Stats – We had 50 solvers completing and submitting the grid. Of those who submitted 31 managed to get the maximum possible score of 162 including the Bonus.
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Bonus Question: What is formed by the connections made in the puzzle based on the instructions? (8,4)
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The answer to the Bonus question is “Infinite Sign” or “Infinite Loop” which is the shape formed by connecting the points as per the instructions.
Here is the solution grid:
Annotations:
| Across | Answer | Explanation |
| 1 Clutch a dictionary to fully understand significance! (5,3,7) | grasp the meaning | CD/DD |
| 8 Fire up campaign members (3) | amp | Hidden |
| 10 Almost murder one chap by surprise, close to volcano named “mountain of the springs” (11) | kilimanjaro | KIL I MAN JAR O |
| 11 Certain Europeans with equal financial burden (5) | dutch | DD |
| 12 Crete’s first worker held inquisitions, initially to keep things quiet (3,2) | can it | C AN(I)T |
| 13 Coati pelt carries secret information (3) | tip | Hidden |
| 14 Potions mixed with love? Exclaim, “It’s a disaster!” (6,9) | atomic explosion | POTIONSOEXCLAIM* |
| 17 Headmaster requested us to return for each lady’s inauguration of Batman, as an example (6,9) | masked superhero | M ASKED SU> PER HER O |
| 21 Spasm from nonconformist iconoclastic characters (3) | tic | Hidden |
| 23 Character from Athens intentionally written this way for a melody, say (5) | music | MU SIC |
| 25 Drugs after quiet morning? What a disgrace! (5) | shame | SH AM E |
| 26 Gophers follow trail of birds (11) | roadrunners | ROAD RUNNERS |
| 27 Overact, withholding age (3) | era | Rev Hidden |
| 28 Stress the importance of a purpose behind fundraiser for housing? (5,4,1,5) | drive home a point. | DD/CD. |
| Down | Answer | Explanation |
| 1 Old lady managed, being carried by extremely gifted grad student (7) | grandma | G(RAN)D MA |
| 2 Take up hickory salad without turkey or cabbage (7) | pakchoi | TAKEUPHICKORY*-TURKEY |
| 3 Piece of stretchy licentious material (5) | hylic | Hidden |
| 4 Locally employed method: fellow to work after dealership is vacated (3-3-3) | mom-and-pop | MO MAN D P OP |
| 5 After-hours salon session top-to-bottom, following an orange-red coloring (7) | annatto | AN NAT TO<< (OT – After hours, Tan – salon session) |
| 6 Improper to sleep in the middle of sex (5) | inapt | I NAP T |
| 7 Small non-profit returns concerning discount (7) | groupon | GRO< UPON |
| 9 Can: it holds number one back medicines (7) | potions | POT ION S |
| 15 Gets comfortable with stormy sea noise around boat’s stern (5,4) | eases into | EASES IN(T)O* |
| 16 Technology at primary election count? Do it over again! (7) | iterate | IT E RATE |
| 17 Grew angry about true metamorphosis (7) | matured | MA (TURE*)D |
| 18 Let mere destruction create a symbol for Massachusetts (3,4) | elm tree | ELMTREE* |
| 19 Rebels take back pawn to exploit knight (5,2) | rises up | RIS SESU P<< |
| 20 Tip top treatment brought back after essentially proven to perform better than needed (7) | overact | OV ERAC T<< |
| 22 Atomic explosion kills a thousand animal species (5) | coati | ATOMIC-M* |
| 24 Era begins after court gathers about Mediterranean island (5) | crete | C(RE)T E |
Results:
| S.No. | NAME | SCORE |
| 1 | Anicha Reuban | 162 |
| 2 | Anirudh Sahni | 162 |
| 3 | Arvind Kannabiran | 162 |
| 4 | Arvind Ramaswamy | 162 |
| 5 | Dean | 162 |
| 6 | Divita Gupta | 162 |
| 7 | Gayathri Viswanath | 162 |
