CISRA Puzzle Competition 2011 - Solutions

4A. A Typical Puzzle

The puzzle is self-describing.

Starting a few lines in:

• randomly reorder instructions so the puzzle isn't trivial

This suggests that the puzzle consists of a series of instructions that have been reordered.

• keep putting in red herrings to pad out the puzzle even when there
  are only about five things you've got to find

So, we're looking for approximately five things.

• produce a cryptic clue, at first, of an ungraceful ungulate

An UNGraceful UNGulate is a GNU.

• endlessly drone on with reams of boring text where it is impossible to
  tell what's suppose to be the puzzle and what's supposed to be a
  clue and what is in there because someone is utterly determned to
  have a big rant about something they dislike and half the time they
  haven't spellchecked the blasted thig so you don't know whether the
  mistakes are deliberate or not, until they release errata one hour
  into the competition by which point some smart alec has solved it
  because it's able to be reverse engineered from the metapuzzle

There are several erros in this sentene.

• "suppose" => d
• "determned" => i
• "thig" => n

These spell DIN.

• initially spell out a clue.

The first letters of each line spell "pokerhighcard", which is ACE.

• have a set of words with 'precisely' the same length

At this point, it's reasonable to assume that we're going to get five words each of three letters.

• generate a word by joining the dots, relying on a fiXed width font

The "," in the puzzle are positioned to form the letter "J"
The "'" form an "O"
The "." form a "T".

Put them together to form JOT.

• hide words, using capital letters

There are three capital letters in the puzzle, which spell FOX.

We have five words ACE, DIN, FOX, GNU and JOT, and some left over instructions:

• order words alphabetically.
• convert letters to numbers,
• and convert numbers to letters
• require you to generate numbers from patterns in number sequences even
  though the sample size is too small and it would be totally logical
  to work out the next number but for some arbitrary reason you have to
  calculate the difference.
• demand that you solve all the first stage clues even when one of
  them is much harder than the others and the answer is short cuttable
  using other parts anyway.

Well, we've solved all the first stage clues (including the harder-in-testing "join the dots"), but it certainly is possible to continue without getting all five answers.

The "convert letters to numbers" and "order words alphabetically" we can definitely try now.

• ACE = 1 3 5
• DIN = 4 9 14
• FOX = 6 15 24
• GNU = 7 14 21
• JOT = 10 15 20

These are fairly straightforward number sequences. Now we can apply the instruction "require you to generate numbers from patterns in number sequences even though the sample size is too small and it would be totally logical to work out the next number but for some arbitrary reason you have to calculate the difference."

The differences between the numbers in the sequences are:

• ACE = 2
• DIN = 5
• FOX = 9
• GNU = 7
• JOT = 5

Now we can apply the last unused instruction:

• and convert numbers to letters

2 5 9 7 5 = BEIGE, which is the answer.