How does one deal with a question which apparently has no cryptic solution? This is of course not an original question; I am sure many hunters—especially the new ones—often raise this very question. Well, since I am also a new hunter, I am not qualified to recommend an air-tight formula. What I can do instead is to share with my readers what I would do.
Q8) They are mainly soliciting your amended cases endorsing KL bar here.
The question that apparently defeated a fair number of masters and grandmasters. My team was more or less at the verge of raising our white flag on this question too, but I somehow came up with something that saved us. We made a second sweep of this sector and was lucky enough to find the answer. I was not very surprised when it was revealed later that many strong teams failed to find the answer. In fact, even a member of the champion team also acknowledged that this was the tough question of this hunt.
Upon reading this question for the first time, my first reaction was to look for the anagram indicator. I don't know why I did that. I guess as a norm, the anagram is almost always a popular theme in any hunt question. To this end, I zoomed in to the word "amended", since it is the most promising word for an anagram indicator. OK, fine; then what?
The word "They" at the beginning of the clue might be referring to the required answer (which is located on the signboard). That is not very helpful, but it still gives us a direction. However, the last word, "here", also usually refers to the required answer. Furthermore, since the "surface meaning" of the sentence appears to refer to something related to the legal profession, is it possible that "They" refers to people of the legal profession? For example, lawyers, judges, prosecutors etc might come to mind. There were a couple of signboards of legal firms within that sector, but none could fit in with the rest of the clue.
I then spent some moments on the word "bar". Could that somehow be an anagram indicator? I threw the idea out to my team members, but Claire didn't find it very appealing. And I didn't blame her too, as I myself wasn't convinced of that solution too.
Time was ticking away very quickly. We left the sector to attempt the other questions first. Then later we came back to this sector again for another attempt. This time, from a fresh perspective, I raised another strange idea. I suggested the idea of "mainly" as an initial indicator. My team members liked that idea and quickly spent some efforts to investigate further. And then, very quickly, Julie spotted a signboard containing SKYLACE. That board looked promising, but it did not really fit to the flow of the clue. So the next step was to figure out how to maneuvre and develop our ideas to fit the answer to the question.
Now IF "mainly" is an initial indicator, we can get SYACE from "Soliciting Your Amended Cases Endorsing..." We are still short of the letters K and L. But we can quickly see these letters in "KL bar". And then Wong came up with the idea of removing the K and L from SKYLACE so that we are left with SYACE only. So that would explain the word "bar", meaning as a deletion indicator, to remove the K and L from SKYLACE to become SYACE. Hence "KL bar here" means "remove K and L from the board".
We therefore settled for this answer. I was very happy that all four of us played our respective roles to arrive at the answer. In a treasure hunt a lot of the times, it takes everyone to work together to figure out the answer.
A8) SKYLACE
BUT! I am not suggesting that the grandmasters did not work together. They are basically well-oiled hunting machines, and I am very sure that they're very well-versed with the principles of teamwork in treasure hunts. But I think they failed here because:
Mainly = Initial Indicator?
I must admit that I was not aware that "mainly" is an initial indicator. Although I was the one suggesting it to my team, I did it because of the "elimination process" from my mental checklist. I have a feeling the other master teams must have also adopted this "elimination process", but I suspect they did not seriously explore this idea long enough. To be quite honest, I still think MAINLY = initial indicator is debatable.
No comments:
Post a Comment