Title: “FACEBOOK Is Now META”
Prompt: This week’s contest answer, which is eight letters long, is something that’s often useful in solving metas.
Answer: TEAMMATE
Correct entries: 232 overall, of which 122 were solo solves
Mixed reaction to last week’s meta, in which a large part of what was going on was not necessary at all to the solve (and indeed served as a red herring, which is something I normally don’t do).
TENTH MONTH was abandoned after four puzzles since one of the most well-known companies in the world decided to rename itself META, which definitely needed a quick puzzle. As an aside, I was pleased with
how TENTH MONTH turned out — Pete Muller’s observation that a constraint on one’s puzzles can expand the creativity worked for me here, and we will probably do another “Muller Month” like this in the future.
Now, on to our Week 5: Mullerian grid, with the identity of theme entries (if they exist at all) unclear. Working from the title, though, we notice several of the bigrams in FACEBOOK in the longer entries, such as CAR(BO)LOAD and FOR(CE)PLAY. Scouring the grid further, we find precisely two of each of (FA)(CE)(BO)(OK)’s four composite bigrams in the grid:
RA(FA)
(FA)IL
(CE)ASE
FOR(CE)PLAY
CAR(BO)LOAD
BA(BO)ON
J(OK)Y
(OK)GO
Could this be a coincidence? Maybe…until you realize that all 8 are on acrosses, so assuredly not a coincidence. Let’s put them in grid order for the next step:
CAR(BO)LOAD
(CE)ASE
J(OK)Y
RA(FA)
(FA)IL
(OK)GO
BA(BO)ON
FOR(CE)PLAY
Now what? Time for the title, so let’s swap out the four bigrams of (FA)(CE)(BO)(OK) for the four letters of META:
CAR(T)LOAD
(E)ASE
J(A)Y
RA(M)
(M)IL
(A)GO
BA(T)ON
FOR(E)PLAY
And there’s your contest answer TEAMMATE, formed by the replacement letters in grid order.
Simple-ish, right? Well, there’s a lot more to this story, which I will be posting before 2:00 PM today. You can get the main idea in Joon’s writeup and comments here for now. Joon himself was not a fan, and he was not alone in that opinion.
UPDATE, 4:05 PM: Overtaken by events here but let me copy my thought process on this meta from the comments section of Joon’s above-linked post so at least you know what I was going for, even thought it didn’t land quite how I wanted:
Was this one fair? Let’s see:
231 right answers, 121 of which were solo. So solid Week 4/5 numbers.
Once you had TEAMMATE, were you 100% sure it was correct? I have only found one comment from someone who had it but wasn’t sure and kept looking, so anecdotally, I think so. It fits the meta prompt precisely and only uses the letters in META, and they’re in order in the grid.
But then…weren’t all the FA->M, CE->E, BO->T, OK->A clue changes extraneous? And doesn’t that constitute a huge red herring, which I’ve always said I don’t put into metas purposefully like this?
Maybe. It’s very close. Here’s what happened: I have this type of meta I very much like to run (I think I’ve done one or two but can’t recall them at the moment) that I call a “front-door” meta. Name comes from playing hide-and-go-seek in the house, where the searcher starts outside on the front porch. Hiding behind the front door is a risky move, but with possible big payoff: if the searcher doesn’t find you right away, then they’re in for a long look around an empty house before they circle back and find you.
Checking the replacement letters is one of the first things, often the first thing, an experienced meta solver would do here. And they spell TEAMMATE, in grid order, so game over. The hide-and-seek equivalent of glancing behind the front door before you head into the house, just in case.
So my tester, an extremely experienced meta solver, found the T-E, and then stopped, because, his reasoning went, you’re only working with the letters in META here, so that’s not going to spell anything. And off he went into the house, finally only circling back an hour later and immediately spotting what he’d missed on the first path.
Just the kind of response I wanted, but it shouldn’t be done with a pure red herring. There has to be some meta-justification for looking in the rest of the house. Here my reasoning was that these eight alternate answers in the grid were there *only to verify that these were the eight answers you should use*. I had recently re-read “The Red-Headed League” (which I referenced a month or so ago) and I have also long thought about using that story’s main idea for a meta, i.e. that enormous effort is expended for a comically small goal (here, to verify the identity of eight entries, in the story just to get one certain guy out of his house for four hours a day so the thieves can dig a tunnel under a bank).
So the solution I maybe should have used would have been to simply leave a few stray FA/CE/BO/OK bigrams in the grid (very easy to do; I spent about 45 minutes weeding them out), but for some reason I thought that would reduce the elegance of the mechanism. It would have certainly made the meta 100% fair (since then the whole 8 alt-answers would have a clear raison d’etre).
So there was a little angel on one shoulder telling me to do it that way and a little devil on the other who kept whispering “Week 5.” Maybe should have listened to the angel. Thinking it all now I do feel like a mystery writer who uses an unreliable narrator. Worth it? I await your judgment.
THIS WEEK’S INSTRUCTIONS:
This week’s contest answer is a two-word phrase that’s something to avoid when solving metas.
Solve well, and be not led astray by words intended to deceive.