CiSRA Puzzle Competition 2013 - Solutions
1B. Inspired
The first step here might be to check all of these places with an Internet search engine or encyclopedia. Doing so should produce the connection that all of them have a tower of some sort. In fact, all of them have a very tall tower over 300 metres high, with the exception of Pisa, which has a very famous tower, even if it is considerably shorter. The puzzle title hints that this is the right path to pursue, with its use of the sub-word "spire", another term for a tower.
The towers in each city, their names (in English), and their heights are:
| City | Tower | Height |
|---|---|---|
| Sydney | Sydney Tower | 309 metres |
| Paris | Eiffel Tower | 324 metres |
| IJsselstein | Gerbrandy Tower | 366 metres |
| Harbin | Dragon Tower | 336 metres |
| Vilnius | Vilnius TV Tower | 326 metres |
| Pisa | Leaning Tower of Pisa | 55 metres |
| Tehran | Milad Tower | 435 metres |
| Chengdu | West Pearl Tower | 339 metres |
Indexing into each tower name with the number provided in the puzzle to extract a letter, and rearranging in ascending order of tower height reveals:
| Height (m) | Tower | Index | Letter | Note |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 55 | Leaning | 5 | I | |
| 309 | Sydney | 1 | S | |
| 324 | Eiffel | 1 | E | |
| 326 | Vilnius TV | 4 | N | |
| 336 | Dragon | 4 | G | (Long Ta in transliterated Chinese, which also indexes to G) |
| 339 | West Pearl | 7 | A | |
| 366 | Gerbrandy | 3 | R | |
| 435 | Milad | 5 | D |
Reading the letters in ascending order of tower height (so no anagramming is needed) reveals the clue ISENGARD. This is the name of the fortress of Saruman in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. However, following the theme of the puzzle, this is not the solution. The solution of the puzzle is the name of the tower which stands within Isengard, namely ORTHANC.
Puzzle design notes:
This puzzle was motivated by our decision this year to add 5 "very easy" (relatively speaking) puzzles to the competition, instead of the metapuzzle format we used in 2011 and 2012. Those metapuzzles involved obtaining a "mini puzzle" clue for each main puzzle you solved. The problem was that, although we felt some of these mini-puzzles were fun in themselves, many teams didn't bother doing anything with them, as the metapuzzle was not worrth competition points.
So this year we decided to remove the metapuzzle concept, and spend our energies creating mini-puzzle-like additional puzzles for the actual competition. We believe this helped many new teams to get a foothold in the competition, and the inclusion of easier puzzles in each Group helped keep more teams involved in the competition as Puzzle Week progressed.
So while thinking about ideas for easy puzzles, and performing a random wiki-walk on Wikipedia, I stumbled on a list of tall towers. A list of named things, with associated properties (the places they were located), and a readily discoverable sorting order (based on their heights) provided the ingredients. I looked through the list, trying to form a clue word from letters in the place names, constrained by definitely wanting to use the Eiffel Tower and Leaning Tower of Pisa, since they were more famous than any other towers I could think of.
I managed to construct ISENGARD, which was good for two reasons: it is a place with a tower, thus providing a recursive step which repeats the same process you need to do in the first step, and it is not in the real world, which means the puzzle is less susceptible to attack by simply guessing the names of other real-world towers. Rather than get too tricky, I decided to simply provide the letter index numbers. This was intended to be an easy puzzle, after all.
Judging from the guess log, I suspect many people thought Isengard was in fact the name of the tower, since many teams entered ISENGARD, and then when it turned out not to be the solution, went in the opposite direction, guessing names of places where Isengard was located: MIDDLE EARTH, ROHAN, CALENARDHON. Thankfully, a quick check of Wikipedia or some other reference source would relatively quickly indicate that Isengard is the name of the fortress, not the tower, and that the tower within Isengard is ORTHANC.