Guardian 29,562 – Anto

81 comments on “Guardian 29,562 – Anto”

1. GROT takes me back not quite as far as the George Harrison movie but to 1977 and Reggie Perrin.

   What a strange grid. Only 8 initial letters are given whilst 10 solutions have less than half their lights checked. Which makes solving this particular compiler much trickier. OPEN AND SHUT CASE is amusing.

   Thanks Anto and Andrew

2. I found this straightforward, I like cryptic definitions and a smattering of science. Despite suspecting what the answer was, 22D, maybe the easiest clue there, took about half my time. D’Oh! Thank you Anto and Andrew.

3. Nobody is likely to complain about outdated references in this one, with CHATGPT and AIR FRYER. I failed to parse GROT, GOOGOL and UTTER, but liked most of the rest, particularly OPEN AND SHUT CASE, INFLUX, BORODIN and CHESSBOARD. Anto usually has a middle-letters clue, but “crucial” isn’t the most obvious of indicators for it, and the middle S in SHOE SIZE doesn’t quite “sound alike”, but neither stopped me from getting the answer. Thanks Anto and Andrew.

4. Couldn’t for the life of me parse ALL ROUND — and wasn’t even sure it was correct — but having seen here I must say I approve! All else was good fun, although I’m not sure I like “crucial” to mean “central letters”.

5. I agree with PostMark@1, the grid is a nasty one, with so many opening letters to solutions being non-crossers.
   However, I get the impression that the setter compensated, by making many of the definitions and/or wordplays rather straightforward?
   For example, 1(down) CHATGPT; not much to like, but “talk/doctor/temperature” is a flat-pack instruction.

   I really enjoyed the puzzle, nonetheless; 12(ac), Schrodinger, is a humdinger.

   Cheers, Anto + Andrew

6. Thanks Anto and Andrew
   Yes, better than he often is. I too was baffled by ALL ROUND, but it’s quite good. UTTER also puzzled me. I agree that “talk” for CHAT was a bit disappointing.
   For us scientists, FOURTH DIMENSION wasn’t cryptic!
   Favourites BORODIN and BOUNCER (&littish?)

7. @Andrew 22d Last letters of gettinG poweR tO rejecO ~ typo at end.

   Forgot George Harrison, but did remember Reggie Perrin 🙂

   Very much liked BORODIN, FOURTH DIMENSION, CHESSBOARD, OPEN AND SHUT CASE

   Thanks Andrew and Anto

8. I see I’d failed to parse 23 ALL ROUND, which turns out to be a clever clue. Nor did I think of batting one’s eyelids in 16, though I could see the instruction to remove ‘fl’. As for others here, OPEN AND SHUT CASE raised a laugh. It took me ages to realise the use of ‘play’ in 3 referred to tolerance. Thanks to Anto and Andrew.

9. ALL ROUND was my favourite. I smiled to myself when I got it. 4th DIMENSION belongs in a “Quick”.
   Nice to see GOOGOL (I’m a fan of Martin Gardener and Adam Spencer) which is 10 to the power of 100 (1 with 100 zeroes after it). Because you can never have too big a number, someone then came up with a Googolplex which is 10 to the power of a Googol, not to mention the Googolplexplex.

10. Like Gladys@3 & Geoff@4, using “crucial” to indicate central letters seemed stretchy to me.
    I’ve not seen it before.
    However, if “essential” = “essence of” = “the core of a word”, then via “crux of”, “crucial” does the same job, one can argue?
    Interesting to see if other setters pick it up as a device.

11. I enjoyed this one and found it fairly straightforward. A good mixture of chuckles (Shrödinger’s luggage), groans (those OOs) and headscratching: failed to parse UTTER, although I could see that FL had to be involved somewhere. Obvious once pointed out. Thank you to Andrew and Anto.

12. I’m never disappointed by this setter, this was a brilliant puzzle and for non-scientists (muffin @6), was very fair. OASC was one of the best clues I’ve seen this year and I also enjoyed DISGRUNTLE, INFLUX, GIVE, GROT, BORODIN and the use of crucial. I agree that CHAT is a bit weak but still a nice contemporary clue.

