Inquisitor 1594: Milpar by Ifor

22 comments on “Inquisitor 1594: Milpar by Ifor”

1. Yes, very impressive indeed. A new twist on nominative determinism that Muriel Spark (famous for a Prime book title) minus her prime-numbered letters should give an anagram of PRIMAL! Which was a great help once I started playing with the IQ title.

   Thanks to Ifor — with stunned admiration — and Hihoba.

2. Another superb puzzle from Ifor. What I love about his puzzles is that not only are they brilliantly constructed, but the solver gets a warm glow of satisfaction when the penny drops. I’ll confess to feeling awfully clever when I realised we were looking at prime numbers, but in retrospect that was all Ifor’s doing thanks to the subtle hints he provided to put us on the right path.

   Muriel Spark was the obvious name to put under the grid, but I missed the subtlety of its relation to the title. No surprises there.

3. Thoroughly impressive. It took me too long to spot that we were looking at prime numbers, despite seeing the pattern pretty early, to my shame. And spent twice as long trying to find the quote as to fill the grid. Was I the only person to get hung up on Mansfield Park based on the title?

4. Well done to all who finished this. I solved what I could but had no idea what the preamble meant. Still don’t, to be honest.

5. Fabulous puzzle!  It took up most of the week (avoiding Google and electronic aids this time) but was well worth the extra effort.  I tried to find an anagram for MILPAR but for some reason did not spot PRIMAL.  That would have been a great help in spotting the prime number pattern earlier. In retrospect I am very embarrassed about how long it took someone with a Pure Maths degree to spot a sequence of prime numbers.

   I couldn’t parse EACH or DISC, so thank you for that.

   Thank you Ifor.

6. I managed to complete the puzzle ok, but failed to spot PRIMAL from the title. Also, failed to spot that all the group 2 clues were prime numbers. Even more impressive. 19a was the one that got me started, having O?S? in the grid.

   One of my colleagues from more than 40 years ago, Jessie Willie from Dalkeith if I remember correctly, was an extra in the film.

7. I was a thousand, or 1061, miles from solving this one.

    

8. WOW! How does Ifor even start compiling such an intricate puzzle?

   We struggled for days with this but were determined not to give in. We started a week late as we were walking the West Highland Way but as cruciverbophile describes it, our warm glow of satisfaction only came on Monday. We struggled with the sequence mentioned in the preamble which took far longer to unravel than it should have. We still had a couple of clues to complete when the penny had finally dropped which enabled us to complete the grid. What stumped us for a while was realising that there could be another letter that was omitted at the end because it was prime.

   If this doesn’t come top in the IQ of the year, we will be very surprised.

   Huge appreciation to Ifor and thanks to Hihoba.

9. Absolutely superb from Ifor. I had a hunch early on what might be happening but it still took some unravelling, particularly in the SW corner. I hadn’t twigged the anagram of the title or the fact that all the thematic clues were those at the clue prime numbers. That has raised my appreciation hugely. Genius.

   Thanks to Hihoba for the blog and Ifor for the stunner. Strongly suspect I’ll be awarding some points to this come the end of the year.

10. Great puzzle. Really challenging and I got to a point when I was making no more progress on the clues and thought I wasn’t going to be able to finish. But whilst with so few clues completed it seemed too early, I started looking for clues in the preamble and the phrase ‘attempt to divide the clues’ poked at my brain. As soon as I’d realised all of the small handful of shortened clues I’d identified were prime-numbered I had a wonderful PDM and everything started falling into place – I wouldn’t say quickly, but steadily at least. If I’m going to be honest I didn’t hugely enjoy the process of filling in and parsing the last few clues (and I never did parse DISC – is that really correct? Ah, I see that disc. is actually listed in Chambers as an abbreviation for discoverer – fair enough), but there was so much else to enjoy and admire that this seems like a minor detail in retrospect.

11. As always, my grateful thanks to bloggers and commenters.  Particular thanks to OPatrick, whose remarks about the oddly-phrased first sentence of the preamble (when “clues fall into two groups” or similar would be usual) told me that at least one solver had made use of it.  As to the rest, I tried hard to find a form of words that adequately explained the sequencing; I hope that the example helped to clarify matters.  Regrettably sometimes preambles do need to be lengthy to achieve fairness.

    I still wonder whether the MILPAR / PRIMAL switch gives too much away too soon.  But I couldn’t resist the fact that MS’s letters produced a euphonious “word” to serve as an endgame.

