3K Triple-One Hunt—Cover Of The Book

I am taking a short break from analysing and discussing hunt questions to talk a bit about people in general.

Everyone has a favourite food (s); what's yours? Pizza? Fries? Steak?...

Fine, let's imagine that I am treating you to all these favourite foods of yours. And I'll buy the jumbo size too. You have skipped lunch in anticipation of the glorious dinner. So you are eagerly waiting at the dinner table. I have all your favourite foods as promised, but instead of serving them with a tray, I am using a toilet-bowl cover; and there're flies all over the food.

You see, in life most of the time the way the food is served and presented to you counts for a lot. Because of how it is served, you may lose your appetite even if it's your favourite food.

Don't judge a book by its cover

That is a famous line we've all heard of. Unfortunately, in life a lot of the time we can't help but judge a book by its cover. The book publishers will tell you that they'd spend a substantial amount of money to design the covers of their books. People are attracted to the books through the covers. Of course they are many other factors that sell books too. It is human nature to judge a book by its cover.

A lazy bum I know left school after form 3. He's been switching from one job to another; and if taken as a whole, he has spent his life unemployed more than being employed. There was once when he went to look for a job at a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet. It was a walk-in interview thing. He came home grumbling that the outlet manager did not even give him a chance.

Well, this joker went for the interview in toilet slippers. He wore shabby clothes; long hair covering his eyes. And he had an earring too. I told him I would have been very surprised if the manager gave him a chance—he must be out of his freakin' mind!

Presentation does count! And the first impression means a lot! People who don't really know you will judge you based on those!

And if that is not bad enough, people have the tendency to compare too. So if your peers are all well-dressed when they attend the interview, don't complain when they get to fill up the vacancy first.

When you are clerking treasure hunts for the first few times, apart from trying very hard to prepare sound questions, try not to screw up on the presentation. Always remember that you can kill the appetite because of the way you serve your dishes.

Therefore, you have to seriously do something to minimise sloppiness. If you present something which is plagued with mistakes upon mistakes on the question papers and the so-called tulips, how do you reckon the hunters will view you?

So spend some time to check and double-check all your servings, for goodness sake! And who knows one of these days, when the time is right and there is no more sloppiness, I, too, will be eager to attend your dinner party!

3K Triple-One Hunt—Junk Mails

Yahoo, Google and the likes have been developing some sort of "defense mechanism" against junk mails, otherwise commonly referred to as spams. Although I have not done any research on junk mails, I have a feeling that most of them have something to do with pornographic materials one way or another.

Because of the unending problems with junk mails, Yahoo has developed the kind of "defense" which can detect some words in the titles of the incoming emails. Whenever suspicious words like "ass", "f**K", "pussy" (and this third one has nothing to do with cats) are found in the titles of incoming emails, they are automatically directed into the Spam Box.

However, junk mail senders are not giving up so easily. They're becoming more creative—instead of coming up with the usual promotion in their titles, they have come up with sentences which comprise meaningless combinations of words. And they have been quite successful in getting their emails into the Inbox!

An example of such emails would have titles like this:

Walk participates for injured stage strut in part of harbour.

The sentence has no comprehensible meaning whatsoever, and there is no story contained therein. It is just a line consisting of words which have no apparent connection with each other. In fact, this was the second question in the Triple-One Hunt. I am convinced that it is the result of wanting so much to beat the hunters—at all cost—even if the CoC had to hit below the belt and bite an ear or two.

I have a feeling that the CoC had intended this question to be his "insurance"—one that is not to be answered, even by the best of the best out there.

I myself am a tricky little devil when I set hunt questions, and I am therefore a little embarrassed to admit that eventhough I am supplied with the answer to the above question, I am still not very sure if I am reading the Captain correctly. I suppose it is possible that the seafaring folks may have a different angle of seeing things when compared to the angle we are used to. It might also be possible that my friend, 2 Romans & 1 Impostor, welcomes the Captain's style. For it is without doubt a departure from the norm which we are used to. 2 Roman & 1 Impostor, if you are reading this, please be careful with what you wish for; you may just get those new ideas in hunt quesetions!