    Ta Anto & Andrew.

13. The long solutions helped a lot with an unfriendly grid. I particularly liked OPEN AND SHUT CASE and INFLUX which both made me smile. Other favourites were AUTOPSY and the lovely ALL ROUND. I too struggled to parse UTTER, but it seems obvious now Andrew has explained it.
    Thanks Anto and Andrew.

14. Tomdsad @8 thanks for explaining why give is a synonym for play. I liked some of this but not this clue or utter. Didn’t parse all round but having seen the explanation I like it. Generally a very mixed and quite difficult bag for me. If a bag can be difficult.

15. Favourite: GORGON.

    I couldn’t parse 16ac, 20ac, 23ac apart from the definitions and was unsure how to parse play=GIVE (3d).

    New for me: GOOGOL.

    Thanks, both.

16. isn’t 1d, stylistically misleading, shouldn’t the letter count be (4,1,1,1) not (7)? I’ve never heard of it (revealed, obviously!) so I lookeds it up and the ‘GPT’ is always capitalised, along with the ‘C’ which Iwould infer means they are individual letters, otherwise, if it was one 7 letter word, howwould you pronounce it?

17. Liked give for play and bat for flutter and all the O’s in 23a but needed the blog’s assistance. Enjoyable puzzle. Thanks Andrew and Anto.

18. Top marks for ALL ROUND and AUTOPSY

    ChatGPT is always written as one word so (7) seems ok to me. Spent too long trying to make it chatbot before the penny dropped

    Homophoney earworm

    Cheers A+A

19. Priscilla @16 – in my (incomplete) solving experience acronyms and abbreviations are rarely, if ever, enumerated in the (…1,1,1…) style; the implied logic, though I’ve never seen it written down, is that the set of letters operates as an accepted word. Interested to see if anyone can corroborate or disprove my theory 🙂

20. 13d NONCHALANT is an anagram of HALT CANNON, not NONCHALANT 🙂

21. Never enjoyed an Anto crossword so much. Laughing all the way to the bank, especially at my LOI ALL ROUND.
    The Schrödinger clue reminded me of one of Douglas Adams’ Dirk Gently novels, in which they actually perform the experiment. When they let the cat out of the bag it’s…bloody furious!

22. I struggle with Anto because I find double definitions some of the trickiest clues, and the unhelpful grid held me up for quite a while.

    As a physicist I’d say there is a little more to 20ac than a simple cryptic definition. Time can be treated as a fourth dimension (along with the three spatial dimensions) in physics, although putting it together with the others requires a little mathematical cleverness involving the speed of light and the square root of -1. This idea is rooted nicely in Special Relativity (1905). That deals with the first 4 words of the clue. The second half (“to explain general relativity”) refers to something different – that three dimensional space can be considered to be curved via a fourth spatial dimension, and that this is a way of explaining gravity. For example, if the space around the Earth is considered to be curved like the stretched surface of a trampoline when you stand in the middle, the natural path of objects near it would be an arc or a circle, rather than a straight line. This helps to explain why gravity affects massless particles such as photons.

    I could go on (really, I could!)…but I shan’t. I just wanted to say that the clue is cleverer than people are giving it credit for. Schrodinger’s luggage was excellent too.

23. I still don’t see why PLAY can mean GIVE.
    Otherwise I loved much of this, especially just reading out loud some seemingly impossible clues such as 20a, 14d, 18d, and 1d (second to last one in)! LOL!
    And I simply love Jack of Few Trades’ wonderful explanation of what I already appreciated as a terrific clue!
    Thanks Anto and Andrew – but still need more help with 3d.

24. A rigorously scientific clue wouldn’t have “heavy” = DENSE (4 down).

25. @23 SinCam – play and give can both be used to mean the movement or slackness of – for instance – a joint.

26. @23 it’s about tension, so if it’s very tight it’s not there, but if it’s not so tight, it is.

