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CiSRA Puzzle Competition 2013 - Solutions

5C. Embrace and Extend

The key insight in solving this puzzle is that each three-word clue refers to a single word composed of related words, and each of the related words differs from one another by the addition of exactly two letters.

For example, "mysterious vault weep" refers to the word "cryptic", which is composed of cry (weep), crypt (vault) and cryptic (mysterious).

Once the words are determined, they need to be fitted into the nearest set of adjoining hexagons so that the letters interlock properly. When all clues are solved and the hexes in the outer clusters are filled in, it looks like this (click image for a larger version which is easier to read):

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Extracting letters from the outer hexes by means of the given hex numbering produces new sets of clues (click image for a larger version which is easier to read):

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The six (longest) words produced from this are:

  • SWALLOWED
  • RETRACTOR
  • DEFORESTING
  • SUSPENDING
  • DETESTABLE
  • TRENCHANT

These words need to be inserted into the inner part of the puzzle. This is a little tricky. Many letters are shared between words, and some words run in unusual directions.

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Reordering the hexes in numeric order produces yet another set of clues:

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This can be broken into the words INTENDED RELEASE SCOLD SCORE, which becomes DELIBERATE / LIBERATE / BERATE / RATE.

DELIBERATE is the answer.

Puzzle design notes:

The original idea for this puzzle was to find words within other words that had quite distinct meanings. For example, PROGRESS would not have been an ideal word to use because although PROGRESS has a different meaning to OGRESS, OGRE has a similar meaning to OGRESS. Instead, I wanted words like ALBUMEN and BABOONS which contain three words with very different meanings.

Some of the words used within this puzzle are suboptimal. For instance, REPELS to clue "detestable" would have been better as REPELLENT or REPUGNANT. Similarly, SPREADS to clue "retractor" is not ideal, and HANGS to clue "suspending" would have been better as HANGING. SAWING to clue "deforesting" would have been better as FELLING. (Avoiding an excess of -ING words was a difficult challenge!)

Our resident test solvers felt these niggles were within the realms of acceptability, given the many constraints of word choices and combinations. Geoff Bailey, who test solved many of our puzzles, made several excellent suggestions alone the lines above which unfortunately I didn't have time to investigate fully (having spent most of my time revising Sudorubikube, also due to his superb insights and suggestions). My thanks and apologies!

To create puzzles I often make recursive programs that examine all combinations of clues (while culling unfruitful avenues) to find a set of working solutions. Sometimes minor changes in the input can change the result from dozens of possible solutions to none. For example, just changing HANGS to HANGING, or changing SWALLOWED to SWALLOWING produced no solutions. (Similarly, I tried about 30 different secret messages within Sudorubikube but only found one that worked.)

So while there may have been ways to make the above-mentioned improvements and still get the puzzle to work, the nature of these kinds of puzzles is that what looks like a simple change can turn out to be surprisingly difficult or impossible. This can mean that we end up with a flawed-but-solvable puzzle, which can still be quite enjoyable and is certainly better than no puzzle at all or a flaw that makes it unsolvable. The main questions are how serious a stumbling block is any flaw, and whether the puzzle overall is fair.

In this case, the puzzle is designed with many cross-checks which can help solvers overcome any compromises made during the construction of the puzzle. The hexagonal crosswords and the use of triple and quadruple word clues both help resolve difficulties or imprecise clues by providing additional constraints that must be met.

The hexagonal crosswords were also designed to have a range of shapes from a simple grid pattern at the top to more curly shapes further down, and this was to help the solver realise that some bending or directional changes were needed in the central part of the puzzle.