#587 - "Reverse Engineering" - August 30, 2019

[BrianMac]

Week 5 of 5,

This week's contest answer is a nine-letter word.

Good luck and have a nice holiday weekend!!

[Al Sisti]

#5 on the board... I can count how many top 10s I've had on maybe one finger (put down the joke).

[TMart]

#10 for me. Second best ever - I got #5 on Lancelot on the last week 5.

Had to screenshot this one - not used to seeing my name up there with Jangler and LuckyGuest!

[Hector]

I have the answer but am missing a piece.

Edit: never mind, got it!

[FrankieHeck]

Yes! Probably the highest I'll ever be on the leader board, too. For some reason I just felt good about that puzzle as soon as I printed it out.

Also my first successful week 5. (Though only the second one I've encountered.)

[LesY]

#17! Maybe my third successful week 5 but have never gotten one remotely this fast. Honored to be in such rarefied company.

Congrats to all solvers! Now to figure out arctanx and, alas, WSJ. I know, I know...

[sharkicicles]

I haven’t had time yet to look but you all are giving me hope that this is a solvable week 5.

[Hector]

Interestingly, among the 37 solvers so far, more than half have over 300 overall correct solves.

[BarbaraK]

Beam me up, please!

It wasn't the first thing I tried. Or the second. Or the third... But I believe this is the earliest I've ever got a week 5.

Oddly enough, the thing that got me started on the correct path didn't end up being part of it at all.

Next I'll take a look at the Christopher Adams puzzle someone kindly linked to. And looks like next week will be a busy week - MMMM Tuesday, Fireball Wednesday (I think) and of course the usual WSJ on Thursday. After all that, it will be nice to have a week 1 MGWCC.

[Laura M]

I'm still lost in a black hole, or something. I thought I knew the general method pretty early on, but I'm not getting anywhere with it so far. There are too many possibilities, which is the opposite of my usual problem!

[Cindy]

Solved but not alone.

[Meg]

It literally took me all day, but I solved it!

[hcbirker]

I've gone down three or four black holes and nothing has worked so far. I'm still going to keep looking, but I'm starting to get sick of looking at it! (Heidi)

[ack]

I was dreading this one, especially after drawing a blank on last week's, but everything fell logically into place. Very nicely done, Mr. Gaffney!

[Hector]

Print it out.

[ChrisKochmanski]

Stared at the grid, off and on, for a full day before finally asking a known solver for a hint. It was just the right kind of a hint, because it didn’t tell too much. So I still struggled for an hour or so before the method started to roll. Fun puzzle! Even needing help, the “aha” felt good. BEAM ME UP!

[Laura M]

Beam me up! Phew! I was so stuck on something that I was sure was the key that I couldn't see anything else. Finally I cleared everything and redid the grid, and THEN I saw a completely different path that turned out much better. (Leaderboard probably won't update until morning at this point, but I'm pretty sure.)

I struggled with this one past the sweet spot where I would have felt really good about getting it (and in retrospect it wasn't difficult enough to justify the time I spent), so instead I feel mostly tired and dumb and also relieved. I think I need a new number on the Kas scale :-)

Edited to add: Yes, okay, technically this would be a Kas 2. But I don't feel like that rating adequately conveys the difficulty of this puzzle. I just managed to make it quite a bit more difficult!

[Cindy]

To me these are like Magic Eye. Sometimes really hard to see but then you cannot unsee it. Is unsee a word?

[FrankieHeck]

Does anyone have the breakdown of how many correct answers Matt shoots for each week? I think I remember that he shoots for 400-500 for a Week 2 puzzle for a Week 2, but not sure about the whole set of ranges, and thought maybe one of you data-keepers would have that information.

I also stumbled across this on Wikipedia: "Gaffney has stated the MGWCC will run for exactly 1,000 weeks, meaning the last one will be published on Friday, Aug. 6, 2027." And while that eases my worry that he'll stop making them right as I'm getting started, it also makes me sad to see an end date! I really wish I had discovered metas sooner.

[BrianMac]

Beam me up! I thought this one was really fun. Maybe not as complex in terms of steps as other week 5's, but that's probably the only reason I was able to solve it. I really enjoyed working it once I discovered the mechanism.