27. Tim C@9: though I’m a fan of the estimable Martin Gardner (his Annotated Alice and Annotated Snark are wonderful) the term GOOGOL is from Mathematics And The Imagination by Edward Krasner, which I remember reading as a boy. He credits it to his young nephew.

    SinCam@23: GIVE as in “there’s some give (i.e. play) in this fastening”

28. For 14d, did anyone else get held up by thinking the clue was referring somehow to drag queens?

29. I will start by saying that Anto is generally my least favourite of all the regular Guardian setters, and that virtually every previous Anto puzzle that I’ve encountered has included a number of clues I positively disliked.
    And I will go on to say that I thought this was as fine a puzzle as the Guardian has carried for some time. Quite superb. It’s a bit invidious to single out favourites, but SHOE SIZE, OPEN AND SHUT CASE, ALL ROUND, AUTOPSY and the very topical CHESSBOARD to be going on with.
    Thank you very much indeed, Anto.
    And thank you Andrew; even though I’d actually managed to parse everything, and am prehistoric enough to have seen A Hard Day’s Night when it first came out, I’d forgotten that snippet about George Harrison

30. Had to reveal the last few (UTTER, LURE, ALL ROUND, CICADAS), the first three of which I couldn’t parse until I came here. And also BORODIN is one of those sad clues I knew I was never going to get, not having heard of many composers or sculptors at all.

    Regardless a fun puzzle for me. Plenty of forehead slappers and particularly liked the suitcase. STENT a new word for me but one of my first ones in nonetheless. I also usually struggle with Anto, so pleased to have done so well on this one.

    Thanks Anto and Andrew

31. All went in very smoothly – some nice long anagrams. Though strictly a DNF as I had no idea what 1d might be even with all the crossers in place. So pressed the Reveal button and Googled it. You learn something new every day. Wasn’t quite sure how ALL ROUND worked, either, but seeing Andrew’s explanation, I realise that was a clever one…

32. I really enjoyed this – but I do like Anto and his entertaining cluing – kicking myself for not seeing the parsing for ALL ROUND, having parsed everything else. I also think Anto is a much better Cryptic setter than Quiptic.

    SamW@30 – you’ve almost certainly heard Borodin – the Polovtsian Dances from Prince Igor turn up a lot in film and TV background music. And to add to the science-y theme Borodin was a chemist in his day job.

33. This from my friend Sean:

    ***

    Me: Can you solve this crossword clue? AI facilitates talk with doctor over temperature (7)

    ChatGPT:

    The answer to the crossword clue “AI facilitates talk with doctor over temperature (7)” is MEDIATE.

    Here’s the breakdown:

    “AI facilitates” suggests the definition “mediate” (as mediation helps facilitate communication).

    “Talk” can also be a synonym for “mediate” (as in to intervene in a conversation).

    “Doctor” indicates “Dr.” (abbreviation for doctor).

    “Over” suggests a reversal or placement above.

    “Temperature” suggests “T” (a common abbreviation for temperature).

    So, “mediate” fits both the definition and the wordplay!

    Me: No that’s wrong. Try again please.

    ChatGPT:

    Apologies for the confusion. Let’s take another look at the clue:

    “AI facilitates talk with doctor over temperature (7)”

    Here’s the breakdown:

    “AI” could suggest something related to artificial intelligence, but it may also just be a part of the wordplay.

    “Facilitates” is likely the definition part, hinting at a word meaning “help” or “assist.”

    “Talk with doctor” might involve abbreviations, and “doctor” often means “Dr.”

    “Over temperature” could suggest using the abbreviation for temperature, which is typically “T.”

    One possible answer is MEDIATE.

    “AI facilitates” means to mediate or intervene.

    “Talk” is related to mediation (as a mediator helps facilitate conversation).

    “Doctor” can be abbreviated as “Dr.”

    “Over temperature” suggests placing “T” (temperature) over “Dr.” to form the word.

    So the correct answer is MEDIATE!

    If you say it enough times, it’ll be right.

