Listener 4477 Word Squares By Elap

[emcee]

Hmm... I have the values of all but five variables but now find one of them has to be 100. Does anyone know if there are any misprints as all the other values 'hang together'.

Nothing on The Listener site.

[BMACMAC]

As usual I’m in awe of ELAP's skill in composing such a puzzle, which I found an enjoyable experience on the whole. I’m not sure that I liked the final resolution. With some empty cells to be resolved, even after using the hint, it would have been reassuring if the additional unclued letters had been indicated in some way. Or maybe I missed something. When the preamble says "thus enabling the grids' completion" I guess I was expecting more. Perhaps "going some way towards the grids' completion" might have been more precise. Sorry to be a nit-picker ... I really did enjoy this puzzle. Thanks, ELAP. Like others I fell foul of the trap, which meant that the numeric part took longer than it ought to have done.

[olichant]

I enjoyed it when I finally cracked it, after a bit of a struggle. I didn't make the wrong assumption at the outset that I guess others are hinting at - but I still found myself falling into multiple false trails. All of my own making, of course - the puzzle just seemed to be full of traps for the unwary. Nothing wrong in that. Right, back to life...

[Scorpius]

I rather agree with BMACMAC regarding the preamble. It was rather loosely worded, and arguably misleading in two respects.

A very impressive piece of arithmetical engineering, but I was relieved to get to the end of it as I found it very tough. Like Olichant, I went down false trails, often down to carelessness on my part, ultimately reaching a cul-de-sac and having to back-track.

[Mysterons]

Bravo Elap, this was indeed a tour de force with an element of cunning misdirection along the way which for me was just as satisfying to discover as any other Listener 'PDM'. Regarding the puzzle's denouement , the preamble's wording doesn't seem to leave any doubt that the two grids should contain the same set of letters.

[BMACMAC]

Fair enough Mysterons, but that still requires additional letters to be added to complete the grids. I was left in some doubt whether my solution was correct, when I realised that two of my words were also words when read backwards, making my total two more than that suggested by the hint. Nothing other than normal convention suggests that reading bottom to top, or right to left makes words invalid. Did anyone else find this problem, or have I found an incorrect "solution"?

[Mysterons]

It seems likely that the two reversals were unavoidable given the various constraints of each word square - perhaps the setter had originally intended one of the hints to be TWENTY SIX ?

[BMACMAC]

Thanks, Mysterons: I think it would be difficult to modify the puzzle to accommodate such a change! Maybe we should just assume that ELAP comes from a family of bakers, and that his hint was therefore correct all along.

[Mysterons]

Could be ! Though perhaps not that difficult - as an earlier poster pointed out, by assigning different values to half a you know what of letters the grid entries remain the same and a different number appears in the hints !