| 8 | Harish Kamath | 162 |
| 9 | Keith Williams | 162 |
| 10 | Krishnan Anantheshwaran | 162 |
| 11 | Kumaresh K R | 162 |
| 12 | Lakshmi Prakash | 162 |
| 13 | Madhup Tewari | 162 |
| 14 | Madhusudan Hanumantha Rao | 162 |
| 15 | Max Jackson | 162 |
| 16 | Meera | 162 |
| 17 | Michael Debenham | 162 |
| 18 | Mona Sogal | 162 |
| 19 | Nagendra Prasad R. | 162 |
| 20 | Nick Loader | 162 |
| 21 | Nilesh Parmar | 162 |
| 22 | Paolo Pasco | 162 |
| 23 | Prakash Arumugam | 162 |
| 24 | Ramki Krishnan | 162 |
| 25 | Sohil | 162 |
| 26 | Sree Sree | 162 |
| 27 | Supriya Mithal | 162 |
| 28 | Tejas Siddharth | 162 |
| 29 | Venkatesan P. | 162 |
| 30 | Venkatraghavan S. | 162 |
| 31 | Viveca Bhatkal | 162 |
| 32 | Anand Ranganathan | 161 |
| 33 | Ashit Hegde | 161 |
| 34 | Dave Williams | 161 |
| 35 | Deepak Gopinath (Col.) | 161 |
| 36 | Himanshu Rajurkar | 161 |
| 37 | Lakshmi Vaidyanathan | 161 |
| 38 | Ratna Rao | 161 |
| 39 | Veena | 161 |
| 40 | Alison Crutchfield | 160 |
| 41 | Bhalchandra Pasupathy | 160 |
| 42 | Debasmita Basu | 160 |
| 43 | Diwakar Menon | 160 |
| 44 | Jyothish B | 160 |
| 45 | Narayanan R | 160 |
| 46 | Ramesh SS | 160 |
| 47 | Sandhya Paruchuri | 160 |
| 48 | Raghavan S V | 159 |
| 49 | Anantakrishnan N. | 157 |
| 50 | Rathnakumar V | 157 |
Congrats to the solvers who maxed the score and to every one who participated. Very well tried.
Grid Rating: The puzzle got a good score of 8.41. It got 10 perfect 10s – i.e 20% of those who submitted thought it was perfect. The minimum score was 6.
Top 3 Clues: The most favorited clues were those for “Drive home a point” and Inapt (12 votes each), Masked Super hero and Kilimanjaro (10 votes each), grasp the meaning and atomic explosion (8 votes each). 28 clues in the grid got atleast 1 vote each.
Thanks for an entertaining puzzle with a clever end game Mathrix. It was innovative and we looking forward to more puzzles from you at the blog.
Comments on the Puzzle
- Fun, but a standard grid and avoidance of non-words would have been better
- very well-made, really liked the theme and the “joining the letters” bit!
- I enjoyed the clues and the concept a lot ,INAPT is my favourite
- Very nice game
- Very nice puzzle with an intelligent theme.
- Good clues. Nice gimmick. Several possible phrasings of the bonus answer though; I plumped for ‘infinity sign’, though ‘infinite (or unending) loop’ would work as well.
- Very clever bonus question… Endless happiness in getting it…
- Like this idea a lot. Aside from the unches point mentioned on the puzzle (which would only have been soluble with a different construction), there are probably a couple of areas that this could have been made even better. Firstly, the provision of answers ‘en clair’ in other clues is a definite weakness, particularly with the two word answers linked – better would have been to have unique in solutions identified in another way (e.g. cycling the definitions between the clues, i.e. the definition of one is provided in the clue it is linked to and so on). Secondly, given the need to come up with a far from obvious phrase (particularly as the infinity symbol is abstract, on a slant and would be drawn in straight rather than curved lines), it would have been even better if the eight nodes had spelt out INFINITE itself. Overall though – great idea – pretty well executed – many thanks.
- Liked it overall but found some of the clues a bit wordy.
- Superb puzzle
- Some of the clues were a little far-fetched, and some too obvious, I thought. But overall quite good, loved the linked pairs.
