set of five words:

  • area
  • curse
  • (home) planet
  • concert
  • disaster

These can be arranged to give a meaningful phrase: Disaster Area concert (home) planet curse.

This refers to the "curse" given to inhabitants of the planet Kakrafoon from the Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy series, which prompts them to host a concert by Disaster Area, the loudest band in the Galaxy, in order to distract themselves. The curse, and the answer to the metapuzzle, is: TELEPATHY.

1A. Follow the Leader

The Venn diagram shows an intersection of three sets. All elements of the top circle are types of owl. All elements of the lower left circle are types of door. All elements of the lower right circle are types of dance.

The empty central intersection of all three of these categories can only be filled by the word BARN.

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1B. Who Really Shot First?

The odd clues describe well known phrases in which a letter is missing. The phrases, with the missing letters inserted, are:

  • Ire at people you don't know – STRANGER (D)ANGER
  • Waterfowl and garden implements – DUCKS AND (D)RAKES
  • Sugarcane distillate in a long, thin solid form – (D)RUM STICK
  • Male cat explosive – (A)TOM BOMB
  • Colossal brains ponder as – GREAT MINDS THINK (A)LIKE
  • Awake and boxing match – UP AND (A)BOUT
  • Upon the remainder of a goodbye gesture – ON THE (C)REST OF A WAVE
  • The entirety of the landscape – (C)ALL OF NATURE
  • Seafood and femur-pelvis joints – FISH AND (C)HIPS

Each group of three phrases has the same missing letter (this was done to make it clear what the required letter was in each case). The three boxes indicate that one letter per group of three is required. The three letters spell out DAC.

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1C. The Question of Infinity

There are 36 metropolitan boroughs of England, and 35 must be inserted into the grid. The constraints provided by the word lengths, and the likely aim of spelling out a message down the red column of squares, allows the grid to be filled out as follows:

Counting the lengths will indicate that spaces between multi-word borough names need to assigned to squares, as well as the letters. The resulting message reading down mentions the missing 36th borough: "Calderdale's administrative location". The administrative centre of Calderdale is HALIFAX.

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1D. Labyrinth

The clues resolve to the following words:

  • Austrian state (German spelling) – TIROL
  • Change equipment and/or procedures – RETOOL
  • Closed curves – LOOPS
  • Diagonal pole extending peak of a sail – SPRIT
  • Later in time – AFTER
  • Piece of lounge room furniture – SOFA
  • Toilets – LOOS

Some of these may be solved by considering the restrictions imposed by the next step – fitting the words into the shape. Each word follows an arrow, so there are overlaps between the beginning of each word and the end of the adjacent word, with the letter order reversed. When placed correctly, the words reveal a secret word clockwise around the middle, beginning at the top.

The answer is ROOFTOP.

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2A. Relation

Filling in the clues produces the names of five ports of call in the grid:

  • Portsmouth
  • ?
  • Rio de Janeiro
  • Cape of Good Hope
  • Sydney

This matches the voyage of the First Fleet which left Portsmouth, England, to colonise the settlement of Sydney, Australia. The missing port of call, and the solution, is TENERIFE.

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2B. Joe Nobody

Some of these words match the colours they are printed in, while others don't. If we highlight the words that do match (fading the remainder), they look like this:

The shape is not particularly compelling, but we can notice that reading across and down the matching words spell out the sequence: red-orange-yellow-green-blue-violet- repeatedly. This is the six-colour spectral sequence (ignoring the old "indigo"), in order.

The remaining words are all "wrong", in that their printed colours do not match their names, but they are wrong by different numbers of steps along this sequence.

If we take all of the words that are wrong by one step (i.e. the word says "red" but the colour is orange, the word says "orange" but the colour is yellow, etc., wrapping around to the word says "violet" but the colour is red), we find five words, in a shape suggestive of the letter A. Furthermore, the sequence of words red-orange-yellow-green-blue (or alternatively the sequence of colours orange-yellow-green-blue-violet) in this shape starting traces out the stroke order up the left side of the "A" and down the right side.

