CiSRA Puzzle Competition 2013 - Solutions

5A. Anachronism

None of the clocks show real times, because of contradictions between the minute and hour hands. All of them can, however, be made to correspond to real times by turning them upside down.

Doing this reveals the times to be (from left to right, if the entire page is turned upside down): 5:13, 7:04, 5:08, 7:18.

By writing these times numerically in the same order as the clocks, and then turning the entire page back the right way up, so each clock is now upside down again...

... the times can be read using calculator spelling, giving the clue string: BILBOSHOLEIS.

Splitting this into words and adding some punctuation gives BILBO'S HOLE IS. This is a reference to Bilbo Baggins from The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings books and movies. He lives in a very comfortable hole in the ground (which is explicitly furnished with a notably anachronistic clock). Bilbo's hole is called BAG END, which is the answer to the puzzle.

The alternative answer UNDERHILL, referring to a portion of Hobbiton including Bag End, is also accepted.

Puzzle design notes:

The idea here was to use digital clock times to spell a secret message using calculator spelling. Unfortunately, the list of possible words is very short. The full list of calculator spellable English words contains only about 250 words, and from that you need to eliminate many of them because they have combinations like "77", which cannot be represented as a time, because minutes and seconds only go up to 59. However, you can use some of those words if you allow words across multiple clocks.

Initially I looked at the (extremely) restricted list of words spellable on a single clock, both with and without second hands. This was only about 40 words. I actually needed some help from Spanish, constructing the phrase "LOS LOBOS BIG GIG" from the times 6:16, 6:18, 5:08:07, 5:07. So the initial version of this puzzle had one clock with a second hand and three without. I had intended the solution to be LA BAMBA, the name of the biggest hit song by the band Los Lobos, interpreting "gig" a bit loosely to refer to a song rather than a concert.

The problem with this was that none of the puzzle creation team managed to test solve it! They all interpreted "gig" strictly literally, to mean a concert, and from there, there was no coming back as they scoured arcane lists of gigs that Los Lobos had played, looking for one that could rightfully be called their "big gig". Despite my protests that "gig" can be loosely taken to refer to a song... kind of... if you squint... they quite rightfully did not let me get away with this, declaring the puzzle highly suspect, if not simply unusable as it stood.

So I went back to the drawing board, intending to find a phrase that could be spelled by spanning words across clocks. Looking by hand proved too difficult, so I wrote a program to assemble candidate phrases from calculator words and test them to see if they fit across clocks. This produced a surprisingly large number of complete nonsense phrases, but nothing useful. In desperation, I began casting about for proper nouns that might help, and stumbled across BILBO. I felt this was more compelling than any of the other names that could be spelled, and started searching manually again for phrases to build around it.

At this point the start of the competition was just 4 days away, and all of the other puzzles had been locked in. We had a team meeting and I said I wanted to try to rework my clock puzzle to use the word BILBO somehow. At this point, someone said, "Hey, that'd be cool. One of my puzzles has a Lord of the Rings based answer." And then another of the team said, "Hey, so does one of mine!" And another said, "Um, guys... so does my puzzle: Flags." And I realised that one of my own other puzzles (Inspired) also had a Lord of the Rings answer.

We all just looked at each stupidly. "You mean... we had a Lord of the Rings mini meta-theme, and nobody noticed it until now? Okay, now you have to use BILBO, and then we can have one puzzle per group with a Lord of the Rings theme." So I went away and scoured the calculator word lists again, finding HOLE, and then from there it wasn't too hard to construct the clue phrase "BILBO'S HOLE IS", leading to the answer BAG END.

And that's the story of both this puzzle, and how we ended up with five Lord of the Rings related puzzles this year - through sheer coincidence, not planning!