End of the Line(s) by Shark
Blogs might not be everyone’s cup of tea and this is effectively three blogs in one, but if you are intrigued to know what aliens have to do with rolling balls then keep reading…and I also have a challenge that I am sure someone out there will be able to prove for me. First let me explain why you have had to endure a trilogy of D grade Shark puzzles.
Since February I have been away from home undertaking a specialist fellowship travelling back at weekends, and so both work and family life have kept me very busy. I knew setting time would be extremely short this year, therefore back last autumn I thought it would be reasonable to give the Magpie three connected puzzles to keep them going (or not as I will explain later). It was the third puzzle, “More Lines” that I created first. Interestingly it wasn’t until I received the proof check from AJ shortly before the puzzle was appearing that he explained this type of puzzle is called Arukone (translation: Alphabet connection). I wonder how many of you realised it had a name. I suppose an idea of joining certain cells with lines had to have been done before and if you had to pick a country that would popularise a puzzle like this it would most certainly be Japan. However, in preparation for this blog, and after I created this puzzle, I have found out a little more about it’s originators. It seems as if it was Henry Ernest Dudeney (of the Haberdasher’s puzzle fame recently portrayed by Ploy in January’s Magpie) who used the concept of linking letters with lines back in his book Puzzles and Curious Problems in 1932. He called this puzzle “Planning Tours” using the analogy of cars driving to and from the same letters. I have reconstructed his puzzle if you would like to have a go.
It seems nowadays, numbers are much more common in this type of puzzle, but one of the most original methods was in Sam Cooke’s Cyclopedia of 5000 puzzles in 1914 entitled Puzzleland Park, where each family must go from their house to their respective gate without crossing paths. Here is the link for the original puzzle:
http://www.mathpuzzle.com/loyd/cop060-061.html
In “More Lines” I decided to use letters that occur less commonly in alphabet (e.g. X, Z, Q, J etc) as I was hoping it would be easier to ensure that these letters were not going to occur elsewhere in other entries. However, it took a considerable amount of trial and error and dead-ends to come up with a working grid. Normally, I construct a grid bit by bit altering bars to ensure real words. Here, I constructed the bars first because of the 90 degree symmetry and as the number of bars was already dictated. The part about rearranging bars was not strictly necessary to complete the puzzle, but I kept it in anyway as it was one extra layer of confirmation. A bit more fiddling around enabled me to use more that two occurrences of the remaining 16 letters of the alphabet. I sometimes do not know why I give myself these tasks as it would have been easier to use single letter occurrences. AJ also commented to me at the Magpie social that he enjoys it when I have thought of thematically relevant clues (e.g. boustrophedon moving letters, missing I’s, etc), so here I decided to use double letters in the clues. I needed another gimmick to lead the solver to this and standard style misprints seemed as good as any other. So that was the first of the Line puzzles sorted, and I had already an idea for the second up my sleeve.
I had previously thought of using rolling balls as a concept for a crossword and could easily make this into a line puzzle. Who remembers those cheap hand-held kiddie games that used to be found in Christmas crackers or children’s birthday-party doggy bags? I am sure I remember a huge version on the gameshow Crystal Maze. There are also apps you can download now on your smartphones where tilting the phone moves the ball around the maze.
So I wanted to create a puzzle that used the same principles as this novelty game where instead of using a maze, I could use lines to show the intended path. Below is the representation of the maze that I used in “Lines”.
As you will see, if you tilt the puzzle appropriately by set amounts you will move the three balls at the same time from start to finish. However there is one catch that you cannot retrace any step, which goes against the real life game. Now here is the challenge for a bright spark out there. I think, but I cannot prove, that this is the only possible way of moving three balls from diagonally adjacent positions to points where they all lie adjacent to each other in the same row or column (excluding mirror symmetry and in the confines of this grid). I therefore think a 12×9 (or 9×12) grid is the smallest possible grid in which this task can be completed. There are of course other ways of doing it in a larger grid.