Continuing to words wrong by two steps, we find the letter T. In this case the stroke order starts with the word "orange" (coloured green). Three steps gives I, with strokes starting with the word "yellow" (coloured violet). Four steps gives K, with strokes starting with the word "green" (coloured orange). Four steps gives the numeral 8, with strokes starting with the word "blue" (coloured green).

We could have gone the other way and spelled out 8KITA, but the progression of stroke starting words implies that the correct ordering is ATIK8, which is the answer to this puzzle piece.

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2C. Word Sets

The clues give fairly straightforward answers, which fit vertically into successive columns of the grid as follows:

Reading the shaded squares across gives the message "Breaking Bad season 5 ep 4". This refers to episode 4 of season 5 of the drama Breaking Bad. That episode is titled FIFTY-ONE.

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2D. Danger Looms

The boxes can be filled in using the provided clues, which then spell out further clues that cascade towards the middle of the diagram. Some answers are ambiguous – for example "Bond album" could be "Born", "Shine", "Classified", or "Play" – but these can all be resolved by considering which answers make the resulting clues make sense. The one trick is that the two green boxes share exactly the same word, so only one of them is provided with a clue.

The final clue highlighted in red in the centre reads "born again in William Omaha McElroy". This refers to a character from the Batman TV show who, after being hit on the head, believes himself to be the reincarnation of Tutankhamun (or "King Tut", as stated in the show). The solution is TUTANKHAMUN (or KING TUT, it does not matter for the solution to the overall metapuzzle).

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3A. Scintillant Sparkler

The complex looking mathematical expression is broken into several pieces, each of which corresponds to a physics or mathematics equation.

  • IR is part of the relationship between electrical voltage (V) and current (I): V = IR. Therefore we can replace "IR" by "V".
  • The long square root expression is a reformulation of the equation of motion: u2 = v2 + 2as. The rearranged expression is equivalent to the variable u.
  • hc/E is an expression combining the quantum mechanical relationship E = hν with the wave speed equation c = νλ. The given expression evaluates to λ, the Greek letter equivalent to our "l".
  • The next square root is a reformulation of Einstein's famous E = mc2. It evaluates to "c".
  • F/m refers to Isaac Newton's second law of motion, commonly written as F = ma. This expression evaluates to "a".
  • PV/RT contains four variables of the ideal gas law PV = nRT. It evaluates to "n".

The resulting letters spell out "Vulcan". The Greek lambda was used because very few equations traditionally use the letter "l". The solution is VULCAN.

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3B. Take Sides

The lines should be interpreted as trips across the periodic table of elements:

  • Starting at ruthenium (Ru), moving right ten groups, then up two periods, lands on argon (Ar).
  • Starting at neon (Ne), moving down two periods, left sixteen groups, and down another two periods, lands on radium (Ra).
  • Starting at scandium (Sc), moving right two groups, lands on vanadium (V).

That we started with chemical element symbols suggests reading the resulting symbols, which spell out "arrav". Arrav of Avarrocka is a hero from the Fourth Age of the popular computer game RuneScape. The fact that the starting element symbols spell out "runesc" confirms an association and that the answer is ARRAV.

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3C. Shape Sorter

The lines present fragments of song lyrics:

  • Burn it to the Ground, by Nickelback ("Screaming like demons")
  • O Canada, the Canadian national anthem ("with glowing hearts")
  • Advance Australia Fair, the Australian national anthem ("girt by")
  • Down Under, by Men At Work ("a Vegemite sandwich")
  • Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer ("Then one foggy")
  • Under the Sea, from the soundtrack of The Little Mermaid ("hot crustacean")
  • My Way, by Frank Sinatra ("without exemption...")

The initial letters of the song titles spell out BOADRUM. Boadrum was a series of musical concerts, confirming the answer.

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3D. Pyramid Trap

Constructing the points, line segments, and arcs indicated by the flowchart so that the whole thing is self-consistent reveals the following construction (with the red dashed lines added to show the distance scale):

The easiest way to begin is to realise that the line segment L must be horizontal. Draw a horizontal segment, and then follow the construction of other parts of the image by adding the pieces dependent on L and subsequent additions. In this way the entire shape can be constructed. It spells out the solution word, ACRE.

