#681 - "Crazy Eights"

An excellent puzzle written by one of the innovators of the meta crossword format. It comes out every Friday at noon and increases in difficulty throughout the month. Available for modest subscription (worth every cent) here: www.xwordcontest.com
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Bird Lives
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#61

Post by Bird Lives »

Joe Ross wrote: Tue Jun 22, 2021 12:29 pm BTW: I know of a "neat trick" which will allow you to post late, but Matt is now editing late entries out. I once posted at 12:05 PM.
In the days of horserooms and race-track bookmakers, this was known as "past posting." (Ah, the things my father taught me.) It's the basis for the long con in The Sting.
Jay
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Bird Lives
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#62

Post by Bird Lives »

Andrew Bradburn wrote: Tue Jun 22, 2021 1:27 pm I have been trying to figure out why I have had little trouble with metas like this one and MASS IN B MINOR which gave so much trouble to so many solvers, and yet get stymied by some of Matt's puzzles that pretty much everyone else gets. I think for both "Crazy Eights" and "Missing Piece," both involve trigrams that spell out the answer. A trigram is simply a unit of three letters together. There is a particular type of puzzle that appears fairly regularly in the National Puzzler's League newsletter called an Anaquote, in which a quote is broken up into trigrams, and the trigrams are presented to you in alphabetical order. The enumeration of the quote is given, so solving the puzzle involves reordering the trigrams and reading them with the given enumeration. This leads to a lot of practice reading meaningful things in a string of trigrams, which is exactly what COD EWO RDO CHO is, four trigrams in a row. I have been doing Anaquotes for decades, so I guess it is second nature to me now. Here is an example:

ANAQUOTE (3 10 4 2 3 5 6)
DLI FEI INE ING LIV RTH
SNO THE TWO UNE XAM

I don't know if there is anywhere online to find a bunch of Anaquotes to practice with. As to why I struggle with others of Matt's puzzles? Those solving mechanisms must not be second nature to me yet, I guess.
I got this one quickly, but in the Gaffney this week, you had to rearrange all but one of the trigrams, which would make the above quote a real trial, or should I say, a killer.
Jay
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jhseeman
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#63

Post by jhseeman »

So I had the 4 three letters and pulled the correct 3 letters from the second set....but that's where I made a left turn into the rabbit hole.

SLY + COD -> SCOLD remainder = Y
SAT+ WOE -> WASTE remainder = O
BAF + ROD -> BOARD remainder = F
REA + HOC -> CHORE remainder =A

YOFA shows up in the grid as
YOEA
UOFA
SODA

DUES.... (facepalm) until it was pointed out that maybe I should take a step back and look at the letters again. (facepalm)
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Hector
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#64

Post by Hector »

Bird Lives wrote: Tue Jun 22, 2021 4:31 pm I got this one quickly, but in the Gaffney this week, you had to rearrange all but one of the trigrams, which would make the above quote a real trial, or should I say, a killer.
It might be simpler to think of it in terms of numbers: each of the 12 circled letters gives you a positional number: the position it occurs in in the upper themer. And that gives you the letter in that position in the corresponding lower themer. So there is nothing to rearrange. I'm pretty sure that early on I tried this and had the (correct) trigrams typed out, stacked vertically in my notepad but like others here, decided it was a dead end. This morning I returned to the idea but not optimistically, so instead of wasting time typing out the trigrams again I just went through the letters in my head expecting to quickly find nonsense. When I found the E I was mentally reciting C-O-D, so it was aha time.
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Bird Lives
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#65

Post by Bird Lives »

Hector wrote: Tue Jun 22, 2021 5:07 pm
Bird Lives wrote: Tue Jun 22, 2021 4:31 pm I got this one quickly, but in the Gaffney this week, you had to rearrange all but one of the trigrams, which would make the above quote a real trial, or should I say, a killer.
It might be simpler to think of it in terms of numbers: each of the 12 circled letters gives you a positional number: the position it occurs in in the upper themer. And that gives you the letter in that position in the corresponding lower themer. So there is nothing to rearrange.
This is a much clearer and more elegant way of doing what I did in my own plodding way (as shown in comment #60). I thought of SAT as a rearrangement of TSA and similarly for the other two.
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#66

Post by burak »

My very first thought was to look at the corresponding letters in the other eight-letter answers. When I got COD I got really excited. And then came nonsensical entries and I gave up.

Hot damn I should have written them down instead of just looking at them. Lesson learned! Although I should have learned that lesson with MAS SIN BMI NOR so lesson very likely not learned.
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MikeyG
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#67

Post by MikeyG »

When I first got "COD," I thought the word was "FISH," haha.

Managed to pull it out, though when I first had:

COD
EWO
RDO
CHO

I was like, "Well, that didn't work."
Less cross words, more crosswords.

Solve my latest "Pun of a Kind" Meta!: 89. That's Not Right!
Alex Boisvert
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#68

Post by Alex Boisvert »

Joe Ross wrote: Tue Jun 22, 2021 12:29 pm BTW: I know of a "neat trick" which will allow you to post late, but Matt is now editing late entries out. I once posted at 12:05 PM.
FWIW late entries are still occasionally accepted but it won't actually get you the "Buzzer Beater" achievement. For example, user "Dirk" submitted at 12:12 for MGWCC 678 but doesn't have the achievement.
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