Keeping my fingers crossed on the accuracy of my source, the answer to this question was:

WISMA PATCO

And I can only hope that I have successfully found the exact wavelength of the Captain. OK, so here goes nothing...

WALK PARTICIPATES:

Maybe he's trying to signal to the solver that this has something to do with, well, walking. Then "participates" has something to do with joining the act of walking in a group.

FOR INJURED:

Again, as we have seen earlier, the Captain has a strange devotion to the word "for". I'm not very sure of the explanation of its presence in this sentence, but my wild guess is that he is targeting WALK PARTICIPATES to that STAGE STRUT.

"Injured" is probably the Captain's choice of word for an anagram indicator.

STAGE STRUT:

Here, I had to consult my dictionary to make sure I get the exact meaning of STRUT. And one can only guess that the Captain is referring to CATWALK, e.g. by a model on stage. But instead of taking the whole CATWALK, the Captain only wanted CAT. So on account of the anagram indicator in INJURED, the CAT is reconfigured to ATC.

IN PART OF HARBOUR:

The word "in" is a container indicator. It means that ATC from above is to be inserted into PART OF HARBOUR. But here the Captain decides to make life more difficult for the solver. Instead of taking some letters (part of) from the word HARBOUR itself, he expects the solver to come up with the word PORT which is one possible synonym of HARBOUR. So "part of" PORT is PO. Of course it could have been POR or ORT or RT too.

Therefore we insert ATC into PO to get PATCO

I don't know about the many grandmasters hunting that day, but if I were there, I seriously doubt that I could have solved this question. And I'm sure that would have put a smile on the Captain's face the whole week long. Like I said it's not intended to be solved anyway. Now I'm sure you can understand why I hate junk mails so much.

I suspect the Captain got carried away with trying too hard to complicate matters that he did not realise that he has breached the permissible boundary of question-setting. Whenever we are using the hidden words indicator such as SOME, PART OF, FEW and the likes, we can't use indirect words.

For example, when we say:

Grooming business for some Asian nerds.

We can only take the letters found hidden in ASIAN NERDS because of the indicator SOME. So in this case, perhaps if we can spot a signboard bearing, say, ANNE BEAUTY SALOON, then we can accept the answer. But we can't change ASIAN NERDS to, say, BUNG MOKHTAR, and then spot a signboard bearing NG MO MORGUE as the answer. Otherwise the hunters can all come up with their own words and then take some of the letters therefrom to get their answers; and the CoC would have a nightmare marking the answers.

But anyway, I want to repeat, I just hate those junk mails.

3K Triple-One Hunt—Mishandling Famale Deer

Q1) Mishandled for a gory female deer.

So that's the first riddle of the Captain. I have mentioned earlier that the Captain focused on making the clue complicated, but chose to ignore the surface reading and storyline.

Now let's see if the clue can at least pass from the cryptic point of view.

In this clue, the word "Mishandled" is intended to be the anagram indicator. It means that the letters found in a word (s) in the sentence are to be rearranged to form a new word (s), and that resulting word (s) shall be the required answer which is found on the signboard.

The CoC intends the fodder to comprise "a gory female deer". However, he fancies that to make the clue more confusing and perhaps "more professional", it's a good idea to make this an indirect anagram. And so he requires the "female deer" to be changed to DOE first. After the "female deer" has been changed into DOE, it is then combined with A GORY, the letters then rearranged to become GOODYEAR, which is the required answer.

At this juncture, I'd like to mention that as far as the cryptic crosswords are concerned, indirect anagram are not generally regarded as fairplay. However, in the case of treasure hunts, perhaps since the answers are found on the signboard, indirect anagrams are readily accepted.

Therefore, for the purpose of treasure hunts, the Captain's clue is OK, except for the word "for" which is found in the sentence. Generally speaking, the fodders are located immediately next to the indicators. There are some exceptions, of course, but not in this case. That word "for" is not only out of place in the cryptic sense, but also in the literal sense. On both counts it is better to do without "for".