- I couldn’t get the pencil to work.
- Excellent grid. Looked tough to solve but progressively got easier. The connections were awesome.
- some of the defs need work
- Felt like all focus was on the bonus question .Clues could have been more challenging”
- very different fun experience
- NICE CLUES OVERALL. ENJOYED SOLVING.
- Nice puzzle. As always, surfaces can be improved.
- Really cool idea to link start of clues with answers. I thought it first that it might make it too easy, but that wasn’t the case
- Well engineered and vectored.
- Good
- NA
- Quite interesting
- NICE PUZZLE
- really nice puzzle
- Lovely grid. The long ones fell in place very quickly and enabled fairly quick solve. However got bogged down with about half a dozen clues with rare words. Could solve due to the excellent word play. Very well constructed anagrams. Only a few clues the definition felt a bit of a stretch. On grid construction a minor observation: unches below 1A first word and above 28A last word. Very innovative bonus question (which enabled a quick check of some answers too)….math trick! Enjoyed solving please do continue setting. Thanks.
- Excellent grid. Good clues. Like creativity in setting to form infinity sign
- Nice puzzle! Some shots in the dark (eg Pak Choi). Connecting the dots was a nice exercise.
- Nice Grid
- Not sure about the endgame. Novel attempt.
- nice puzzle
- Hadn’t read the instructions at first, and was annoyed at the unches when I got a bit stuck. Then got dramatically easier when I noticed some words from the clues showing up in the answers and led me to read the instructions. :). Enjoyable puzzle.
- Not sure how a dictionary = the meaning, and not sure that Groupon works. Otherwise a fun grid.
- It was great fun solving this. Thanks, Mathrix and I’m looking forward to your next one
- Enjoyed the puzzle
- specific to the attempt of 8-solutions from the first words of clues, the 4 3-letter solutions meant almost half the grid was made simple (if not give away).
- Nice concept. Enjoyable grid.
- INTERESTING GRID
- Very nice challenging puzzle
- Unches in such long answers aren’t usually a problem. They’re not helped by the end game though. Interesting way to show the sign.
- Good one!
- Really creative idea! Looks like it would have been quite a challenge to pull it off. Some clues were hard to anno, but managed to get everything in the end. I don’t think the definition for 7D works though.
- SUPER
- This was a fun puzzle! As soon as I looked at the instructions and the (8,4) enum, Infinite Loop / Sign was the first thing that came to my mind. While solving, I realized we were heading in the same direction. Liked the long acrosses and how they helped progress smoothly through the puzzle
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- I love the wordplay here, some very cool and interesting ideas. 2. Surfaces, though, often seemed unusual or a bit lacklustre. Maybe a result of trying to make the endgame work(?) 3. Only issues with wordplay were: A) Using ‘top to bottom’ as a reversal indicator in 5d (I assume that’s how it works?) and B) ‘equal financial burden’ to make DUT(-y) CH(-arge). From equal I would think an equal amount would be taken from each but here it it is 3/4 and 1/3. Overall, what we are taking and leaving (5/10 and 5/10) is equal but this would be more fairly referred to as half or equally [taken and left] in my opinion. 4. Endgame is a fantastic idea but A) Far too easily given away by the title I felt B) Backfired once due to barely varying the wordplay of ‘can it’ so that the answer to 12A gave away 9D. C) Could have been more interesting with a less predictable shape(?) 5. Overall though a tremendous effort adapting clues to suit such an intriguing endgame and there were certainly still a good number of superb clues :D”
- Very inelegant surfaces
- Ingenious method of connecting points on the grid, with an outcome that was not easily predictable. Entertaining clues despite having to satisfy this constraint. Appreciated learning some solution words which were new to me.
On the negative side, 5 hidden word clues are too many. (Shouldn’t be more than 2, IMO.)” - Very enjoyable puzzle. Perfect for a Sunday morning.
- Some of the clues were just brilliant , kudos to the setter.
- Nice challenge. The theme of answers appearing in the clue itself made it easier.