Guardian Genius 237 – Qaos

11 comments on “Guardian Genius 237 – Qaos”

1. This was an remarkable puzzle, which seemed impossible at first. The only way to start was to try the clues, and I pencilled in some likely or at least possible answers. ETNA (instead of LOVE) was one of my earliest guesses (being the reverse of a real word: ANTE), but it hindered the solving of HEARTHSTONE for quite a while. Eventually, having ‘solved’ 25 of the 30 clues, whose answers crossed each other successfully, I collected the few words I had written down as possible replacements for some of the asterisks and looked online for a match. These words were ‘in ice’, what, fire, twice, hate and great. Matching the blogger’s experience, the poem luckily came up for me as the first search result – confirmed by checking the first two lines (from the ODQ) against the first five clues.

   Of many good clues my top ten were TRILLED, PIECE, INSECTA, PYROMANIACS, EXCEPT, EPITAPHED, HAND, TEAS, SOCIALISE and DOAB.

   Thanks to Qaos for a clever puzzle and to duncanshiell for an excellent blog.

2. Thanks to Qaos for a remarkable puzzle, and to duncanshiell for the multicolor blog.

   Somewhat like Alan B@1, I passed over the Robert Frost poem multiple times before I ran the search “of desire those playing with fire poem,” (the asterisks that I was pretty sure I had a handle on), and Fire and Ice came up for the tenth time, and I finally realized how it worked. What a relief, after feeling stumped for three weeks.

   The anagrind for INSECTA is “broken.”

3. Well it does say “genius” on the wrapper – now it seems you have to be one to set it as well as to solve it! Immensely clever and the truly remarkable thing is how solvable it was given so little to start on, like a sudoku with only one number in it. To sustain that device without torturing the grammar or resorting to non-words (which many setters do even without a theme) was very impressive.

   Like others, I got about 90% through solving with guess-work and an idea of what the missing words must mean before finding the poem which rang the faintest of bells. I was even able to quote the opening to a work colleague (an English grad) in an appropriate context that very evening so tahnk you Qaos for making this scientist look a little more cultured than he is!

   And thank you duncanshiell for the lucidity of the blog.

4. The only thing that was going to redeem this puzzle for me was if the clues turned out to include every word of the poem, in order. They do, so I suppose it is less of a turkey than I found it to be when solving.
   It took about twenty minutes to get all the solutions. I had no idea what any of the asterisked words might be except for a likely ‘hate’ and a possible ‘fire’. I don’t know a lot of poems, and there was no value in trying to find which one it might have been.
   Apart from ‘hate’, I don’t think there is any clue where one can say ‘it must be that’. In addition, there is Qaos’ personal take on how English works to contend with, so even the right words might turn out to work badly in the clue (for example, 22a ‘I hold with ..’ is bad for SINGLE containing W, plenty of other examples too).
   Well done to those who got the poem, but do you think you solved it? I think a computer solved it for you. These puzzles work well if (a) the gimmick makes the puzzle harder, (b) you have to understand the gimmick to complete the puzzle and ideally (c) you get a bit of help from it at the end. None of those applied here. I completed the entry form with all the solutions and I’m afraid wrote a disgruntled message where the poet’s name should have gone.

5. I interpreted “some say” in 12a as meaning “this is how some say the word is spelt”, rather than as a homophone indicator.

   Thanks to Qaos and duncanshiell

6. Well I feel like a dummy now. I did everything right and my experience was very much like yours, duncanshiell.

   Many thanks for the excellent blog and to Qaos for what has already been pointed out was a very clever and most enjoyable and different solving experience.

   The reason I feel like a dummy is that my last clue in (7d) was wrong and the reason is that I blindly trusted Wikipedia where the line

   “to say that destruction…”
   is incorrectly shown as
   “to KNOW that destruction…” rendering my version of the clue invalid. In hindsight I should have realised this because the punctuation in my version makes it even more wrong: my possibles were TEAS, LEES and WETS and I went for the latter thinking that written upwards STEW might be an obscure term for KNOW. Anyway, onwards and upwards, you live and learn. I should have checked my sources.

