CISRA Puzzle Competition 2007 - Solutions

This is the archive of the 2007 Puzzle Competition. Please visit the current competition site for information about the latest Puzzle Competition.

D.4 Coarse Mode

Intuitive leap: The walls and spaces in the "map" spell out a message in Morse code.

Simplifying the map (making it "coarser") makes the encoding used for this puzzle more obvious:

# ### ###   # # # #
# ###   ###     # #
# # #     ### ###   ##
# # ### ###     ### #
  # #   # # # ###   #
  ### #     ### ### #
  # ###   ### ###   #
  # # ### ### # #

The walls of the maze can be read left to right to give one long wrapped line of Morse code. Each lone '#' is a dot, and each '###' is a dash. Dots and dashes within the same letter are separated by a single space. A small gap indicates a space between letters, and a large gap is a space between words. The map is equivalent to the following Morse code:

.-- .... .- -   .. ...   -- -.--   -. .. ...- . -.   --. .- -- .   ..--..

Which reads:

"what is my niven game ?"

This looks like an almost-sensible English sentence. The next step to solving the puzzle from here is realising that this is a Spoonerism - a form of wordplay in which the initial letters of words are swapped to produce a different phrase. The Spoonerism theme is strengthened by the puzzle title "Coarse Mode", which Spoonerises into "Morse Code". (The story text also contains a Spoonerised hint in the form of a "mere horse".)

The Spoonerised question therefore translates into "What is my given name?" The asker of the question is none other than William Archibald Spooner himself, and the answer to his question is WILLIAM.