The clue would then be:

Q1) Mishandled a gory female deer.

Still awful surface reading, but at least it is much better without the word "for". My opinion is that the Captain still has a lot of room for improvements. Setting cryptic clues is not only about randomly arranging anagram indicators for fodders.

The art of setting cryptic clues lies in the ability to compose sentences which appear to have a specific meaning and storyline in the literal sense for the purpose of deceiving the solver. It is hoped that by reading the literal meaning of the clue, the solver is misled into a direction which is as far away as possible from its cryptic meaning. The Captain has not achieved that here. How is he to deceive the solver when it is not even easy to understand the surface meaning of the sentence?

3K Triple-One Hunt

The 3K Triple-One Hunt was held on Saturday, the day before theSun Hunt last week. It was clerked by TrailBlazers which was in turn helmed by Captain Jack Swallow.

A number of my friends have suggested that I have a look at the questions and answers of the Triple-One, and then see what I make of them. But I found that suggestion a little strange. To start with, I wasn't even a participant of the hunt. And then I might even become vulnerable to the title of a busy-body! Why would I want to poke my nose into a hunt which does not concern me?

Such were my thoughts until I received a personal call from the good Captain himself two days ago. He said he's sending me an email on the hunt, and would be looking forward to my comments on it. However, I found it a little strange that only photos were attached to his email, and nothing on the questions and answers of the hunt. I wonder if he's only looking forward to my comments on the photos?

At any rate, I have now in my possession the questions and answers from a friend who's kind enough to scan them and send to me this morning. I am having a bit of trouble reading through the scribblings all over the pages, but I will try to figure 'em out somehow.

I will go into the detailed analysis on specific questions in separate threads; and, oh boy! it seems that I have a hell lot to comment on! I don't know if I can finish commenting within a week, but perhaps I will just concentrate on a few of them.

Some of you have also raised your concern that I am often too blunt in my comments; that I might just offend some people because of my comments. Well, I have to admit that I sometimes have the tendency to get carried away. But please be assured that my comments are not intended to belittle or to make anyone feel small. I sometimes can't resist my sense of humour; and of course there is that tendency of being sarcastic too. But that's probably because I've been reading too much of Che Det?

Anyway, I'd like to mention here that I have received reassurances from some of the CoCs of whom I commented on in the past. They actually welcome my comments; and I am therefore encouraged to continue commenting.

Coming back to the Triple-One, I have noticed a change in the Captain's style since his previous hunts. One striking change was his attempt to complicate the clues, perhaps for the sake of confusing the hunters, but without much thoughts invested in the quality and elegance of the questions. The words that he used in his questions are not harmonious with each other; and a lot of the times the surface readings do not make much sense—they're merely meaningless ramblings and devoid of any sensible storylines.

Consider this treasure clue by Michael Pang, which I thought was very impressive:

The old-fashioned love at first sight.

The surface reading is neat; all the words blend in with each other harmoniously to form a perfectly smooth and meaningful storyline. But from the cryptic point of view, this clue translates to the brandname, Yeo's.

Now compare the above with the first of the Captain's riddles:

Q1) Mishandled for a gory female deer.

What can you make out of the sentence? That word "gory" is an adjective which means "involving violence and bloodshed". In this sentence, "gory" is used for the "female deer". Try to imagine the storyline with a female deer in the light of "involving violence and bloodshed".

Then we have the "Mishandled" at the beginning of the sentence. That, too, is another big, fat question mark. How do you "mishandle a gory female deer"? Furthermore, why mishandle for...?; why is that "for" there in the sentence anyway?

Do you see now what I mean when I said the questions lack quality and elegance? Well, I will have more to say later in separate posts.

theSun Hunt 2008—The Spider-Look-Alike Ant, The Grumpy Old Man & The Rooster

The vast majority of treasure hunters have only experienced the sport from the hunters' point of view; only a small number of them have experienced it from the Clerk-of-Course's (CoC) point of view.

When these people put on the hats of the treasure hunters, they're approaching the riddles from the questions, leading to the answers; whereas when they put on the hats of the CoCs, they're approaching the riddles from the answers, leading to the questions. The two opposing directions require different strategies and different sets of considerations.