    ***

34. Toby @33 that must have taken you ages to write! Thanks for bothering as it was brilliant.

35. Good one, despite the rather difficult grid.

    I solved the bottom half first and then moved up, despite failing to parse the nice ALL ROUND. I liked the TERMINATOR anagram, the wordplays of GORGON, AIR FRYER and CICADAS, and especially the Schrodinger CASE. Thanks Toby at 33 for the hilarious CHATGPT tying itself in knots to get the wrong answer. I suspect that in the same way that we used to laugh at computers messing up playing chess, as AI gets better it will be able to write very convincing cryptic clues. Dan Word does better.

    Thanks Anto and Andrew.

36. GIVE probably took 25% of my solve time. No quibbles from me but not overly keen on ALL ROUND

37. [LOi – by a long chalk – 3d GIVE – liked it 🙂… (…and Bodycheetah@18’s earworm 😉)]

38. PS, I couldn’t see how to do the link in edit mode – here it is for Dan Word.

39. 16A defeated me, and I see I am far from alone in that. 19D was my favorite. For 8A I got SIZE immediately, but it took a while before I remembered that Oxford is almost always a reference to the shoe in Crosswordland.

    Ravenrider@28 Yes, that was my first thought. I smiled when I had some crossers and the penny dropped.

40. Shanne @32 I agree, I saw Borodin’s inclusion as deliberate in this science-themed crossword, he was a brilliant organic chemist (first to demonstrate what is still known in Russia as the Borodin reaction) and a major champion of women’s science education. Never mind being one of the truly great composers. Thank you Anto (and Andrew)

41. Curved spacetime fits 20 across well and confused me.

    Shrodinger’s cat’s box is of course shut and then open so the riddle is an open and shut case.

42. I got all but 23 across ALL ROUND — and for me it doesn’t quite equal “broad” — but I love the clue/parsing.

43. Nakamova @42: How about “A broad education” = “An all-round education”? Does that improve things?

44. Very enjoyable, thank you Anto and Andrew. I liked the scientific feline reference and the word play (pun intended) on 3d. Struggled to parse a couple but a great work out and a confidence builder for a semi-beginner like me. I have been a fan of Anto’s recent Quiptics, so I was more than chuffed to be able to solve a full-blown Cryptic!

45. Thanks for the parsing explanations Andrew, I needed them today! My FOI was OPEN AND SHUT CASE, followed immediately by NONCHALANT and CHESSBOARD, at which point it felt like it was going to be a write-in, but after that it all got a bit chewy! I couldn’t parse UTTER or ALL ROUND and, even after hitting “reveal” and then reading Andrew’s explanation, was still in the dark about GIVE. So thanks to Tomsdad@8 for the idea that “Give” could mean “Play” in the sense of a rope. Still think that’s a bit of a stretch (pun?), especially with no wordplay to help in such a short clue? Or maybe that’s just sour grapes after my first DNF for a while 😊

46. Yes, nice puzzle, as people seem to be saying ALL aROUND.

    Re: 23a, I was wondering: is “good book’s contents” more properly “OODBOO”, thus ruining the clue, or is the intended reading the more natural one? For me, either interpretation works, but I was wondering if there was an argument that either was better. Tx.

47. Was I the only person to put “open his suitcase” for 12A before getting the crossers? It would resolve that was his luggage and it was the opening of the box that crystallised the cat’s fate one way or the other!

48. I agree with gladys@3 on SHOE SIZE and “crucial.” Don’t really see what’s wrong with “talk” for “chat” though, it’s straightforward but this isn’t the first time a straightforward synonym was used for a part of an answer. I put in CHATBOT figuring that BO was some UK term for doctor I didn’t know (like MB or MO) until I realized it had to be OPEN AND SHUT CASE.

    Anyway very nice puzzle, especially ALL ROUND. Thanks Anto and Andrew!

49. Thanks both,
    I wasn’t convinced by my parsing of play equals give as in “I’m due to give my Hamlet at Stratford” so CNBA to put in effort at 16ac.
    Simonc@24. As density equals mass/vol, I’m happy that something with a high mass per unit volume is heavy.