    Ifor

12. I’m with NormanLinFrance on this one. I had some success solving both normal clues and ones that needed to be shortened but couldn’t make head nor tail of the instruction in the preamble about the letter sequence. This made it a frustrating experience for me, I’m afraid.

    I also have a general query – why do setters tell us “Numbers in brackets give the space available”, when we can already see that for ourselves in the grid? It would be much more use to know the original length of the answer before shortening, surely?

13. Susan @12

    You make a very good point about word length information – one that I often stop to think about but to the best of my recollection have never commented on.  The flip answer is that setters hate to give anything away, so they tell you only what you can see for yourself.  A better answer, reflecting what I hope is more often the case, is that the entry length, if that is all you are given, is at least related to the answer length in some definite way. (In this puzzle, a 5-letter entry, for example, could signify a 5-letter or a 9-letter answer. In many other puzzles, the answer length of some clues is the entry length plus or minus one letter.)

    I imagine that some solvers would have had a more satisfying experience of solving this puzzle if the answer-lengths were given instead of the entry lengths. I’m sure Ifor wasn’t blind to that possibility and chose instead to force the solver to work out such essential information from the clues.  Other solvers were evidently happy to do that.

    As for the preamble, I too found the explanation of the sequencing very confusing, although I did manage to work it out. Perhaps there was no obvious way to express it any more clearly.

14. Susan & Alan B @ 12 & 13. I agree that there is no need for the rubric to include length information if the clued length = the grid length. On this occasion the shortening algorithm meant that the number of letters to be removed was simply a matter of calculation, so the answer length was easily derived. On other occasions, e.g. if unspecified numbers of letters are to be removed or entries are to be changed entirely, setters may help us by specifying how many letters are in the clue answer – the number of letters in the grid is always clear!

15. I am another who wonders why instructions state that the number in brackets is the number of cells in the grid, as is normal.  It is a bit like stating that this sentence has to be read from the left to the right.  State when that is not the case (and if the setter chooses to let us know this in advance).

    Hopefully the ed is following this mini thread.

16. Hi @14

    Thanks for your response to the points that Susan and I made.

    Although Susan was making a general point, I took it that she was also making a particular point about this puzzle as well.  As you rightly say, in some circumstances “setters may help us by specifying how many letters are in the clue answer”, and Ifor could have chosen to do so here, knowing, of course, that it would change the pitch of the puzzle to a degree.

    It’s only “a simple matter of calculation” if you have already solved the clue without knowing the word-length in advance!

17. [Me @16.  Sorry about the tautology ‘also … as well’.]

18. I think it’s worth giving a setter’s take on this.  First, we are enjoined not to include unnecessary complications (often this refers to a jigsaw or carte blanche presentation that isn’t relevant to the theme), and secondly, it is policy to give answer rather than entry lengths unless not doing so is justifiable, as it is in this case.

    Consider: if answer lengths were given here, an obvious first step would be to use the (non)mismatches to identify the two groups.  Even in the unlikely event of the rationale’s not then being immediately apparent, the sequence is, so the message can then be readily picked out from the normal clues and the endgame completed – all this prior to attempting to solve any of them.  Where then the “warm glow of satisfaction” after the theme has emerged?

    Ifor

19. Ifor @18

    Well said. You have shown that I underestimated the likely extent to which the challenge of your puzzle would have been neutered simply by giving us the answer-lengths.

    There were actually two main solving challenges that your puzzle presented to a skilled solver who is not at the expert level: (1) the opaqueness of a large part of the preamble and (2) the fact that the answer-lengths and groups are not known. Such a solver had to get a long way into the puzzle (depending on solving ability, analytical ability and some luck) before the rationale could be worked out. And you shouldn’t underestimate what it takes to solve the clues!

    Congratulations on the thematic design of this puzzle, which I thought was admirable.

20. My point about the answer length being able to be calculated relies on you knowing the algorithm. Here if the grid length is 4 letters this must be letters 1,4,6 and 8, (2,3,5,7 eliminated) so the answer must be an 8 letter word. I found this very useful in solving the remaining prime numbered clues.

    Like PeeDee @ 15 I am persuaded that the preamble should say nothing about word lengths unless they differ from the grid space.

21. Thanks to Hihoba and Ifor

    I had 30d as DISC(loser)

22. A puzzle to marvel at indeed. Another contender for a top 5 finish from Ifor.

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