Inquisitor 1797: Commutability by Eclogue

14 comments on “Inquisitor 1797: Commutability by Eclogue”

1. Empty grid style puzzles are very much my favourite, as I always enjoy a bit of Sherlock Holmes style deduction. This was all very cleverly done, I thought, with the two alternative summations coming from the same set of thirteen letters. Some very good clues too, all very enjoyable indeed.

2. Lots of thanks to Eclogue and duncanshiell. Very satisfying and much enjoyed after a slow start here — I got the 13-letter answers and then took an unaccountably long time to crack HOLINESSES, which placed them and allowed grid fill to begin. The invocation of the commutative law was clear enough, but I half-expected some final surprise or Easter egg from the positioning of the 13 and still wonder whether I’m missing some significance in the finger of fate having pointed to the word DARE.

3. With the help of a friend (and after a long time contemplating), I used the same approach for the final endgame but appear to have miscounted the cells as I thought the 13th clue was NOWT, which made more sense to me as 13+NOWT = 12+1 = 11+2 ! (Though I still didn’t like it much as solution). DARE I say it, maybe the setter miscounted the cells as well?

   Otherwise a very enjoyable puzzle with an ingenious placement of letters – the anagram might be “well known” but it was new to me, so I found it very neat. Thank you all.

4. Arnold @ 3

   That’s an interesting suggestion and one that made me double check whether I had got the 13 in the grid in the right place. I also looked to see whether NOWT was the thirteenth alphabetical clue, but it isn’t.

5. FWIW, I went with DARE too, though only after several miscounts. 🙂 Nice puzzle, though I had no idea what the commutability stuff was about.

6. This was a very well-constructed puzzle, and an excellent example of a jigsaw, a type of puzzle that I often used to struggle with. I was pleased to be able to start the grid quite early on when I had both of the 10-letter answers and two of the three 13-letter ones. I enjoyed working out which letters were lacking in the wordplay, some of them proving quite tricky.

   The endgame was short and spectacular. Not knowing exactly how to proceed, I just read my circled letters down the grid and then across the grid. As it happens, I already knew that amazing equality TWELVE + ONE = ELEVEN + TWO, but I didn’t see it coming until ELEVEN revealed itself. A clever construction, and a very good puzzle overall with a good set of clues and an apt title. I had 13 DARE.

   Thanks Eclogue and duncanshiell.

7. An enjoyable solve and gridfill, but I didn’t get the endgame, and even when it was pointed out to me I was a bit baffled. I had been expecting the shaded word to be thematic, but just shading Dare because it was clue 13 was a bit disappointing.

8. A pretty fast start for me, with all but one of the 10-, 12, & 13-letter entries solved straight away. No major hiccups, and an enjoyable smooth ride – and a reminder of the 11+2=12+1 quirk with English number-names. Thanks go to Eclogue & Duncan. (I inserted 13 in row 2, column 8, as did most others.)

9. Really enjoyable and challenging solve, but as I entered the 13 (in the wrong place, natch) I was pretty sure I must be missing the point (I was; I saw only the ‘twelve plus one’, not the other – very clever). Thanks to Eclogue and Duncan.

10. I guess we’ll have to wait until Saturday’s paper to find out where 13 was meant to go!

11. I hope there’s more to the endgame here. The problem is that the entering the number 13 can’t, as far as I can see, be said to “demonstrate the commutability of these letters” as required in the instructions. You don’t have to read them both ways to get to thirteen – one or the other will do. What the number 13 shows is the sum, not the commutability. The fact that you can only enter the number with an extremely sharp pencil or draughtsman’s pen doesn’t help.

    All in all I hope we’re all missing something. Around the D of “dare” are various hopeful looking combinations – “are”, “one”, “the”, “same” (though not “and”), “nowt” of course, “two” backwards etc, but I can’t make any of them work. If the tiny 13 really is all there is, I’d call this a brilliant puzzle with a bad endgame.

12. Herb @11
    Thanks for your comment on that sentence in the preamble. I actually thought that the use of the word ‘commutability’ was reasonable. Something is ‘commutable’ (not to be confused with the mathematical term ‘commutative’) simply if it can be exchanged with something equivalent. Naturally, the setter did not wish to refer to the two different ways of reading the same letters that we had to discover for ourselves. Each reading is commutable into the other in two ways: (1) by reordering the letters (a trivial result) and (2) by extracting the meanings of the words and symbols and coming up with the same answer – a ‘number’ that we illustrate (or ‘demonstrate’) in the grid.

13. Take that Spinal tap
    Bet your marshalls dont go past 11!

14. The Saturday paper simply said “we need to insert 13 for DARE” so we’re none the wiser. I’d email John H to elucidate but I’m not sure I can be sufficiently bothered 🙂

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