13 comments on “Inquisitor 1603: Partition by Eclogue”

1. I guessed pretty early what we’d be looking to shade, but got a bit hung up on trying to work out where the “partition” was (there wasn’t really one, was there?) In the end looking for letters A-L proved to be the easiest route, with the rest of the preamble to confirm the finished shape. As you say fairly gentle and thoroughly enjoyable.

2. I tend to agree about the curious use of ‘partition’. Notwithstanding that, I thought it was an enjoyable puzzle overall

3. Another enjoyable IQ. Thanks as usual to Eclogue and kenmac. I’m always impressed by the ingenuity of setters who manage to partition the alphabet (is that the intended sense of “partition”?) and arrange the grid so that — in this case — two-thirds of it does without the vowels A, E and I as well as all the other letters A-L. There did seem to be a high incidence of O and U in the outer regions, but I didn’t deduce anything useful from that until I read the extra-letters message, which immediately suggested L.

   Cor, Excel and conditional formatting, there’s posh! Checking by eye was enough for me.

4. Maybe I’m being pedantic, but the proportions of the L-shape isn’t quite right. The vertical part should be longer than the horizontal part.

5. I really enjoyed this. It became clear that the partition would be in the leading diagonal area and the surrounding letters did start to form a sort of pattern. With a bit of back and forth, I got there in the end. Very clever grid from Eclogue and thanks to Kenmac for the explanations. My parsing of rumpus rooms was a bit ropey, but then again I am still fairly new to this game…haven’t quite shaken off my “L plate”!

6. It all looks so easy when the grid is presented in a neat graphic! I got there in the end, but made a hell of mess of it to start with. I misinterpreted the instruction about crossing the partition (what partition?) and ended up with a very strange shape. That meant spending a lot of time researching whether the government had introduced some new vehicle classification called ATOL that I hadn’t heard about.

   Eventually I ignored the partition references and did the same as Jon S at  comment 1. That worked out.

   A good puzzle slightly spoiled for me mostly by my incompetence but also, dare I say,  not the clearest of preambles.

7. I decided to put the crossing clues in ink, the non-crossing clues in pencil. What I got was an unholy, and unhelpful, mess. By now I was convinced the partition would be that separating a London taxi driver from his/her audience, with the usual sign ‘thank you for not smoking’. (I couldn’t parse 6d, so didn’t know if it was in or on a vehicle).

   As Jon_S says, easier just to look for the low letters…

   Thanks to Eclogue and kenmac

8. I think I must have approached this a little differently from those who’ve commented so far. One relatively early answer I got was STORM TROOPS across the bottom row, and I reasoned that this would be outside the partition – therefore all the letters after and including at least M would also be outside. So when I entered other answers, I shaded all those letters light grey and the L-shape emerged rather soon.

   I felt a bit let down by the ending – but later I realised that the letters A, …, L don’t appear outside the partition (which is not precluded by the preamble), and I perked up a bit. So thanks to Ec & Log for a grid that seems hard to construct, and to kenmac for the blog.

9. Damned if I could work out what the shape was, or see that there were only A to L present in it. Excel? Huh.

10. I good progress though the clues and spotted what to do immediately.  My daughter is currently learning to drive (test next week) and I have some magnetic L Plates that I put on and off the car daily, so I could hardly fail to spot what to do.  Also I found the word partition helpful: as well as meaning a physical divider a partition can also mean a way to create two disjoint sets from one source set.  The letters A-L and M-Z form a partition of the alphabet, so the idea was already planted from the outset.

    Another enjoyable puzzle with a neat idea.  Thank you kenmac and Eclogue.

11. PeeDee @10: Whilst I agree that “partition” can also mean grouping the elements of a set into disjoint subsets, that sort of partition can’t ‘surround’ anything, nor can it be ‘crossed’. So surely it must refer to the edges of the relevant cells, i.e. those edges that have A-L on one side and M-Z on the other.

12. HG @11 – yes just as you say, I’m not trying to disagree with you. I was just commenting that the choice of word “partition” gave me a big hint as to what to expect, it put the endgame into my head before I had really started the puzzle.  If Eclogue had chosen to use “barrier” or “fence” for example then it would have been less obvious to me what to do.

13. Thanks Eclogue for another fun puzzle and a more impressive grid than I initially credited. I’d failed to spot that the cells outside of the partition contained only M-Z, which makes the construction all the more impressive.

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