So this was the basic concept of the puzzle, but it didn’t make much of a thematic crossword as it stood and therefore I had to find a phrase of 28 letters (the number of corners) that somehow connected with this theme. So I put 28 question marks into WordWebPro and it gave 128 possibilities in ODE alone: for example, “being unable to believe one’s luck”, “beyond the bounds of possibility” etc. and then I saw “close encounter of the third kind”; this had a nice ring to it as the three balls had close encounters, not actually touching. Now here comes the answer to so many queries about this puzzle, it has nothing to do with aliens, especially the movie. In fact the movie is “close encounterS of the third kind” with an extra S. What I also thought interesting was the ODE definition…“used to describe encounters involving increasing degrees of complexity”. This was particularly pertinent as it was going to be the second crossword and it was appearing that each puzzle was getting increasingly more complex. Unfortunately this has completely been lost on most solvers and will now hopefully resolve the alien issue. Three balls was a fortuitous find in Chambers as I had to point the solver somehow as to how the lines were created and the fact that pawnbroker is the same length was a useful way of disguising this aspect of the puzzle.
Shark puzzles can often be tricky but to ask solvers to work out the path on their own is beyond difficult (despite in the back of my mind is Pieman’s quip that he wanted to create a puzzle that only one person could solve correctly). In addition, the fact that I could not prove that it was unique, led me to include the solution in the clues. How could I do that with so may S/N/E/W letters? I thought using the first letter in clue 1, the tenth letter in clue 10, etc. was an unusual gimmick. Again using misprints to lead to this was just as good as any other device to guide solvers. However, it seems the direction was not that easy to fathom out, a similar ring you might say to the third Line pizzle.
So onto the final puzzle that was in fact the first of the trilogy of puzzles published. It naturally had to be a puzzle with only one line. I find Saturday evenings a useful time to create, solve and blog puzzles and it was when Atlantis was on the TV that I had the idea. This TV programme was not really about Atlantis but a conglomeration of Greek mythological characters including Hercules, Jason, Ariadne and the anachronistic Pythagoras. So the adventures of Jason and the Golden Fleece were devised. I could use the parts of his journey with the Argonauts as a route around the grid and solvers had to draw the path with a single closed line. This is where I have to mention that my original idea is not what you solved. There were a number of extra events that had to be completed in the grid but were removed in the final version. Shark enjoys changing grids ensuring real words (as, for example, in Lines) and Line was no different. Apart from the Argo killing Jason by falling on him as you saw in the published puzzle, I also had HYLAS being removed from the grid (as he was lost), the FLEECE being removed from the grid (as it was taken), two letters of SIREN changing using the instrument that was used to get past them (LYRE) and the NAIL being removed from TALOS’s neck creating his name. Despite these subsequent editorial exclusions I accepted the decision and the puzzle has gone down well according to your feedback. However one aspect I did notice was that the deliberate red herring of ARIADNE appears to have resulted in making it a tricky to ascertain the endgame. Ariadne also appeared in the aforementioned TV show and so I included her as I thought some solvers might think the puzzle was in fact a maze using the thread (line) to escape out of the labyrinth. It appears so and therefore I do have to apologise for to those solvers who gave up failing to find the Minotaur.
I could not resist creating another set of thematic clues. The idea struck me when setting the first few across clues with pertinent thematic wordplay of “turn left”, “proceed slowly then race away” and “travel although not initially”. I then chucked all the definitions into the down clues and so it led to a very fun group of across clues to set.
There we have it, and I think that is enough line type puzzles for one lifetime. That brings me onto the point I mentioned earlier regarding Shark puzzles and my year away. I created these to give the Magpie enough to get on with, but in the end they wanted to keep the theme fresh in the solver’s mind especially as I used the same first paragraph in each of the three puzzles. For any of you awaiting another Shark puzzle, unfortunately you will have to wait as the editors have (and I have) no more puzzles for you at the moment…although I have managed a couple of joint puzzles you may see before the next Shark surfaces…see if you can spot them! Now that definitely is the end of the line.