Four Setters of The Apocalypse – Oyler’s Take
Ever since my Listener puzzle Odd One Out [L3984] put the ‘fear of God’ into one of the Magpie editors I’d wanted to replicate that but with a scary title instead. I thought about words that had scary connotations. Apocalypse – now that was scary after all there are The Four Horsemen of that ilk. I decided that the title would be Four Setters of the Apocalypse. I am, along with other setters, constantly trying to think up new ways for clueing entries. There’s not much that can be done with letter/number assignments so it’s the number properties/definitions that offers the most scope. I hit on the idea of each setter coming up with a function. The clues would be the output from the function and the entries in the grid would be the input. So what setters would I choose? As I was using mathematical notation I started with the Greek alphabet – α, β, γ and how fortuitous as we have the mathematical triumvirate of setters Arden, Brimstone and Googly. So who to have for the 4th? Well as this was going to The Magpie an obvious choice had to be one of the editors as it might improve its chances of publication hence Mr Magoo!
Digit sums and digit products have been used in puzzles and I decided to combine the two with Arden’s function being their sum. Brimstone’s function would output the number of distinct digits and Mr Magoo’s would give the sum of all possible single digit products. Googly’s function was going to throw a spanner in the works ( something that his puzzles often do! ) as it would be either the digit sum minus the digit product or the digit product minus the digit sum according to whether the input was odd or even and this would be confirmed by decoding the grid taking the digits two at a time mod26.
So I had an already filled in grid and the clues were very easy to write as all I had to do was put each entry into each function in turn. I did the cold solve and wondered if I could give the outputs in a random order for each clue. Brimstone’s ones were an easy spot as were some of Googly’s. I found that that could be done but forgot to type it up in the summer of 2011.
I didn’t send the puzzle away though and came upon it again in the spring of 2012. By now Olympic fever had gripped the country. You couldn’t go anywhere without hearing Vangelis’ haunting opening theme music to Chariots of Fire. The opening scenes were filmed on the West Sands here in St Andrews and at the time I was doing my Ph.D in theoretical/computational chemistry.
Such was the Olympic fever that our SMT deemed that the S2 in school would have a whole fortnight of Olympic themed lessons. Now that’s all well and good for subjects that only had the kids a couple of periods a week but in maths it was 4 periods a week! We rose to the challenge and managed to come up with 8 topics, the best of which was a mini Olympic games where they had to see how far they could putt the cotton wool ball, how far they could throw the drinking straw javelin and the paper plate discus!! The fortnight culminated with the S2 going down to the West Sands on the Friday afternoon to recreate the opening scenes of the film and the rangers on the Old Course suspended play, briefly I hasten to add, so that the pupils could cross the course safely.
Hang on a minute Vangelis had been the keyboard player in the Greek prog rock group Aphrodite’s Child and one of their hits had been Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse with Demis Roussos on wailing vocals. Could I perhaps bring this into the puzzle in some way? A quick letter count revealed that Aphrodite’s Child had 15 letters – great a 5×3 rectangle. I don’t know what I’d have done if it had been prime.
I decided to have a central rectangle that would have to be decoded mod10 to reveal the group and that the corner cells would have to be coloured according to the lyrics in the song which were taken from the Book of Revelations. The digits in the corner cells would use the same code as the central rectangle and as the track was from their album 666 – how good was that? – that number too would appear.
I took the opportunity to redo the functions and change them to rules. Arden’s rule stayed the same and Mr Magoo’s rule became Brimstone’s as I had a better idea for Mr Magoo!! In issue 72 of The Magpie the numerical puzzle was Manual Cipher by Mr Magoo and here you were given clues that gave the number of prime factors of the entry along with their sum. So I made Mr Magoo’s rule the sum of the prime factors of the entry just to keep things correct. I ditched Googly’s over complicated rule and made that the other rule that had appeared in M72.
Since the grid was only partially filled in I had a bit more latitude than before in that now I could chose some of the entries. To give solvers a bit of help I made one entry a prime which would give them a way in via the rules provided by Googly and Mr Magoo.
With puzzle set and solved I sent it away and waited. At Christmas time I set another puzzle and sent that in and asked what was happening regarding Four Setters of The Apocalypse. I was informed that it had been solved but that the ending was too obvious given my preamble and title and that they had come up with some changes. A new title was one along with a completely different preamble. As these were a vast improvement, I was more than happy to go along with it.
I realise that some, perhaps many, solvers will not have appreciated the dénouement and preferred to have just had the puzzle without it or worse still no puzzle at all!
The puzzle was an attempt to try something different in the clueing department and in the lyrics of ‘I Believe’ by Asia is the line ‘How can I contribute if I just don’t try?’. Well I tried and I contributed. You can’t do any more than that. Whether it was worthwhile or not will be decided by the feedback but rest assured regardless of the positivity or negativity I will keep on trying.