Tuesdays with Dr. Stabby

Viva La Stumpy

Thu, 24 May 2012 11:33:10 -0400

WORLD HIST - A national commission formed by a South American government estimates that, during a period from 1976 to 1983 in what has come to be known as the Dirty War (Guerra Sucia), 13,000 individuals in the country were killed or disappeared. Name the country.

http://www.learnedleague.com/ll53/questions/md07/md07q3.php

The Dirty War doesn’t have its own musical, but covers a tumultuous and tragic period of Argentina’s history. Isabel Peron was ousted by a military coup that instated the National Reorganization Process. It was Argentina’s defeat in the Falkland War that lead to the junta’s eventual downfall. The first democratically elected president to follow the junta, Raul Alfonsin, investigated the Dirty War. This investigation lead to the Nunca Mas (Never Again) report, a perennial best-seller in Argentina. Alfonsin attempted to straddle a line of prosecution against the military and appeasement to prevent further coups, but was eventually ousted from office in 1989, ceding his office 6 months in advance of the presidential elections.

LITERATURE - The Red Room and The People of Hemsö are novels from what playwright and novelist,...

Thu, 24 May 2012 09:30:27 -0400

LITERATURE - The Red Room and The People of Hemsö are novels from what playwright and novelist, considered the father of modern Swedish literature?

http://learnedleague.com/ll53/questions/md06.php

August Strindberg influenced numerous other playwrights throughout the western world. Eugene O’Neill, upon receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature, dedicated much of his acceptance speech to Strindberg. Although Strindberg was best known for his literary work, he also dabbled in painting, alchemy, the occult, photography, and strangely enough, telegraphy.

Here Comes The Stump Again

Mon, 21 May 2012 09:51:53 -0400

POP MUSIC - What is the stage name of this pop music superstar? Click here.

Rain is a South Korean singer and actor perhaps best known to US audiences from his R&B music and the movies Speed Racer and Ninja Assassin. But fans of Stephen Colbert may remember him from 2007. Rain topped Stephen by 100,000 in an on-line Time poll for the 100 most influential people (Rain was #1, Stephen #2). Stephen challenged Rain to a dance-off, which Rain responded to on May 5, 2008. (In classic Colbert style, the dance-off was done using a Dance, Dance Revolution machine.)

Completely Stumped

Fri, 18 May 2012 18:28:20 -0400

SCIENCE - At a fixed temperature, the volume of a gas is inversely proportional to the pressure exerted by the gas. This is, simply stated, a law in the field of chemistry first published (and subsequently named after) what 17th c. scientist?

http://learnedleague.com/ll53/questions/md04.php

Robert Boyle is considered one of the founders of modern chemistry, and his work, Sceptical Chemistry is a cornerstone of the science. However, Robert Boyle was also a director for the East India Trading Company, and contributed heavily to missionary groups attempting to convert natives. In his will, Boyle funded a series of talks aimed at defending Christianity, and these talks, known as the Boyle Lecturs, were revived in 2004.

Where Everybody Doesn't Get Stumped

Thu, 17 May 2012 10:11:00 -0400

Among the main characters on the television series Cheers when its run concluded in May 1993, the only one never to appear subsequently on the series Frasier was the character played by whom?

http://learnedleague.com/ll53/questions/md03.php

Spin-offs are a weird duck. While commonly perceived as short-lived inferiors to the original series, a spin-off can occasionally do as well as or surpass its source. For every Joey, there’s a Frasier and for every AfterM*A*S*H there’s a Simpsons.

Some of the more successful spin-offs in US television history:

Frasier: Both Cheers and Frasier lasted eleven seasons, and both received numerous Emmy nominations and wins (Cheers’ 111 Emmy noms is a record, but Frasier took home more trophies than Cheers, 37-28). Cheers went out on a high note as a top 10 show during it’s final season, while Frasier had slunk to the middle of the ratings pack. Most of the Cheers gang appeared in a single Frasier episode, season 9’s “Cheerful Goodbye”, in case anyone was wondering what the hell Carla Tortelli was doing in Seattle.
NCIS: NCIS will go into its 10th season next year, rising from a show out of the top #20 to a show in the top #5 the last few years. The show spun off from JAG, which also lasted 10 seasons, but never broke the top #10. NCIS has now spawned its own spin-off, NCIS: LA.
The Simpsons: The longest-running spin-off in history, its 23 seasons dwarfs its source The Tracy Ullman Show by a good two decades. During the show’s run, there have been four different presidents, the Dow Jones has risen over 10,000 points, and the world’s populaton has added 2 billion people.

