"Follow The Leader" by benchen71

[benchen71]

Before I post the answer, here's the full list of successful solvers again:

T.G.
Hector

And now, let me put the rest of you out of your misery...

[benchen71]

With only 2 successful solvers, "Follow The Leader" is very definitely my hardest puzzle by far! Before I get into a short autopsy, here's the answer that proved to be so elusive...

The title gave you what you needed: the instruction "Follow" and the key phrase THELEADER. Here's how it worked. Take the first letter of the key phrase. Then start at the top left corner of the grid and scan through until you find that letter and then record the letter that follows (either immediately or after a black square). Then keep going from that point, but start looking for the next letter of the key phrase...

I've had this puzzle kicking around for ages now. I think it was constructed around the time of "Encrypted", but I thought I should delay its publication given the mechanism of this puzzle really does involve encryption! I knew this would be a difficult one, so it had to run as a week 4 or 5. And then, what with guest appearances and slotting puzzles in for other timing reasons, this one kept getting delayed.

As for the puzzle itself, I really love that you can encrypt a message into a crossword using a key phrase like this. It took a bit of doing, I have to admit. And there are quite a few tricky grid entries as a result. Also note that there's quite a gap between the E of "THE" and the L of "LEADER". That was so that I could get the themers DECRYPTION and STEGANOGRAPHY into the grid. Turns out, though, that L is not too hard a letter to avoid - as I demonstrated to good effect in "First Christmas"! Similarly, the rest of the encoding occurs before the final theme entry ONETIMEPAD.

Oh, how I wish that I had not clued ONETIMEPAD the way I did! I'm a bit of a crypto fan; Neal Stephenson's book Cryptonomicon is my favourite book of all time. However, I only had a vague understanding of how one time pads worked, and I did no research into the matter at all, mainly because I had already come up with how I was going to encrypt the hidden message. But it turns out one time pads have very specific uses. And so that led many potential solvers down a bottomless rabbit hole. My sincerest apologies if that was you!

My hope was that the theme entries would suggest that there really was some steganography going on in this puzzle, that a message (the meta answer) had been hidden into a harmless looking object, namely a completed crossword. But how did that fit with the puzzle title, which seemingly has nothing whatsoever to do with codes. My hope was that you would reinterpret the title, and discover that it was literally giving you the solving method. Well done to those of you who did this without requiring any nudges!

This week's puzzle will be a "week 1" puzzle, I promise!

[Dplass]

With only 2 successful solvers, "Follow The Leader" is very definitely my hardest puzzle by far! Before I get into a short autopsy, here's the answer that proved to be so elusive...

The title gave you what you needed: the instruction "Follow" and the key phrase THELEADER. Here's how it worked. Take the first letter of the key phrase. Then start at the top left corner of the grid and scan through until you find that letter and then record the letter that follows (either immediately or after a black square). Then keep going from that point, but start looking for the next letter of the key phrase...


Follow The Leader (solution).png


I've had this puzzle kicking around for ages now. I think it was constructed around the time of "Encrypted", but I thought I should delay its publication given the mechanism of this puzzle really does involve encryption! I also consider this a difficult one, so it had to run as a week 4 or 5. And then, what with guest appearances and slotting puzzles in for other timing reasons, this one kept getting delayed.

As for the puzzle itself, I really love that you can encrypt a message into a crossword using a key phrase like this. It took a bit of doing, I have to admit. And there are quite a few tricky grid entries as a result. Also note that there's quite a gap between the E of "THE" and the L of "LEADER". That was so that I could get the themers DECRYPTION and STEGANOGRAPHY into the grid. Turns out, though, that L is not too hard a letter to avoid - as I demonstrated to good effect in "First Christmas"! Similarly, the rest of the encoding occurs before the final theme entry ONETIMEPAD.

Oh, how I wish that I had not clued ONETIMEPAD the way I did! I'm a bit of a crypto fan; Neal Stephenson's book Cryptonomicon is my favourite book of all time. However, I only had a vague understanding of how one time pads worked, and I did no research into the matter at all, mainly because I had already come up with how I was going to encrypt the hidden message. But it turns out one time pads have very specific uses. And so that led many potential solvers down a bottomless rabbit hole. My sincerest apologies if that was you!