When approaching the riddles from the CoC's point of view, i.e. from the questions leading to the answers, the CoC needs to constantly put himself in the hunters' shoes. Essentially, he needs to constantly ask himself if it is humanly realistic to expect the hunters to stretch their minds as much as that required by the riddles in order to arrive at the intended answers. The construction of the questions; the tricks behind them; the turns and twists, may be brilliantly created; they may be entertaining too. But for the questions to qualify as masterpieces, in my opinion, they must be reasonably solvable.

Therefore, whenever I clerk hunts, I tend to spend a major portion of my time asking and keep asking myself if it is reasonable to expect the hunters to stretch their minds to the extent of that required to solve the riddles. But at the same time, I also have a personal obsession to make my questions as tricky and entertaining as possible. Quite often, my so-called most difficult questions are those which are "simple"—in fact, so "simple" that even the most outstanding hunters might fail to see their simplicity!

I want to share with my readers what I consider to be a brilliant treasure clue in the theSun Hunt last Sunday. It is beautiful in its trickery; in its simplicity; in its novelty. Regretfully, however, in my opinion the clue requires an unrealistic imagination and stretch of the mind on the part of the solvers.

The clue goes like this:

Figure out these picture clues carefully,
And an edible item will appear surely.

I have downloaded the above pictures from the net and those of you who have the original question papers may find them slightly different. But for practical purpose, it doesn't really matter.

OK, so now we have these 3 pictures in that order. Many of you are now aware of the required item. But imagine that you are seeing this clue for the very first time. How and where should you start?

Well, the first picture is that of an ant, although I know at least 3 masters who said they thought that's a spider when they first saw it. What can you make out of that picture? I'll be honest with you—I came up with ANT and SEMUT. I also for a very brief moment thought of INSECT. But because INSECT is just too wide, I abandoned that choice almost on the spot.

Now imagine that you are the CoC, is it reasonable to expect the solver to think of INSECT? Yes? OK, how about ANT or SEMUT? Yes? Fine, what else can you reasonably expect from the solver?

Now let's move on to the second picture. The grumpy old man is a little bit easier. This famous man used to be the ruler of Malaysia. Yes, I said the ruler, because he was above everyone else when he was in power—even more powerful than the judges and the Sultans. I don't really like this man, but I have to reluctantly admit that he's the best Prime Minister that our country has ever had. Now what can the CoC reasonably expect from the solver? DR M? TUN DR M? MAHATHIR? DR MAHATHIR? Or just MM? Of course the choices can go a little further to cover, for example, CHEDET. So out of these possibilities, the solver has to choose one—for the purpose of being the raw material to derive the answer. But let's keep the option open for now.

Now we come to the intriguing third picture. It is what's commonly referred to as the WEATHERCOCK, so it is reasonable to expect the solver to come up with that word first. But what else can be reasonably expected from the solver? DIRECTIONS? POINTS? COCK? ROOSTER? N.E.W.S? Anything else? How about N? W? S? E? Or even NW? SW? SE? etc.

So as you can see, it is already a Herculean task just to figure out the first level of the solution. Remember that if you are lucky enough to be able to guess the words or letters required from those 3 pictures, that is only the beginning of the solution. You are still very far from the end!

But let's just assume that because you are an exceptionally brilliant all-rounder person with an impeccable knowledge of specific categorisation of insects, then you would know that the first picture is a SOLDIER ANT. It is a SOLDIER ANT because of its exceptionally large head. Fine, we can now sift out all the other choices and zoom in on SOLDIER ANT. We progress—capital!

Now we move on to the second picture. Presumably by adopting the trial and error process, we start taking one choice at a time, try to fit it to the other pictures, spend probably a good 5 hours, and finally decide that it has nothing to do with DR M or MAHATHIR. Instead, we are simply looking for the word TUN.