Finally, some spin-off weirdness: In 2001, Lipton aired two commercials for its Sizzle & Stir product that featured several D-list celebrities living together. These two commercials inspired a VH1 reality show called The Surreal Life, which in turn spawned Surreal Life: Fame Games (which spawned two series with Pepa), My Fair Brady and Strange Love with Flavor Flav and Brigitte Nielsen. Strange Love spun off Flavor Of Love, which spun off I Love New York, which spun off New York Goes to Hollywood and New York Goes to Work as well as Real Chance of Love, which spawned Real and Chance: Legend Hunters. The less said about an additional spin-off, Frank the Entertainer: A Basement Affair, the better. In addition, Flavor of Love inspired Rock of Love, which spun off Daisy of Love. Rock of Love Bus, and Brett Michaels: Life as I Know It. Several of these shows spun off together into Charm School and I Love Money. Megan Wants a Millionaire is at the bottom of this web of spinoffs. One of the contestants on Megan and I Love Money 3, Ryan Jenkins, murdered Playboy model Jasmine Fiore and killed himself a week later. Because of this, the remaining episodes of Megan were pulled, and entire season of I Love Money scrapped. (I Love Money 4 was produced and aired, with the understanding that this would be the last series in this web produced.) All this from a Lipton product.

I Won't Get Stumped Again

Thu, 17 May 2012 09:35:00 -0400

A groundbreaking 1963 book describing a widespread phenomenon introduced by the author as the problem that has no name was given a name, in her book’s title. What was it?

http://learnedleague.com/ll53/questions/md02.php

Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique stemmed from conversations she had with fellow Smith graduates about dissatisfaction and unhappiness stemming from lives as housewives and mothers. The book is widely credited with beginning the second-wave of feminism in the United States, and Friedan herself went on to help found the National Organization of Women as well as serve as its first president.

What I Don't Know Won't Stump Me Again...I Hope

Wed, 16 May 2012 18:03:00 -0400

Learned League 53 has begun, and I wanted to start a blog similar to ericberlin.com, yet have it be a more in-depth discussion on one of the questions I missed.

From the Greek for black and islands, this is a term commonly used for a region of Oceania directly northeast of Australia, including the islands of New Guinea, Fiji, and Vanuatu.

http://learnedleague.com/ll53/questions/md01.php

Oceania’s a weird duck of a geographical entity…fuzzily defined, encompassing numerous islands, and not well understood. Technically it’s a ecozone, or a broad geographical division that corresponds roughly with floristic kingdoms in botany and zoogeographic regions in zoology. Oceania is the second smallest of the eight, the smallest being Antarctica, and includes three or four regions, depending on who you ask.

Melanesia is easily the least known of the four. Polynesia (“Many islands”), Micronesia (“Small islands”), and Malaysia are the other three. The term was originally used in 1832 to differentiate these islands from the other regions. The person who coined the term, Jules Dumont D’Urville, was also one of the earliest explorers of Antarctica, although quite accidentally when his ships became trapped in the ice floes off the coast.

Melanesia also boasts the most dense rate of languages in relation to land mass in the world, with over 1300 in just 700 square miles. Rosetta Stone, you have your work cut out for you.

Shellshocked

Tue, 06 Mar 2012 19:13:58 -0500

When it comes to Mystery Hunt style puzzles, metas are the centerpiece, and usually garner the most attention and criticism. Metapuzzles often fall into one of two big categories:

Pure Meta. This is a meta where the answers by themselves yields an answer. Pure metas can be really difficult to write, but a pleasure to solve, as they have to encode both an extraction technique and ordering technique.
Shell Meta. This is a meta that relies on some additional puzzle or piece of information to translate. This may be as simple as a chart in which the answers are entered, or combining the results of some other puzzle. Shells are often easier to write, as the answers do much less work.

A big divide exists in the puzzle community between people who like shell metas and people who despise shell metas. A shell meta when done right can be a beautiful work of art, and a shell meta done wrong can be a trainwreck.

Pointing to the Puzzle Boat for example, most of the metas in this are shell metas. Each puzzle answer becomes an input for a given metapuzzle that ties into the theme of the round. In the Dilbert round, for example, solvers must take the answers that correlate with specific Dilbert characters and enter them into a grid, following the characters line of sight, while Dilbert then denotes a path through that grid. Of the metas I wrote for the Puzzle Boat, it was the one I was proudest of. In the 2011 MIT Mystery Hunt, even the most die-hard shell meta detractor had to appreciate the beauty of the Mega Man and Civilization meta structures.

