I have toned down the difficulty level of the questions in my KK Challenge 16 treasure hunt last Sunday. But of course there were still a few notably tough ones that I suspect would enter into the history books! One of them was this question which caused many teams to burn substantial amount of time under the hot sun, and yet ended up unsolved!
Q15) 11 or 45 degrees clockwise from the north?
Looking back at the question now, perhaps it's more appropriate for a classroom exam setting, rather than a field exercise where hunters had to endure the brutally hot day amidst horrifying traffic jam. This was especially so when most teams were bleeding away precious time, with a couple more sectors yet to cover!
If one were nicely seated in an exam hall, in the comfort of an air-conditioned room, and indefinite amount of time to think in a calmly manner, maybe - just maybe - there is a higher chance to figure out the answer. But even then, it would have required a very strong hunter having a good day, and who's unwilling to surrender very quickly!
Anticipating such an uphill task for the hunters, I dropped a big hint to the hunters a few weeks before the hunt, practically informing them that there will be a Double Jeopardy (DJ) question for the KK Challenge 16. The DJ is a type of treasure hunt question that is unique in the sense that what's provided to the hunters on paper is actually the answer to a question; and the hunters will then have to find the question on the signboard within the specified hunt sector. This is of course the reverse scenario of the norm.
What makes this DJ even tougher is that even the clues in the question are indirect and require a bit of figuring out. In this particular case, the best place to start is the "45 degrees clockwise from the north", which is of course northeast or simply NE as its abbreviation. Only that part of the clue has a reasonable degree of certainty that the hunters can latch on to. The "11" at the start of the sentence is a little harder to deal with.
Now the trouble with the DJ is that it's almost impossible to solve the riddle on paper even if the solver is aware that he's dealing with a DJ. The solver must be in the hunt sector to start with, and then scan through all the possible candidates there, and hopefully can reverse engineer to make the connection with what he has on paper! If he's lucky, he will notice this signboard:
If you have some basic knowledge of cryptic clueing, then you would know that that word CENTRE is a cryptic indicator that points to the central portion of the fodder (the target of the indicator). In this particular case, the fodder is: THE ONE-STOP, 3 words taken together as a whole, as if to form a long single word! And the centre of that resulting long word are the letters NE. And then, as a confirmation, if that central NE is extended a bit more, then instead of 2 letters, you just add 2 more to become 4 letters, one each on the left and right, and you will get ONES. Now you can see that ONES (not eleven as what it seemingly is) agrees with the "11" at the beginning of the sentence to confirm the solution to the riddle. So now you can see that the centre for THE ONE-STOP are either ONES or NE.
Questions such as this may look easy and straightforward to the very strong hunter when seen on paper, together with the answer nicely cut and dried. But when one is out there in the field subject to the elements, it's a totally different story.
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