   Thanks again for the blog and the puzzle, ds and Q.

   [In other news, I confirm that my submission experience on my phone is not what it should be: a couple of Genius blogs ago I complained that I get no confirmation – on screen or via email – of successful submission 🙁 . No bad thing on this occasion but frustrating nonetheless ]

7. James @4

   I too attempted to solve all the clues first, thinking it was the only way to get near the theme. The difference between us is that I was five answers short (and I took a couple of hours to get that far!). I agree that one had to guess what any of the asterisks represented (there was no other way), but I thought that kind of device was permitted, within reason, in a Genius puzzle. (I remember Soup’s puzzle, no. 197 in this series, in which all vowels were missing from the clues, although in that one there were not many instances of plausible alternative guesses at missing vowels – it was just hard with some of them to find the right ones. In Qaos’s puzzle, most of the asterisks attracted multiple plausible guesses, the second asterisk in 21a being one extreme example.)

   You are so right about the computer solving this. I practically never do wild online searches to get a result in a crossword puzzle (by which I mean bunging in words that do not seem to be related but probably must be related somewhere, for the setter’s sake, in which case the computer will find it), but of course I had to do that here. I came away from the computer at that point and looked up one line in my ODQ, which gave me two lines, and I followed that with a pinpoint (computer) search for the rest.

   As for 22a SWINGLE, that is the one instance that I remember of a solecism in the cryptic grammar – it jarred! Any others I may have noticed have been forgotten, but I take your point. I always value your contributions, by the way, and I know that you also commented on the earlier puzzle by Soup that I referred to.

8. I asked Qaos about the idea for this puzzle and he credited the concept to Mark Goodliffe who set a barred puzzle for Magpie using the same device.

   The Wikipedia page has an image of the first publication of the poem which has “to know that for destruction” rather than “to say that for destruction” which confused for a while. I prefer the later version.

   Lovely puzzle, thoroughly enjoyed!

9. I am not sure that I understand the comments about the necessity of a computer search. (Perhaps thumbing through a poetry anthology would be a quainter version of the same exercise.) Even if I recognized the gist of the poem from a few solid “asterisk” solutions, I certainly would not have had the poem perfectly memorized, such that I could have substituted word-for-word every asterisk without having consulted some resource for the full text of the poem. I do not feel as though “the computer solved the puzzle for me,” since most of the clues were designed to allow for solving (or educated guessing) even without knowing that the missing information from the asterisks provided, and I had the grid almost filled before confirming the poem, with solid guesses for the clues that I had not solved. For me, filling in the blanks/asterisks with the text of the poem merely confirmed (in a delightful way) the solving process up to that point.

10. Cineraria @9
    Thanks for your comment.
    As a rule, I prefer to have sufficient indications in the clues (and in the preamble if that is relevant) to enable me to get the answers rather than have to guess them (which by the way I am not very good at). However, this crossword was different (as most Genius puzzles are), and I enjoyed this different way of working, which I found challenging.
    Again, as a rule, I prefer to be given hints or pointers that enable me to work out or find something thematic rather than use a machine that scans all possible data to try and match things that I have not yet resolved. But I recognise that for most solvers this is an everyday tool. Naturally, I don’t have all reference books in English in my home, and I very often use my tablet to look up things when I don’t know the answer to a question.
    One thing I could have mentioned, but forgot, is my appreciation of the way that Qaos used words, and sequences of words, that were forced on him by his own choice of source and fashioned cryptic crossword clues around them. That is the basis of what I considered to be my ten favourites listed in my first comment.

11. Thanks for the blog Duncan. Our experience was much like yours (I’m staggered by those who got most of the answers without having got the poem!) – Frost’s poem was the second hit for “poem world twice hate” – Wordsworth’s “the world is too much with us…” was first, but that clearly wouldn’t do.
    But that was after having given up and thrown the thing to one side twice, so it was gratifying to finish it eventually!

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