One of the reasons solvers may be disappointed in a shell meta is the lack of cohesion among the answers. Part of the joy in solving these types of hunts is getting that a-ha when you look at a group of words or phrases and suddenly realize “Hey, these are words from Sherlock Holmes stories” or “Hey, these are all phrases that combine a color from Guitar Hero and a five-letter word!” When I write shell metas for P&A, I try to:

If possible, still have some sort of connection between the answers themselves (and tie it into the shell meta)
Have puzzle titles be thematically related and have puzzle answers that relate to the titles (albeit worked backwards)

As an example, the first Vampire Puzzle issue involved a shell meta, but solvers still had to recognize each answer had a pair of fangs: two Vs, which were then used to help place the answers in a larger grid. Solvers still at least get some sense of connection between the answers.

By way of contrast, the Irate Avians had a group of unrelated answers (albeit they were all eight-letters long), but I really focused on making sure that each answer tied into a type of bird. Thus, even though the solver doesn’t get the satisfaction of seeing a connection between the answers, they at least get repeated satisfaction in seeing the connection between puzzle answers and puzzle titles, which already have a tight connection.

To keep things positive, what has been your favorite shell meta (MIT Mystery Hunt, P&A, or other source) and why?

Extraction Distractions

Tue, 28 Feb 2012 14:23:00 -0500

It’s 2AM, and you’ve just spent the last 3 hours trying to solve a diagramless crossword or identify TV shows by their credit sequences as interpreted using Legos, and now you ask yourself, “How do I get answer out of this?”

Extraction is the last step before finishing a hunt-style puzzle. It involves figuring out how to get something meaningful out of the words, phrases, and images that you’ve unravelled. There are two rules for extraction:

It should be really clever, and thematically apt OR
It should be really simple.

Anything else is a waste. As an example: The puzzle Picture an Acorn has a really clever way to extract the answer. Given a series of 20 circular images broken into 20 segments and a blank circle with 20 segments, the idea of somehow taking one segment from each image to create a final image seems pretty clear. Now take the puzzle Yo Dawg, I Herd You Like Puzzle Hunts. A great puzzle, but the extraction process is pretty simple and straightforward.

Now consider the puzzle How Hard Can It Be? The puzzle type is pretty common (I’ve referred to it as ISIS, identify, sort, index, solve). In this case, the puzzle resolves to a series of descriptions of Stig, the anonymous driver on Top Gear. The problem is the extraction process is unbelievably onerous. One has to enter into a separate grid vehicles Stig drove, using the way the car was referred to in the episode (which itself is difficult to ascertain). Finally, one has to read a series of circles from the grid in order to get the answer.

In the first example, the puzzle was “Identify the misspelled phrase from the image” and the author sticks with that throughout. In the second puzzle, the puzzle was “Solve these puzzles within puzzles that give things within things” and let’s the extraction not get in the way. This last example however creates an entirely separate puzzle, and that’s where the problem lies. When you write a puzzle, you want your solve to enjoy what the puzzle was about, not get caught up in how to organize or process the information.

What can trip puzzle authors up is feeling as if they need to present some new form of extraction for the puzzle to work. Certainly in big hunts, like the MIT Mystery Hunt, one has to worry about solvers getting bored with plain old indexing or reading diagonals. But it’s better to go with this than have solvers get stuck feeling like the puzzle should be finished, and instead are spending an hour trying different techniques.

Final thoughts: Really simple is a matter of perspective. For solving novices, even an acrostic (first letters) is a stretch. The easiest method is highlighted letters in blanks, then acrostic, then diagonal. Other tried and true methods involve leftover letters and trace-the-paths. Also, this is not an admonition to never use a clever extraction technique, but as noted, make the technique clear by emphasizing whatever you think will lead the solver to the right technique, as Greg Clark and Skuld did with Revisiting History.

What are your thoughts?

EDITED: Fixed my explanation of ISIS. Thanks Trip.

This Week's Tuesday with Dr. Stabby Delayed...

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 09:16:17 -0500

…until tomorrow. In part because of sick kittens yesterday, in part because of SOPA/PIPA today.

Puzzles Types You Hate

Wed, 11 Jan 2012 01:04:40 -0500

As I was going through Matt Jones Thanxtravaganza experience, there was one puzzle that when I saw it, I just wanted to run. Not because I thought it would be a bad puzzle, but because it was a Nurikabe. While I’m no expert at the Nikoli set of puzzle types, I for some reason have a problem with Nurikabe puzzles. I have a hard time getting started and finding footholds, let alone finishing.

