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Listener No. 4453: Army & Navy By Shackleton
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I made heavy weather of this at first, and admired the way some of the misprints were quite deviously hidden. I was lucky in the end-game, spotting a likely anagram which turned out to be correct: I'm not sure I'd have solved the cryptic name indication without that. There was still more to do, though: what a rich mixture. Thanks, Shackleton, that was a fine construction and a great work-out.
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For more on marking an answer as the "Best Answer", please visit our FAQ.The blanks are presumably separators, which - if I have the right name - places them unambiguously and also makes 6 + 5 (+3) fit the available space. But what worries me is the lack of any relationship between the letters being replaced and the replacements. Unless I'm missing something, we have to erase three solutions and replace them with a representation of a name which is unrelated and uncheckable (other than that the name is common to both expeditions and its coded representation fills 14 squares) How does this add to the complexity or elegance of the puzzle?
I've finally resolved the dilemma. Subtle? Yes. Devious? Yes. Clever? Brilliantly so. I, along with most others, was misled, but whether I was deliberately or unfairly misled is open to debate. Whatever the case, my opinion of the puzzle has been enhanced.
If the setter is following this thread he must be chuckling to himself.
If the setter is following this thread he must be chuckling to himself.
It only seems unfair because most of us solved this part of the puzzle the wrong way round - ie by guessing the name based on research, and then coding it (resulting in 6,5). The trouble with this short cut is that the replacements could be made in any old row. But if the puzzle is solved in the order that the setter evidently intended, there is no misdirection. You first get 6,6 and then, by applying this to the specified row, arrive at the name - which you can then confirm by reference to the two expeditions. However, I'm still uneasy about the extra line, which doesn't seem to add anything further to the instruction to "apply H to the title".
Really have got the coding now - am I the last? In all honesty I doubt I'd have got there without the hints here and elsewhere. Yes it's unambiguous (so fair, I suppose) and certainly a very clever use of the source material. Whether it justifies a gridfill-endgame time ratio of one to about 8 is another matter. I realise that one can't expect to knock off the Listener before Friday dinnertime every week, but personally I wouldn't want to see too many puzzles with this amount of misleading. YMMV, and that's a good thing of course.
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