Inquisitor Review of 2015 – The Results

Submitted by John Henderson.

The Great Pumpkin

There’s obviously a lot that an A-Level in Statistics can’t teach a chap. Having just spent a very enjoyable couple of hours looking at the numbers for the Inquisitor year, I find it as hard as ever to draw meaningful conclusions. In the IQ reports for 2013 and 2014, I remarked on solvers’ “obvious” perversity (the puzzles that they hate most at the outset – remember “Woodchuck” and “Soprano”? – seem to get voted to the top of the pile). So one would predict, then, that Chalicea’s “Blowing” (IQ1384) would be our puzzle of 2015? It received 52 comments here, with Lato’s “Snobs” (IQ1379) second with 31. Neither puzzle, in the end, featured in the final analysis.

It’s clear, therefore, that perversity remains the order of the year, something I’m quite pleased about in at least one respect. I suppose it’s in the nature of the job that the majority of correspondence received by an editor complains about puzzles being “too hard” or (less frequently!) “too easy”. Well, of the top six in the voting pile, you’ll see that there are three of the hardest and three of the easiest of the year. I offer warm congratulations to Charybdis, a clear winner for his Hallowe’en special, perhaps the most tricky of the easier trio. Coming in second, was “Child’s Play” – living up to its name as my quickest solve of the year: congratulations to Ferret for appearing twice in the top six. The top two accounted for 31 (19+12) individual votes from the 27 voters and a remarkable 59 points (more than a third) of the 162 registered. My toughest solve of the year finished third, your toughest fourth (I shan’t comment further) with two of, for me, the most enjoyable puzzles of 2014/5 joint fifth, reflecting opposite ends of the difficulty scale.

Not featuring in the table below…it was very gratifying that about a dozen of you actually contacted me to say that they would prefer not to vote at all, expressing a general feeling that it would be unfair to exclude points from so many great puzzles. That more than half of the year’s puzzles are represented below, and that many who did vote made this very point, is testimony to this opinion. That “regulars” like Lato, Nutmeg, Nudd and Eclogue garnered no votes between them speaks volumes for the overall quality on display but all members of this lofty quartet were specially mentioned in the aforementioned correspondents’ dispatches.

Here’s the complete list. If you’d like copies of any Inquisitors, please leave a comment below or drop me an email. Additional stats this year: numbers in the central column indicate the number of posts on each puzzle’s Fifteensquared thread, numbers in the penultimate column indicate the number of votes (of whatever value) given to the puzzle. Many thanks to everyone who contributed. Here’s to 2016!