The Sphinx's Lair

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Sphinx

00:20

Q: What’s interesting about these numbers?

Erich Friedman has a website What's Special About This Number? but there is nothing listed for 391, 424, 460 and some larger numbers. Can you think of anything interesting about these unlisted numbers?

number-property

Stiv

And it is done...!

Sphinx

00:43

Q: A Trivial Pursuit #25: Meta-Analysis

This is the final part of A Trivial Pursuit, a 25-part puzzle hunt. Having solved the previous 24 sub-puzzles in this series, you have managed to find 24 keywords that will help you extract the overall solution to A Trivial Pursuit. For your convenience, these answers are collated in the followi...

logical-deduction knowledge enigmatic-puzzle metapuzzles treasure-hunt

1 hour later…

oAlt

01:59

Wow, we have two metas :)

And also, I think yesterday is now the day with the most CCCC clues. (The previous one was in 2017, but I can't remember the exact date...)

(^ which I now notice msh210 has pointed out earlier haha)

5 hours later…

msh210

06:38

@oAlt 2017-07-17

msh210

06:50

No idea what to do about the T.P. Meta-Analysis, but I did notice offhand that the words seemed to have a lot of H's in them. So I counted and, indeed, 6.3% of the letters in these words are H's, as compared with 3.0% of letters in words in general. I didn't check statistical significance, but I suspect that this is utterly meaningless.

oAlt

07:07

Same I have no idea. Stiv briefly mentions 21 in the flavor text, and the number of numbers in the string is twice that amount (42, and dots are 43), which makes me raise an eyebrow

rot13(Naq gur hasnzvyvne jbeqf ybbx fhfcvpvbhf gbb. V zrna, jung xvaq bs jbeq vf "bgvngel"?)

@msh210 (and I forgot to say, thanks for this. overlooked it somehow)

msh210

07:39

@oAlt a tetrasyllabic one

Daniel S

07:52

Hmmm INTERNATIONAL TELECOMMUNICATIONS UNION HEADQUARTERS matches 3/4 on enumeration, Headquarters might mean removing the first 25% of a solution…

… or it could just be an anagram of “Zion IL…CCs” and not a meta at all

... such as INTERNATIONAL TELECOMMUNICATIONS SATELLITE ORGANIZATION

itso.int

oAlt

08:08

Wait is that actually it

Wow, it... actually is

I'm just going to double check, this is too good to be true

Daniel S

TakingNotes this morning

@TakingNotes should have flagged you on the above

oAlt

That's devious and impressive, what the heck? I didn't think you can make an anagram out of that seemingly ordinary phrase

How did you even find that anagram?

Jafe

08:25

wait so it wasn't a meta at all?

Jafe

08:45

i have no idea how you saw that, it would probaböy have taken me 30 days and 30 hints

Daniel S

@oAlt My first thought was that the first word was very likely to be INTERNATIONAL. I then thought that 18 letter words are often quite specialised and, as it happens, I work in TELECOMMUNICATIONS and know about the ITU. I then saw that a lot of these letters we lying a round and started counting...

TakingNotes

08:59

@DanielS yep, this is it :)

took me so long to find a phrase that had malleable enough letters

thought i'd play a bit of a trick

stiv found that the first words of my last 3 clues spell RED HER RING - but they contain 10 words between them, matching my clue

additionally, RED BLOOD CELLS has 13 letters, matching INTERNATIONAL, HER MAJESTY'S THEATRE has 18 letters, matching TELECOMMUNICATIONS and RING THE BELLS BACKWARDS has 21, matching SATELLITE ORGANIZATION

so there was at least a bit to hold you up in my last few clues

msh210

09:24

very nicely done @TakingNotes

TakingNotes

thank you lol

Stiv

Hahaha - that was a really funny idea! Totally subverted expectations that we have entirely created for ourselves!

msh210

yeah, and the extra details made it even better

Daniel S

10:07

I'm not sure how to follow that with just one clue, so here are two clues. Feel free to solve either:

CCCC: Play wordplay for Rome. (5, 3, 6, 4, 3)

CCCC: Play wordplay for o. (5, 3, 6, 4, 3)

TakingNotes

something strange is going on here...

msh210

10:24

@DanielS is this Henry the Fourth, Part One, as r (fourth letter of Henry) + ome (what you get when you part "one" by sticking a "|" in the middle of it)?

Daniel S

@msh210 Correct answer; derivation not quite right. Can you figure out the second clue and how they fit together?

msh210

@DanielS Henry the Fourth, Part Two, as O (O. Henry) = second letter of fourth?

(so it's not wordplay for O but definition and wordplay for O in that case)

Daniel S

@msh210 Again correct answer and enough to take the win. My meaning was Rome+o=Romeo=R=Henry the Fourth (which is more than a little convoluted)

msh210

ahhh

msh210

10:44

CCCC: Apply wordplay to broad span (7)

oAlt

11:16

@DanielS same with the first part. In fact I had already stumbled upon "International Telecommunication Union" but got stuck there

@TakingNotes was it all by hand?

TakingNotes

well it was a lot of hand-testing what words worked as part of the final answer (i.e. meta > metapuzzle and CCs > clues) but i did use qat to help me find base phrases (COMMUNICATIONS SATELLITE for this one) and then onelook to find longer phrases containing those phrases

so no i used computers

oAlt

11:30

Ahhh. Again, impressive :)

oAlt

11:54

Wordplay could be something like PUN, or this is probably another reverse cryptic

And now I shall stop thinking about this C4 since I still have to review for an exam tomorrow :')

1 hour later…

oAlt

13:19

((Our exam was postponed to the 9th and it was announced 3 days ago apparently))

msh210

Probably when you were looking at PSE or the Lair instead of listening to announcements. :-)

oAlt

13:51

A stretch is a (broad) span and if you stretch the meaning of words then you play with them, which is thus an application of wordplay...? Yeah no this ain't it

msh210

@oAlt correct

that ain't it

oAlt

1 hour later…

oAlt

15:23

"Apply wordplay to" could be "anagram" or "reverse" (reversal being wordplay in the cryptic clue sense)

1 hour later…

Sphinx

16:44

Q: Sudoku variants #1: Schrödinger's Grave (6x6 grid)

Not in conjunction with my Minesweeper puzzles - that would be concerning! Inspired by Cracking The Cryptic's video "The Graveyard Of Schrödinger" (original gimmick by fjam) How this gimmick works: Normal sudoku rules almost apply. Place the digits 0-6 into cells such that each digit appears on...