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4A. Take More Sides

The provided latitude and longitude coordinates are the locations of various volcanoes around the world.

The unadorned mountain names are in alphabetical order, which is a hint that they are the important components (as opposed to "Mount", "Cerre", or the country names):

Adams, Aracar, Ararat, Kilimanjaro, Kronotsky, Ollagüe, Rainier, Tambora.

The initials of each volcano anagram to spell the solution, a very famous volcano: KRAKATOA.

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4B. Caverns

The bars can be removed from the figure, one at a time, in the order indicated below. The arrangement of bars is such that at each step the bar to be removed spans an entire edge of the remaining figure (or two edges, around a corner).

By interpreting the edges from which the bars are removed as a series of pen drawing movements (with hollow bars representing non-drawing moves), the message SKARO is drawn.

Alternatively, you can start at the central star, and always add a bar that spans an edge or two of the accumulated figure. This will draw the same answer word upside-down in reverse order.

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4C. Blaiseing Sun

First, apply the operations as indicated by the logic gates and addition gate. The final waveform rises to a value of 2 in places.

The result can be read as Morse code, by reading double height pulses as dashes and single height ones as dots. Each pulse is of equal width, and letters are separated by 0 levels.

The waveform converts to: -. .... . (big space) -... .- -- -... .. -. ---

Decoding from Morse code gives: THE BAMBINO.

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4D. Fabrication

The symbols in the grid indicate letters using the well known Pigpen cipher. Once decoded, the names of several characters from the Peanuts comic strip can be found by tracing paths along adjacent letters, as follows:

The characters found are: Peppermint Patty, Linus van Pelt, Sally Brown, Schroeder, Marcie, Charlie Brown, Franklin, and Lucy van Pelt. Another regular character in the strip was Pig-Pen, matching the cipher used.

The leftover letters spell out the message: "Snoopy's bird friend". Snoopy, the dog in Peanuts, had a bird friend named WOODSTOCK, the solution.

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5A. Grid Plan

Each of the rather odd two-word phrases shares an interesting property. The first letter of the first word can be swapped with the last letter of the second word to form a new two-word phrase.

  • eating curd – dating cure
  • iolite swamp – polite swami
  • piking shiv – viking ship
  • elastic warp – plastic ware
  • tiring cornea – airing cornet
  • ironing mind – droning mini
  • might steal – light steam

If you make these swaps, a hidden message appears reading down the central column of letters: "dive ail". This doesn't quite have a meaning, but applying the same letter-swapping trick produces the answer: LIVE AID.

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5B. Upper Class Rail

This is some sort of flowchart, but what to apply it to? By reading the questions, you should get the feeling that they apply to shapes. In particular, it turns out they apply to letter shapes.

But what letter shapes? Letter shapes vary a lot depending on the typeface and whether they are capitals or lower case. Fortunately, there are plenty of letters in the puzzle to show us what sort of letters are intended – the typeface is the common Arial, and we should look at uppercase letters.

Applying the flowchart to all the letters of the alphabet discards most of them, leaving exactly nine to fill the boxes at the bottom and spelling out CHERNOBYL.

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5C. Cloorsu

The pieces form a straightforward jigsaw puzzle. The solution needs to be oriented the right way, which can be done by recognising the resulting image as three Japanese hiragana characters:

Reading down, the characters translate to: no, ki, shi.

The solution is NOKISHI. The meaning of this becomes clear when taken in the context of the other metapuzzle pieces.

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5D. Animals

The pattern of demises listed on the right side matches those of the seven teachers of Defence Against the Dark Arts at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry during the seven years covered by the Harry Potter book series. The sixth such teacher, Severus Snape, was transferred from the role of Potions teacher, corresponding to the arrow pointing from column A. By filling in the Potions and D.A.D.A. teachers for each year of the book series, the grid can be completed as follows:

The references at the bottom are to specific teacher names, and the parenthesised number indicates a letter index. The indexed letters spell out CRUCIATUS, one of the Unforgivable Curses in the books. (Amycus Carrow teaches this curse to students, and has it turned on him in a fit of rage by Harry Potter.)

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