Azed 2630

25 comments on “Azed 2630”

1. Thanks duncanshiell, AMO is ‘a twinking of an eye’ (A MO).
   Agree on your parsing of TAINO.

2. Finally finished this on Thursday, the last encoded solution GARVIE having fallen on Tuesday (SCHEME took a long time too, seme being new). I had the P->A->E colinearity and the S->L,C->U one, and the ETLU square, but thought it unlikely that P would be on the bottom line – such a long keyword! Very satisfying when the OUSLY jumped out as a possibility, and A M I D looked like being near on a line.
   Thanks as ever to Azed, glad I persisted.

3. PS did you have any rationale for think VW must be together?

4. I agree with Gonzo @ 1 for A MO (short for a moment) in AMOEBAE. I took “in” as a synonym of “included” in TAINO, so it’s “in” in “tao”.
   I always find solving Playfairs a bit of a chore. Not just having to cold solve the encoded answers, but just the mechanics. You know it can be done, it’s just a slog to do it.
   I found PERDU particularly difficult to clue for some reason

5. Thanks for the blog and all your efforts, you had the answer all along – Scrabble tiles.
   Makes it so much easier, we have probable rows of four A M I D , C U S L, E and T O and R. The PAE must be a column so E below A. With tiles you can cycle these rows and slot in possible fifth letters AMBID comes quickly , E under A and the X appears and all done.
   Much easier than lots of scribbling and crossing out.

6. Agree with Gonzo @1 for twinkling which I thought was very nice . Also Tim@4 for included=in which I thought was clumsy with the second “in” to put it inside.
   OBTUND took me a while with all the cycling of don and tub. GARVIE my last coded word, finally remembered that Azed uses see=v often.

7. I solved all the uncoded words fairly quickly, and even got a few coded words, but I had no idea how to work out what the code square was. I’ve come across the Playfair crossword before but I can’t remember if I’ve ever been able to complete one.

8. I only started doing this last evening. I solved all the clues bar LASSU (never heard of either part) and GARVIE (I thought of a CIE ending, but forgot VIE), but I struggled with the Playfair square. I just couldn’t seem to bring all the bits I had together! So I went to bed. After a short while asleep, I woke up and found myself thinking about AMID (although I’d previously written it down as IDAM) and hey presto! Ambidextrous popped into my head. Then, knowing L belonged with US, I amended it to Ambidextrously and worked out that C would come at the end of that line (as I’d already thought SLUC belonged together). Finally, before drifting back to sleep, I worked out Garvie. I guess my subconscious must have been at work while I was asleep!

9. Gonzo @ 3

   V and W had to be on the same row and I reckoned they werent going to be in the rows with AMID or UCLS. or E,T, R and O I suppose they could have gone on the same row as G and H. There was probably a bit of subconscious thinking that they had to be in the alphabetical remainder part after the keyword. It seemed unlikely that there would be real words of the form *T*R*W*V* or appropriate variants to maintain the TRVW rectangle. If tV and W were in the alphabetical part, they had to be together as there is no letter between V and W. They would have to be in the bottom line as VWXYZ are the last five letters of the alphabet. V couldn’t be at the end of the fourth row as that would leave only a maximum of WXYZ for the bottom row,

10. I’m enormously impressed by anyone who takes the trouble to decipher a Playfair code by logic alone. I remember doing so – laboriously – when I first encountered them in Azed puzzles and didn’t have access to online codebreakers. Once I discovered their existence, coupled with the fact that they can find a keyword with very little text to work on, I’m afraid I never went back.

11. bridgesong@9: I didn’t even know there were online codebreakers. Indeed, it’s very likely that the last time I did a Playfair was before there was a worldwide web.