I’ve talked to various solvers who have similiar feelings towards verbal logic puzzles, Knight’s Tour puzzles, cryptograms and what have you. As a puzzle constructor, especially one that feels a need to hit as many different puzzle types as possible, I do worry that as I write a puzzle involving some strange variant of Sudoku or a puzzle involving a creative use of a Dropquote that one of my readers sees it and has a similar reaction I had to the Nurikabe.

What puzzle types do you really hate, and more importantly, why do hate that particular puzzle type?

January 3rd, 2012: Writing Hints

Tue, 03 Jan 2012 09:08:24 -0500

In my very first-ever puzzle hunt, (The Wes Carpenter Experience, http://pandamagazine.com/puzzles/frightening_noises/) I included a way for teams to acquire hints. In fact, they could use chips to buy hints of different degrees of helpfulness, and were told what to expect from those hints. Some time page I added hints to P&A, something that seemed to be pretty well-received. In the Australian trio of hunts (MUMS, SUMS, and CISRA), hints are part of the rollout process.

Writing hints, however, is much like writing the puzzle. Because I know the solution already, it’s harder for me to see what nudge might eventually help the solver over the finish line. Here’s how I approach the first week of hint-writing:

If a lot of wrong answers were submitted, approach that first
Write a vague hint for some aspect of the puzzle

Second and third week, I try to make the hints less vague, and sometimes by week three, I’ll provide the explicit instruction on what to do. When you only see one or two hints total for a puzzle, it’s because I don’t think there’s anything particularly devious about it. (The Simpson’s puzzle for example is one I consider very straightforward in solving, and is the most-solved puzzle of the issue.)

On the flip side, I’ve always wondered if the need for hints is more an indication that I need to do a better job of cluing certain aspects of the puzzle. In the current issue, there is no cluing whatsoever for the a-ha…some solvers still get it, but the what-to-do-next step is basically a big guess.

If you use hints, what improvements would you like to see in them? And how often do you feel the hints indicated the puzzle should have been better clued in the beginning?

December 27th, 2011: Recursion

Thu, 29 Dec 2011 18:12:13 -0500

Recursion is a simple enough concept. If a puzzle has you solving in a specific way, or referring to a specific topic, then the final clue of the puzzle better follow suit. At least, that’s what I’ve always thought. In the last two issues (34 and 35) however, there are two puzzles which both use recursion that solvers have struggled with. This makes me wonder if recursion is as elegant as I think it is.

Here’s a basic example of recursion: A puzzle presents to me various numbers with + or - next to each. After some leaping, I discover the numbers are in fact references to chemical elements. + and - appropriately gives me, rebus-style, another element. (e.g., Ag + Os -As + Lb + Ds - Sb = Gold). The individual puzzles can then be grouped together and solved as one big puzzle, giving the final answer to the puzzle.

This, in my constructor’s mind, seems elegant. This, in my solver’s mind, also seems elegant. Why? From a narrative perspective, I think we expect it. It gives us a neat little pattern in the puzzle that can be applied one level up and gives the world order.

That having been said, two puzzles I’ve recently written (As the World Turns in issue #34 for one) use recursion to lead solvers to a specific answer. Yet solvers seem to struggle with that final leap. In As the World Turns, solvers are given a series of alien names, and circular rings with spaces to fill in. The leap to figure out that the homeworld of these aliens seems a paltry leap…hell, we used a homeworld of aliens meta in the 2009 Mystery hunt. The final clue in the puzzle is “WOMAN, PER GRAY”, and following the same alien->planet name cluing technique, the answer is VENUS.

Typing this up now, I think I see two issues. One is that the clue is not technically right. “Women” are from venus, but “Woman” is not used. Thus, the clue should read WOMEN PER GRAY. Also, none of the alien names had qualifiers…they just simply gave the alien name. So even so the clue is expected to be solved the same way, it does not read like the same type of clue.

Since the other puzzle is in the current issue, I can’t bring it up, but I do feel it properly uses the recursion technique. Even so, solvers struggle with it, and so I ask you, gentle solver, your thoughts?

Let the Tuesdays Begin

Tue, 27 Dec 2011 01:28:57 -0500

The goal of this blog is to provide a forum for a lot of the puzzle-centric topics that wander through my brain like a lost child in an oversized department store. Topics like recursion, a-has vs. leaps, puzzle size, puzzle fatigue, themes, overused gimmicks, and construction notes for past issues of P&A Magazine. Post your own questions, your own comments, or hell, post anything if you read this. It’ll be nice to know the vacuum has us both.