Setting the scene… Gut Reaction by Gareth
Wolfgang Pauli was a physicist, known for his exclusion principle and the postulation of the neutrino. He was also a scathing critic. One of his best-known quotations is “This isn’t right. This isn’t even wrong”, which pithy reflection on the inadequacy of unfalsifiable work brought him to the attention of this crossword setter.
I thought that it should be possible to create a crossword in which the letters of the word RIGHT clash with those of the word WRONG in the grid, and a suitably worded preamble would lead solvers to replace both options with the letters PAULI, making real words with every possibility. A nice, simple idea. And not a computer game or obscure minor celebrity in sight.
Unfortunately, there were problems. The first problem was that the quotation isn’t in any reference books. The second was that the Internet references don’t agree on a single form of the quotation, and none gives a reliable source. The third was that filling the grid was going to be hard. I made five lists of words satisfying the requirements for each clash (eg STEIN/STERN/STEAN, GRATES/ORATES/URATES), and the lists were disappointingly short. Needing to use 2 words from each list (so they clash in a checked cell) means 10 awkward words in the grid.
Maybe these problems aren’t completely insurmountable, but while researching Pauli quotations I found the rather excellent one about painting like Titian. This came complete with a scan of the source document. Good enough for even the most Internet-sceptical solvers, surely. I quickly edited the Wikiquote entry for Pauli in case anyone thought to look there, and began to think how I could make my new Pauli puzzle work.
I knew that it would have to end with a Google search, because the quotation is obscure and not listed in books. I also wanted to end with a blank rectangular grid (as close to the proportions of the original as possible). The challenge was to hold the most googlable information back as long as possible. I decided that since I was making people delete everything anyway, I would make every letter in the grid count, hence the idea of putting “TECHNICAL DETAILS” in the unchecked cells, and an unclued instruction to remove the checked letters. The result is a grid that is effectively 100% checked, and also 100% redundant, with all the gimmickry in the grid, which I thought would be nice.
Filling the grid was difficult, but only as difficult as finding a configuration that Sympathy could complete for me given my constraints. In the end the average word length was a but short, but I thought I could get away with it.
For the preamble, I needed to use the phrase “paint like Titian”. Solvers who tried this in quote marks in Google would get the answer straight away. But I thought that was unlikely. Combining paint, Titian, technical details and missing in a Google search in various combinations would get anyone to the answer, though. I added the line “Google is recommended” as a nudge in the right direction.
I also nicked the (rather good) title from an article I found on the web concerning the original quotation. This made it even more possible to short-cut all the solving, but I hoped nobody would think of it.
Writing the clues was an interesting experience. After my first puzzle, Cats, I created Accomplished Lassie in a bit of a rush with ghost-written clues (the authors preferred not to be credited. No idea why). I thought I’d have a go at doing my own this time. No nasty constraining clue gimmicks, so I could do what I liked. And the high level of checking meant I could experiment with some ideas that might be impossible to cold solve, but could be understood afterwards. In the event, the words were kind, and I’m pleased with how some of the clues worked out.
I sent it off to be test-solved, and all went well. Some doctoring of the bad clues was required, but most of the risky ones stayed in. Then Mark had a go at it (“Good Lord, a scientist’s ‘joke’!”), and rewrote the clues that still didn’t work (outlawing “X-box game” as a definition for HALO, for example). Of course Mark’s clues (eg 19a, 27a) were effortlessly miles better than mine, which is annoying.
My THORNLESS clue (Time polled in Old Norse: not a pangram) with its almost completely nonsensical surface meaning, stayed in, as did some of the weirder wordplay ideas. Shane and Simon also solved it OK, and I got the A grade I was hoping for without any major problems.
I realised that a blank-grid gimmick is risky, but I reckoned that the last complete blank entry was Use a Pencil by Ploutos in the Listener in 1995, which was long enough ago for a repeat to be doable. So it was disappointing when Resolution by Alligator appeared on 27th October 2007, also in the Listener. They must have thought the same thing. Oh well – it happens.
Feedback has been a bit mixed. Although hardened Magpie solvers found it a straight-forward A grade puzzle, many solvers found it impossible. First, the clues proved to be trickier than many people expected. But more importantly, what I thought would be a fairly straightforward Google search turned out to be beyond many solvers. This came as a bit of a surprise in some cases where experienced computer users failed to turn up the answer. Maybe they just thought using Google was always cheating and refused on principle. If I took that view I’d barely be able to complete any thematic crosswords.