My hope was that the theme entries would suggest that there really was some steganography going on in this puzzle, that a message (the meta answer) had been hidden into a harmless looking object, namely a completed crossword. But how did that fit with the puzzle title, which seemingly has nothing whatsoever to do with codes. My hope was that you would reinterpret the title, and discover that it was literally giving you the solving method. Well done to those of you who did this without requiring any nudges!

This week's puzzle will be a "week 1" puzzle, I promise!

Aw, I was thinking about that as a mechanism but never followed through. Thanks though.

[Laura M]

Nice! I just didn't hit on the right interpretation. All of the hints were telling me things that I knew but I still couldn't figure out how to apply them correctly.

After having solved a reasonably tough WSJCC and MGWCC last week, this puzzle and also @AnswerPfinder's kept my ego from getting out of control, so thanks for that :-)

[KayW]

Aw geez. A KAS 4 - or actually even worse than that - for me.

4. The Metas I DON'T EVEN TRY TO get...but *should* have. (It happens. I don't want to talk about it.)

I googled STEGANOGRAPHY and ONE TIME PAD and let myself get spooked (oblique NSA pun intended) out of giving this one a fair chance.

I meant to get back to this puzzle after your fourth nudge but didn't get a chance. In fact, I was coming back just now to review the nudges and maybe give it a go, but couldn't resist reading the autopsy. Nice one, Ben.

[Jacksull]

After the hints, I got that we were looking for letters that followed “The Leader”. I read that as letters that follow T, since “T” is the leader of “The”.
This, of course, didn’t work.

Then I decided to read the Wikipedia article on One Time Pad. My brain hurt so much that stopped the solve.

[Bird Lives]

I got stuck in Natick. I kept running into squares that I thought needed one letter in the down entry and a different one in the across. I had O in RHO as the measure of fluidity but E in TIMEPAD. I even Googled "RHE fluidity" and got nothing, but "RHO fluidity" did get results. Instead of SNES GAME, I had STEP GAME. The latter gets 100 times more results than the former, which I'd never heard of. That made for two more squares that required two different letters. Another two came from the Swedish group VERTEX (yes, there is such a group) instead of REDNEX.

Since my knowledge of steganography does not go much beyond Rot-13, I was never going to get this one. I should have given up sooner.

[edestlin]

Such a clever puzzle! I wish I hadn't given up quite so soon. It was a really nice idea.

[Dplass]

Such a clever puzzle! I wish I hadn't given up quite so soon. It was a really nice idea.

+100

[ChrisKochmanski]

Agree with above comments. I should have kept playing with THE LEADER, trying ways to follow it. Might have gotten there.

Good one, Ben!

[boharr]

The first couple of nudges made it seem way more complex than it actually was and sadly sent people away.

[lbray53]

I agree that the ONE TIME PAD entry led me into a dark abyss. Compared to what I was working on the solution was quite straightforward. I was afraid that I was not going to be able to understand the solution itself.

[rjy]

Ditto here... I thought the grid was the one-time pad and struggled to come up with the message. Did a few ideas manually (oof!), before stumbling onto https://www.boxentriq.com/code-breaking/one-time-pad where I tried all kinds of permutations of words in the grid as the message or the key. Nudges led me to use FOLLOWTHELEADER, and later THELEADER, but nothing proved fruitful.

Some rabbit-holes are nigh impossible to back out of.

Very cool concept, Ben, which is why I stuck with it as long as I did. In some parallel universe, I totally nailed this!

[woozy]

I'll do a me-tooism on the ONE TIME PAD (Tried applying "THE LEADER" to the theme entries to get.... nothing). But I can't blame my not getting solely on that as I tried other things involving trying to follow the The or some other interpretation of "the leader" (including looking at all the letters after all the T's (The Leader = T). I just never got it.