50. Couldn’t parse 16. Good clue by Anto.

51. Dave F @34. That is the actual transcript from the ChatGPT session!

52. Chatgpt was totally unknown to this technophobe but fortunately it was easy to parse and then look up.

53. I had misread the clue for 23a and had ALL FOUND for “board description”, and thus read no further. My bad, obv.

    It took me ages to see ‘play’ for GIVE, but I finally had a little memory grab of my father preparing his car for its MoT, and saying there was “some play in the steering”. And 7d was so reluctant to solve itself that I began to wonder if INFLOW would do instead for 9a, but eventually my flirtation with CORONER and INQUEST was put out of its misery – I read and watch enough crime fiction that AUTOPSY should have been a write in. 🥴

    Probably my most enjoyable Anto solve so far – particularly enjoyed Schrödinger’s luggage, and Einstein’s FOURTH DIMENSION, however straightforward it might have been.

    Thanks to Anto and Andrew.

54. Schroedinger’s cat lives or dies depending on whether a radioactive decay triggers release of a poison gas – thus showing that while quantum effects generally average out in the macro world, this isn’t always the case. No animals were harmed in this thought experiment.
    Thanks to Anto and Andrew.

55. TimSee @54
    A few days ago the family spent some time speculating whether Scrodinger actually had a cat. We suspected that if he had, he would have chosen a different animal for his thought experiment (as Eddie Izzard pointed out, cats aren’t great experimental animals, and I’m sure a cat could have collapsed the wave function anyway).
    My daughter came to the conclusion that he may or may not have had a cat, but if he did, it was called Benson.

56. I agree with Andrew’s introductory comments. Unusually, i liked most of the clues,- particularly 23a – but really do not like ‘ChatGPT’: if it is actually a word, then it’s a neologism I have not encountered and of which I disapprove.

57. Excellent.
    Didn’t understand Schrodinger’s cat, but easy enough from the checking letters.
    NHO CHATGPT or CICADAS.
    All parsed and a great range of clues.
    Thanks both.

58. Toby @33 ChatGPT would clearly benefit from visiting fifteensquared!
    I tried your questions just now. The first attempt was – an improvement it managed CHATBOT. But then it clearly got disheartened and tried HOTLINE.
    But, yes Robi @35, given time it will become more self-aware.

59. Thanks Anto. Despite a number of less-than-stellar surfaces I enjoyed this due to clues like GORGON, OPEN AND SHUT CASE, DISOWN, CHATGPT, CHESSBOARD and AFAR. I failed with GIVE (I dislike double definitions with connecting words) and UTTER (too clever for me). Thanks Andrew for the blog.
    [Clues like 20a cause me to miss Roz who would surely elaborate on its meaning much like Jack of Few Trades @22.]

60. SamW@30/Shanne@32 BORODIN’S music was pillaged for the musical Kismet, so many people have unknowingly heard his melodies in songs like Baubles, Bangles and Beads, and Stranger in Paradise.

    GROT certainly predates Harrison and the film. And I didn’t like ‘crucial’ either.

61. I enjoyed this. It’s been a slow solve, mainly due to other things the day has brought, but it’s been nice to come back to.

    I don’t get the ‘play’ part of GIVE (I haven’t looked through the comments yet, so this may have been covered already), and raised an eyebrow over CHATGPT being denoted as (7). On the other hand, (4,3) or (4,1,1,1) might have provoked the same response.

62. I cannot believe that “CHATGPT” qualifies as a word. All crossWORDS answers should be one such.

63. I’m with George @56. Is ChatGBT really a word? It has to be spelt with lower and upper case letters specified in their correct positions. I’m not keen on giving free advertising to confected product names unless and until they are so commonplace that they become generic, eg biro.

64. Came to this very late but really enjoyed it. Agree about the ChatGPT enumeration.

    Liked the Schrödinger reference and the good book’s contents.

