Guardian Genius 137,Qaos

11 comments on “Guardian Genius 137,Qaos”

1. 15D – near is a synonym for miserly; 27A – tindery is defined as easily angered in Chambers
   20A – ESTERS is just compounds, with the definition as “badgers and hounds” (both as verbs).

   Good puzzle I thought, first Genius I’ve picked up for a few months. I don’t suppose we’ll get another for a while, but what I did was prepare a spreadsheet with the alphabet written twice in one row, then again once underneath, and moved the lower one back and forth to match the letters above.

2. I am a sloppy writer so I had to buy a book of lined paper for this. Did my brain in but very enjoyable.

3. Thanks Matt. I also really enjoyed this one.

   Five of the twelve encrypted clues shift by six letters (13a, 21a, 26a, 22d & 23d). I wonder if Qaos originally intended all to have the same shift-number?

4. Hi all,

   Many thanks for the comments and to Matt for the excellent blog.

   IT skills were handy here to produce the initial list of valid words, as it’s something a computer can do very quickly. You’d be amazed how many words can be produced like this. So to keep the puzzle fair, I settled on the 5-letter words as a good length to decrypt, as well as being evenly spread throughout the grid.

   The first draft had a much shorter preamble, with something like “To resolve letter clashes, find the hint in the grid” so spare a thought for my test solver who virtually had to solve this “blind”!

   The higher number of “shift 6” words seems to be an interesting artifact of letter distribution, rather than something I intended, as I -> O -> U -> A are each 6 steps. So a word with consonants(C) and vowels(V) like CVCCC is more likely to be shifted by 6 to keep the same CVCCC pattern for another valid word.

   Best wishes,

   Qaos.

5. Thanks all, in particular Andy for the clarifications, and Qaos for gracing us with some insights into the construction.

6. Wow

   I am very impressed that anyone finished this at all. I was delayed a bit by the normal over-hyped and ludicrously ‘cloying’ festivities here in USA in late November, but I cannot really blame everything on that. I just was not on the right wavelength this month and fell a couple short, even without the cracking of the code, which I did not manage to do either. Still, I finished the last 5 months puzzles OK, so I was due for a failure. My own fault, not QAOS, whom I like as a setter.

   Tindery was a new word for me too.

   Thanks for the blog Matt.

7. By the way NEAR, meaning STINGY, is in both my Collins and Chambers, both around the 7th or 8th meanings given. I have never heard the word used in that context.

8. Thanks for the blog.

   I caused myself quite a lot of difficulty by putting CAPABLE for 5ac – A(dvanced) B(ooks) in PLACE* – I only attempted the coded answers after sorting out that error, so by then I had all the non-coded crossers, which made the coding very easy for the 5 letter clues I had cold-solved. & even the ones I had to back-solve from the coded answer possibilities didn’t take too long – I just wrote out the alphabet & putting my fingers on the 2 or 3 letters I had just moved one letter along each time until I hit a combination that could yield a word.

9. It took quite a bit of struggling to get the measure of this. 5d was our first coded answer – INGOT transforming to CHAIN. Aha! I thought, the cipher is moving letters on 6 places!
   Quite a bit of head-banging later, the penny dropped that every word could have a different shift. Faced having to “fill a lot of paper with rows of gibberish”, I knocked up an Excel formula to move a letter, and by dragging it down could show all the possible ‘translations’ of a 5-letter word.
   This certainly saved some time, but only in the latter stages when there were some crossing letters to play with.
   I found the cluing fairly tough, apart from the cipher shenanigans, so it felt like a huge achievement to finish it !

10. Am I getting dimmer, or are the Geniuses getting harder? They usually seem to take an hour more or less, but this one and the December one both took about three times that.

11. I do these crosswords over Skype with my son and daughter-in-law who live abroad and he spotted early on the clue to 6 down was “6. Forward …etc” so we went full steam ahead and solved five of the coded words almost straight off, thinking how clever we were, moving letters six forward.

    And then we hit a brick wall when INGOT resulted in nonsense, but produced CHAIN six steps BACK. But we persevered and completed it, with one error: SHAME for SHALE – I had too glibly jumped at such an easily recognisable word amongst my lists of gibberish. And shame is what I felt at such carelessness!

    I wonder if such encoding is easier or harder in Latin?! Perhaps next time, Qaos? Anyway, thanks for hours of gruelling pleasure.

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