Re: #681 - "Crazy Eights"
Posted: Tue Jun 22, 2021 4:23 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.
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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.
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.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.
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.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.
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.Hector wrote: ↑Tue Jun 22, 2021 5:07 pmIt 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.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.
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.