    Thanks Anto and Andrew

65. Jack of Few Trades @43: It helps a bit! But maybe “all-round” is more of a UK thing? I’m more familiar with “all around”.

66. For all those complaining about ChatGPT, would you moan about BOOTS as an answer for “kicks pharmaceutical chain” (or whatever)?

67. Man, this one was good!

68. For Blaise at # 66
    No, because Boots is a word. ChatGPT is not!

69. I usually struggle with Anto, and this wasn’t really an exception. Mostly very nice, especially when the parsings I missed were explained. I was less impressed with the non-word and SHOE ZIZE.

70. Doug @68. For me it’s an f-word. Good enough?

71. Solid puzzle. UTTER and GIVE were tricky in their different ways. ALL ROUND is very clever on reflection, and I thought INFLUX was neat.

72. This zoologist enjoyed the proper taxonomic use of ‘bugs’ in 18d. ie, members of the order hemiptera rather than generic creepy-crawlies.

73. Zoot@60
    You’ll remember the alternative words to Stranger in Paradise – ” Lovely tune but it’s borrowed from Borodin. The moment was opportune to borrow from Borodin”.
    22d As I commented once before, friends lived near a pub called The Grotto that they always referred to as “The Athlete’s Foot”.

74. Pino@73 I hadn’t heard that version before. Thanks. Also nice to see the correct word for ‘other’, rather than similarly spelled solecism that appeared in the Grauniad very recently. I’ll say no more.

75. Since GPT stands for Generative Pre-trained Transformer it is a bit of a stretch to present it as three letters of a seven-letter word. Also you can only pronounce it by spelling out the letters, which does not happen with other words. Cry foul.
    If you thought GOOGOL was big, have a look at the Wiki article on Graham’s Number.

76. All this fuss about UTTER! I rarely complete guardian cryptics (failed on 17, 18, 22 & 23 this time) but got this one quite quickly. Feel gutted was obviously fl, abandoning was likely to be a deletion which meant “say” was likely to be the definition…. Easiest clue in the puzzle!

    Thought 14 was non-cryptic.

77. I thought this was a very enjoyable puzzle. As I’ve said before, I’ve complained about Anto in the past, so I like to give him credit where due.

    I have no problem with the enumeration of 1dn. It’s common for abbreviations to be enumerated in this way, for good reason: otherwise, the enumeration would often give away the clue, and where’s the fun in that? If I were to complain about the clue, it would be about the word “facilitates”, which seems awkward in the cryptic reading. But that would be only a very small complaint.

    GROT was a jorum for me, but clearly clued. (I think that Tolkien uses the word to mean something like “grotto,” but that’s completely different.)

    simonc @24 is correct, of course, that “heavy” and “dense” mean different things when used in a scientific context, but there are plenty of nontechnical contexts in which they are equivalent (e.g., a heavy / dense fog).

    I wondered briefly about cluing DOWN as “a depressed state” in 25ac, as it’s not generally a noun when used in this sense, but a sentence like “I’ve had my ups and downs over the past year” seems to justify it.

    I particularly enjoyed 12ac (OPEN AND SHUT CASE) and 23ac (ALL ROUND).

78. Innocent fun to get within 2

79. Dr. WhatsOn@46, I’m in the camp (of just us two?) that thinks that the contents of good book is OODBOO and indeed that meant that I quickly rejected interpreting the clue as a “middle letters” device and consequently failed to parse it, though the answer was inevitable from the checkers.

    Still, there were other pieces to enjoy, especially O A S C.

    Thanks both

80. A toughie at my level, but I did over a couple of days, rather than a single sitting. I haven’t even managed a single clue on today’s cryptic 🙁

    I really like the ALL ROUND parse now it’s been explained, same with PLAY and GIVE. GORGON is the fave amongst the ones I solved by parsing.

    Thanks Andrew and Anto.

81. Very surprised at the unfamiliarity of so many with ChatGPT. It has been widely reported and discussed in the press, so you hardly need to be an IT specialist to have encountered it.

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