12. Thanks, as always, to Azed and to duncanshiell. Sadly, having competed all the clues, including the eight coded ones, I didn’t complete the “cracking” ’til Saturday- a very busy week and the decision that P couldn’t be on the bottom row meant the eureka moment was too late to clue PERDU.
    I recognise all the steps made by our blogger- my spread-sheet matched that precisely- down to the mysterious term “code-cracker” (what’s that?) when I envisaged Benedict Cumberbatch standing in front of the Bombe.
    How long since the last Playfair?

13. KeithThomas, last Playfair was August:
    
    where the theme of UK playwrights made the decoding much easier.
    Thanks duncanshiell for your explanation re VW.

14. August 2021 that is.

15. Bridgesong@10 not really logic for me, more trial and error, I maintain that Scrabble tiles are ideal. Simple , effective and flexible. I also ignore the rectangles just focus on single letter switches looking for mixed groups which nearly always means the same row. I also ignore the last two rows and just hunt the code word.

16. The first time I’ve attempted a playfair puzzle. Having got all the answers bar a couple of the coded ones I made an impatient and rather brief attempt to crack the code then left it, feeling that the benefit of a completed grid was outweighed by the effort required to obtain it. Admittedly, codes do not excite me, but I was hoping when I started the puzzle that deducing the codeword would be more essential to solving the crossword. As it was, it would only have been any use for mopping up the loose ends. I note that most solvers solved all of the coded words before attempting the decoding, so that part is just an appendix to main business of the puzzle. Is that always the case, or is it a particular feature of this grid, with the coded solutions on the periphery?

17. Azed usually gives a strong hint to the code word using the answers to be encoded. As Gonzo says the last one had UK playwrights . A fairly recent one had doubleparking as the code word and PP in the answers to be encoded.

18. James@16 , just from memory I would say there are are usually four coded clues and not always on the perimeter. In the past I have “back-solved” one after constructing the Playfair from the other three.

19. Roz, back-solving was what I was expecting, and was what I would have had to do to complete, and is what I would have tried harder to do had I not all but finished the puzzle by the time it became relevant. It is almost as if the grid is set up so that all of the solutions to be encoded must be found before cracking the code. The coded entries have a shortage of crossing letters, so very little information about the code square is obtainable from each entry, making it a requirement to solve most if not all of those clues cold. Would it not be more satisfactory if some coded entries had more crossers and were more embedded, giving enough information to work out the codeword at an earlier stage, which would then be the key not only to filling in the unchecked squares of the coded entries but also some of the normal clues?

20. I thought this one was particularly awkward in terms of coded entries. Each had only one pair to fully encode, the corners of the grid could not be checked at all. Also for Azed the top of the grid and left hand side are usually very useful giving lots of first letters for other clues.
    I think the eight coded clues were needed this time or we would not have enough letters for the Playfair.
    As suggested in the blog, maybe the positions were meant to hint at the code word.

21. Roz@20, not sure if you made use of this but the corners were more useful than I thought at first. The checked letters in the plaintext map to the same coded letter, and hence are in the same row (if at the same end) or column (otherwise).
    Couldn’t manage the exploration of the possibilities offered by the constraints with Word tables (definitely Scrabble tiles next time) so tried a solver with two doublets of plain and enciphered text hoping to get a manageable number to explore. Unfortunately that number was 1 – Playfair really is no match for computer analysis. Even a single doublet gave a few possibilities with one obvious choice.
    [For those unfamiliar with Lassus, here’s a sample]

22. Tim@21 I did not need the corners , I had 4 out of 5 letters for the top three rows and with Scrabble tiles that was easily enough to get the code word. The corners could have given the row for B but I had already guessed it.

23. Very educational: 14 NHO, 11 of which I managed to deduce!

24. Thanks Gonzo @13 for the link. It was not a comp week but I recall the playwrights as theatre was one of my things (no more alas). I certainly cracked that a lot quicker than this.
    So good to see a proper dialogue on one of Azed’s wonders.

25. Very disappointed that I got nowhere near the code-word, having decided from the start that it must be Proust-related (Perdu. 100 years since his death.)

Comments are closed.