MGWCC #859 — "Shifty Behavior" by Peter Gwinn

[Joe Ross]

[HoldThatThought]

Between the title "Shifty (behavior)', and its parallel at 54A, which referenced the typographical mark that was intentionally used in place of the traditional asterisk to highlight the five meta-related clues (a dagger), I was pretty confident that we were looking at a Caesar cipher.

"Words right after Caesar felt a dagger" seemed a curious way to clue the Crosswordian "et tu", a caesar cipher is an alphabetic shift, and I was already tuned in to the unexpected use of the dagger to highlight clues.

Further to my progress, it was hard not to notice that "home for a bear", right at 1A, wasn't particularly an apt pairing, as I tend to think of lions as lair denizens, and bears as the keepers of dens. When "den" showed up at 47A, I immediately suspected we were looking at the very common "alternative entry" meta solving step, a suspicion that was further confirmed by PAC, as a far more general answer to the clue at 2D. The ACLU is certainly active in DC, but "Grp. active in D.C." was an oddly broad way to clue it.

Once I saw the alternative entries, and considered that this was an advanced week puzzle, it seemed quite likely that the Caesar shifting would apply to the alternative entries, and not the original dagger clued entries (why else were the alternatives there?).

The only sticking points left were to realize that 1) The Caesar shift was different for each decoding 2) The necessary shift for each entry was defined by the clue number, and probably most difficultly, 3) That the necessary shift was defined, not by the clue number of the alternative entry, but rather by the clue number of the ORIGINAL entry. (For example, the Caesar shift applied to the alternative entry "Den" was defined by the clue number of the original entry for LAIR, and, therefore Shift +1, and not Shift +47. In retrospect , that makes sense, because there are really only 25 shifts available, before you roll back around to the original word, followed by Shift +1, again. That explains why all of the daggered clues fall within the first 25 clues of the puzzle.

So, yes, absolutely challenging and mind-bending, but, in my opinion (worth little), not as tres tres as other solvers have rated it.

My only discombobulation came from generating partial segments of the solution - I wasn't initially confident about resolving DEN as EFO, for example.

Many other solvers' mileage obviously differed, but I did consider this a fair and accomplished challenge.

[HunterX]

Even with a couple of hefty shoves from @HoldThatThought, I still had difficulty. By the time I got to the segments of the answers, I gave up, thinking I was getting something wrong. And by that time, I was already tired of counting letters up and down and not getting anything I could recognize. So I was happy not to submit an answer.

Definitely a KAS 5 / week 7 for me. Would have felt like an 8D if I didn't see that others also perceived a similar level of difficulty with this one. Not my favorite. And I wouldn't say that if either 1) it was only because I didn't solve it, or 2) I didn't think the construction was impressive. I can't imagine the work it must have taken to construct this.

Definitely kudos to anyone who solo-solved this one!

[sharkicicles]

For what it’s worth I felt “answer brute force” wasn’t quite in the language so I submitted “brute force answer” and it was still accepted.

[BarbaraK]

I did kind of solve this one with brute force. Or rather, I let https://www.dcode.fr/caesar-cipher do the brute forcing for me. When I saw that BOT was one letter away from ANS, I figured (hoped) I was on to something, and when the rest didn't work with a one letter shift, I looked at all the possibilities and saw the pieces that made a good answer. (I took "answer brute force" to be an instruction and just submitted brute force.) It was only after I saw the answer and wondered if the shift distances meant anything that I noticed that they matched up with the daggered answers. Wow! Talk about the icing on the cake! And then as I was submitting the answer the Brute/Brutus connection registered. Another wow!

I'd tried ROT13 early on, just based on shift in the title. But when that didn't work, I moved on to trying to add ETTU, TU, YOU, 2, Y, shift letters between theme answers, add letters to make a dagger, add daggers to make another entry, do something to get something dead or extinct, etc, etc. The next day, taking another crack at it, I suddenly thought, "Wait, isn't 'Caesar shift' something?" Didn't recall exactly what it meant, but google cleared that up and got me to start experimenting.

[sharkicicles]

For me, ROT26 is my preferred cipher.

[MMe]

I had loaded up my fav Rot decoder (https://theblob.org/rot.cgi) on seeing the "Shift" in the title, even before downloading the puzzle. And I saw the alternative answers thing quickly, even with a daggerless .puz (though I also had RADIOAD and APU, with misgivings because of how APU was clued), and noted the top-heaviness of the entries with alternates. So I am angry at myself for how long it took to get to the finish line. I like the challenging ones, so I hope Matt doesn't dial down the difficulty this week.

[mkmf]

Kept circling back to this rabbit hole searching for something I'd missed:

LAIR -> DEN -> SEA; airport code for Sea-Tac
WAD -> GOB -> LOT; a gob = a lot
OATLY -> SILK -> LAWYER; a Silk is a British barrister/lawyer appointed by a Queen/King
LAG -> BOT -> OLED; (a BIG stretch, but there are NanoOLEDs and AutoOLEDs)
ACLU ->PAC -> (nothing) POOF!

Great puzzle!

[schmidzy]

Anyone else get real distracted by the numbers in this one? The very first thing I noticed was the five daggers were at 1, 2(??), 9, 16, and 25. That 2 was irritating, but maybe there was some reason 4 wouldn't have worked? Hmm, I'll ignore it and keep working. The title seems to suggest a Caesar cipher, but I'll ignore that idea, because these numbers are too promising.

Then I saw the matching set in the bottom half of the grid, and I was even more certain I was onto something.

2 --> 53 --> 5 - 3 = 2
9 --> 45 --> 4 + 5 = 9
16 --> 44 --> 4 * 4 = 16

I tried for the longest time to find a single mathematical operator that would explain the other two (4+7=11, which is kind of like 1? 3^3 = 27 which is just slightly too big...?). I saw @MikeyG made a comment along the lines of wishing he'd thought of this idea, which only further cemented my confidence that I was on the right path. Two days later, I finally listened to that voice in my head saying, "Hey dummy, if this constructor wanted to write a puzzle about square numbers, ain't no way in hell they'd let such an obvious mistake slip through!"

[BrennerTJ]

[ZooAnimalsOnWheels]

I didn't come close to getting this one. I was focusing on the "et tu" answer rather than the strangely worded clue. Once I was nudged to look at the clue, I recalled that "Caesar cipher" was possibly a thing, but I forgot exactly what it was. I should have read up on it before trying to apply it. With paired sets of words, I thought we were looking at something closer to a Vigenere cipher with one set of words as the keys to translate the other set of words, and that just created a lot of nonsense. But this was a creative puzzle with something new for the toolbox.

[DCBilly]

And... Caesar Cipher pops up again today in the Fireball. The other elite constructors may be showing off that they, too, could have majored in Enigmatology like Will S. if only they had thought of it.

[KayW]

It took me several days to solve this one, but I saw significance in the 54A DAGGER cluing almost immediately. And because of the quote "ET TU, BRUTE" I came up with BRUTE FORCE as my WAG in the hole. Of course I wasn't going to submit that until as late in the game as possible and luckily was able to find the metanism in time. I laughed out loud when the web page I found to solve Caesar Ciphers had a BRUTE FORCE option and again when that turned out to be the answer.

I can not imagine how on earth Peter Gwinn constructed this - absolutely incredible!

[BarbaraK]

And... Caesar Cipher pops up again today in the Fireball. The other elite constructors may be showing off that they, too, could have majored in Enigmatology like Will S. if only they had thought of it.

I wonder how many more solvers there would have been if this Fireball had run last week instead of today.