As for the third picture, it is even more complicated. Can it be an anagram indicator? Nah... not likely. Has it got anything to do with the Rooster? Hmmm... I don't believe it! Directions? Which one? Or which ones? OK, let's adopt the trial and error process again and start eliminating the less likely candidates. And after spending 5 hours, we have finally decided that we are looking for a single letter from the third picture, i.e. the letter S. Why not W? Or N? Or NW? I don't know. It's just a lucky guess.

Phew, we have brilliantly solved the first step of the clue—we have successfully identified the raw materials from those pictures so that we are now ready to go to the next step.

Let us now summarise our hard-earned deductions so far:

Picture 1: SOLDIER ANT

Picture 2: TUN

Picture 3: S

Now what?

Well, the solver is expected to suddenly realise that of all the kinds of SOLDIER, and classifications and rankings and all those, we can come up with SOLDIER = GI.

And then, voila!

GI + ANT = GIANT

Now we have arrived at the final homestretch. TUN + S don't seem to mean anything. But wouldn't it be nice if there is an anagram indicator somewhere in the pictures so that we might then do a bit of reconfigurations of the letters to come up with something more meaningful? Maybe we can come up with STUN or NUTS? Hey! NUTS!...

And then suddenly the solver remembers the Double Jeopardy. He realises that the CoC expects him to look for the anagram indicator on the item itself! And so he came up with GROUND NUTS. Tada!!

And reaching the finish line shortly after midnight, he submits the precious treasure:

GIANT GROUND NUTS

Now the important question which the CoC must ask himself when conjuring up this clue:

Is it humanly realistic to expect the solver to have such a stretchable and imaginative mental capacity?

Anyone out there who can honestly say he or she came anywhere close to GIANT GROUND NUTS?

theSun Hunt 2008—Double Duty Revisited

Bring me a drink that's easy to find,

Turn it to shine a treasure of the fruitful kind.

Such was the clue for Treasure 2 of the Master Category of theSun Hunt 2008. My team got this treasure correct. But to be honest, we did not solve the puzzle. We got it based on psychological deduction rather than cracking the cryptic clue.

You see, each participant was given a goodie bag. And in that bag there were many kinds of drinks. I can't remember from the top of my head, but perhaps there were at least 10 types of drinks. When I received the goodie bag, I thought it was rather strange that we were given so many drinks.

So from the psychological point of view, the first line of the clue must be referring to the drinks in the goodie bag. Otherwise why would that drink be "easy to find"? But now we come to the bigger problem—which one?

During the earlier stage of attempting this clue, we actually bought 2 or 3 types of drinks which we thought might fit. But later on, when we thought of the drinks in the goodie bag, the scope of search was narrowed down substantially. However, there were still many choices. We shortlisted further to either TWISTER or a kind of yogurt drink with the word SHINE on the bottle.

So which is the correct one?

Ek Leong voted for SHINE because after all that word was specifically mentioned in the clue. But Kah Sing thought SHINE was just too straightforward for a Master's treasure. I agreed with Kah Sing. SHINE did not fit from the psychological point of view. I did not entertain for a moment the idea that the setter would use that kind of cheap trick on the masters. Therefore, although we did not know the explanation, we decided on TWISTER.

And here's the explanation by the CoC:

The first line is as we had expected—that it's easy to find because it's found in the goodie bag!

The second line is more complicated. In fact, I dare say much more complicated! The word TURN carries the duty to find the word TWIST. But at the same time, TURN is also given the duty of being an anagram indicator, of which the fodder is "it to shine a". It means that the letters found in "it to shine a" are to be rearranged to become a new word. And the CoC expects the solver to come up with the word HESITATION. But that is not the end of the story. After arriving at HESITATION, the solver is supposed to equate that to ER (which is the usual sound we make when we hesitate).

In the end, the CoC meant to join the resulting words by means of the charade operation to derive TWISTER. Amazing, isn't it?

Although I can live with "IT TO SHINE A" => HESITATION => ER, I do not agree with the double duty of TURN. It is a blatant violation of basic cryptic clueing rules, and if allowed to develop in the sport of treasure hunting, can lead to all sorts of mediocre clues. Trust me on this folks, I can very quickly expand the idea of double duty to other indicators too. For example, I can use a reversal indicator for the purpose of a definition etc.

This is not the first time I'm discussing the issue of double duty. When I first started learning about cryptic clueing, I used to spend long hours surfing the net to research whatever I could about cryptic clueing. And there was one very good article I read which focused on the topic of Double Duty. Unfortunately, somehow I can no longer find that article to share with you all here. I've forgotten how I found it in the past.

Anyway, as I said, I have discussed about double duty in the past. Check out the post entitled: Multiple Functions. The discussion revolved around the acceptability of a word which is used for the role of an indicator; but also at the same time for a second duty within the same clue. To give an example, consider this clue:

Q) Doctors

A) SPG

In the above example, that word "Doctors" may be referring to GPs (General Practitioners). In this case, "Doctors" has the duty of defining the GPs. However, "Doctors" as a verb is also given the duty of being an anagram indicator, which means the letters in GPS are rearranged to become SPG. An ugly solution, is it not?

As you will see in the comment box of the Multiple Functions post, Mr Nestor Fields, who's apparently an expert in cryptic clueing, informed us that double duty is not allowed in cryptic clueing. And from the above example I'm sure many of you would understand why it is disallowed.

So I would plead all the CoCs out there; let's all set the standard of not employing the double duty trick in hunt clues because you may just find your trick back-firing on you. You may be caught by surprise if some teams found WATSONS in the sector for the DOCTORS question, and it would be extremely difficult to defend your SPG.

theSun Hunt 2008—With vs Without

IMAGINE that you are blind; and I'm describing a car to you:

The car without an engine.

You are unable to see the car, but do you think:

A) The car has an engine

B) The car has no engine

C) Could be both above

OK, now let me rephrase the description:

The car with an engine.

You are still blind, but which of the answers A, B or C is the most accurate?

Now imagine that you're in a treasure hunt; and I am asking you spot a signboard based on this criteria:

Signboard without the letter M

Would you scan the sector for a signboard:

D) Containing the letter M

E) No letter M found thereon

Getting confused already? OK, let me go a little bit further; what if I give you this instruction:

Search for a signboard containing ABC without the letter M

And within that sector, you see 2 signboards containing:

F) ABC

G) ABCM

Which of the 2 would you choose? Both F and G contain ABC on them, but F is without M. Would you say F answers the clue perfectly?

Now consider this question from yesterday's hunt:

Q30) Unacceptable service without a thousand at a district.

The first time I read this clue, I saw in my mind a signboard containing something which can fit the cryptic requirement of "Unacceptable service", and that something must be without the letter M (or K). Then that is followed by something which answers "at a district".

That then was the basic search criteria within that very long sector with so many signboards. But I thought it wasn't that bad, because all I had to do was to focus only on the signboards without the letter M (or K) on them. But as I was scanning through that sector, I saw:

ACME @ SOHO

That "@ SOHO" attracted my attention because I thought it could satisfy "at a district". But now we have a problem; ACME contains the M (thousand), whereas the clue clearly says "without a thousand".

Since I was running out of time, I texted this signboard to my team mate anyway on the strength of "@ SOHO". But I was almost certain this was the intended answer. I did not know that my team mate had by then submitted our answer sheet, which was a shame because this answer turned out to be the required one, even though it obviously did not answer the question!

Let us now find out what really happened here.

I have seen similar hunt questions in the past, where "without" actually meant "with"! The setter had intended to instruct the hunters to look for a board containing something that when the letter M is removed therefrom, we are left with something which agrees with "Unacceptable service". The problem is that the sentence does not actually say so!

I have discussed this problem in the past; a possible improvement is something like this:

Unacceptable service if without a thousand at a district.

Now there can be no mistaking the intention of the setter. Because we have all heard of the basic rule of cryptic clueing before:

You may not mean what you say; but you must say what you mean.

In this clue, the setter did not mean what he said. So I suppose he has satisfied the first part of the rule. But did he say what he mean? I did not think he did, so in my opinion he has failed to observe the second rule of cryptic clueing! And it's for this reason that I think the setter has failed in this particular case.