Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs - Episode 210: C++ Cryptic Crossword

Episode Date: November 29, 2024

In this episode, Conor and Ben chat about Ben's C++ Cryptic Crossword.Link to Episode 210 on WebsiteDiscuss this episode, leave a comment, or ask a question (on GitHub)TwitterADSP: The PodcastConor HoekstraBen DeaneShow NotesDate Recorded: 2024-11-12Date Released: 2024-11-29CppCon 2024 Cryptic CrosswordADSP Episode 201: CppCon 2024 Recap!C++ Weekly by Jason TurnerCarbon Programming LanguageIntro Song InfoMiss You by Sarah Jansen https://soundcloud.com/sarahjansenmusicCreative Commons — Attribution 3.0 Unported — CC BY 3.0Free Download / Stream: http://bit.ly/l-miss-youMusic promoted by Audio Library https://youtu.be/iYYxnasvfx8

You read a clue, and it seems to suggest something. You must assiduously avoid that line of thinking, because it's almost always trying to throw you off the scent. Welcome to ADSP The Podcast, episode 210, recorded on November 12th, 2024. My name is Connor, and today with my co-host Ben, we chat about Ben's C++ cryptic crossword. Well, let's do the crossword. Let me share my screen. I think I've got it. So, did you and Shima try it? I asked Shima if she wanted to partake and she said no.

So this is a callback to what episode was it? We're going to go to the site and it says episode 201 when we were doing the CppCon recap. We put a link at the top of the show notes, which was to the C++ crossword that Ben made for the CppCon conference that happened back in September. And we said at some point we were going to come back, revisit this. I spent, admittedly, only 45 minutes attempting this. And half of that was spent with ChatGPT as well. Because let me tell you, folks, it was a struggle. I'm still not sharing my screen.

It's fair. Anyway, you know, when you're beginning, all roads to solutions are fair. There is no cheating here. I definitely did cheat. Okay. So you did use ChatGPT. And ChatGPT, let me tell you, was not helpful at all. In my experience, LLMs are not very helpful. For cryptics or just in general? For cryptics. Well, some point in are not very helpful for cryptics or just in general for cryptics well

some point in general but especially for cryptics so i'm not sure if in episode 201 if we gave a cryptic crossword overview not not necessarily of this one but just in general but maybe because i used to be a crossword aficionado i I had the little, I got it from my grandmother when I was very young. It was this A to Z crossword, like, you know, hint book kind of thesaurus mixed with a dictionary mixed with clues. Used to love crosswords. I am terrible. And so I was pretty good at them.

The point being, I am terrible at these cryptics. Anyway, so give us a little overview and we'll go through a couple of these. I'll walk through my thought process and then maybe you can try and help me. You can be my actual real life chat GPT and then we won't solve it all. We'll leave some of it for the listeners that haven't done this yet. So cryptic crosswords, the differences in the clues. So in a regular crossword like you might find in the New York Times or any newspaper in america north america they are caught they're what brits call quick crosswords which is where the clue is typically a straightforward synonym

of the answer right um now a cryptic crossword the clue is different uh but the clue always contains within it or practically always contains within it a a quick definition however the clue is designed to throw you off the scent. It's designed to suggest in your mind something which has nothing to do with the answer. Every clue has two parts. As I say, one part is the definition part, which will typically either be at the beginning or the end of the clue. The rest of the clue is wordplay, which when put together in the correct way will lead to the same answer as the definition. So that's the basics. But the thing you have to remember is you must never, you read a clue and it seems to suggest something.

You must assiduously avoid that line of thinking because it's almost always trying to throw you off the scent. Okay. What instead you must do is consider each word, what it could mean and how they might fit together in wordplay. Anyway, so with that very brief introduction, go ahead, Connor, where should we start? Maybe what we'll do is I have two clues solved and then three or four or five that are guessed wrong. And so I did the ones that were guessed wrong.

I actually did first, but we'll come back to those because I don't actually know the solution. But I'll walk through my thought process as a former, you know, crossword doer, non-cryptic crossword doer. And I do know I have done a couple of these with Ben and Tristan before, and I'm not new to cryptics, although I've never solved probably more than five clues in my life. But so number six down, the clue is nerd with double E enthralled by database. And then it says parentheses five, which indicates it's five letters, which you could infer from just looking at the crossword. But sometimes it's two words and it'll give you like a two comma three. My thought process with this was that double E is supposed to mean electrical engineering or something from university. But it's a pun meaning that you're going to see two E's in this word.

And I thought to myself, okay, nerd. Another word for nerd is geek. I don't know what database has to do with this. But I thought maybe I'll try geeks. And I actually, when I asked ChatGPT, it came to the same conclusion. So I'm as bad as the LLMs at least. It'll tell you all sorts of things. I typed in geeks.

And then I checked if I was right and I got the middle E correct. And so I thought to myself, okay, that's not bad. So the classic, what you've done is fairly classic, right? You've seen something, there's some

wordplay in there, there's the clue and you've got nerd in there and you've made a guess. Okay. And that's a fairly's some word play in there there's the clue and you've got nerd in there and you've made a guess okay now that's a fairly normal way to start now what you need to appreciate is that you have to be able to explain it in a good crossword clue there will be no word which is superfluous every word in the clue has its place either in the definition or the wordplay. And so with the guess of geeks, okay, so double E is in there. So there's part of the wordplay in there and it means nerd, but it doesn't mean nerds. Geeks is plural. So that's an issue. And then we've got this enthralled by database, which is unexplained. So yes, so geeks is not correct because we're unable to, you know,

it doesn't fit. And this is quite common. Like sometimes you'll make a guess, and sometimes, as in this case, you'll make a guess based on the definition. So the definition leads you to a guess, particularly if you have some crossing letters. And then you can spend a couple of minutes figuring out why it fits the wordplay.

But in this case, geeks is not quite right. So carry on. What's your next? Well, so my next guest was, and I got to admit, most of these, I was just throwing darts and I didn't even know where the dartboard was. And I was just hoping that I would get, my even know where the dartboard was and i was just hoping

that i would get my strategy which we'll get to for the five letter words was i went and typed out all the keywords in c++ that i know are five letters like const and uh there was a couple other ones float i think and then i went because there's a lot of five letter clues in this puzzle and i was like one of them's got to be const and so I went and found a couple that I thought could be const and would try it and none of them were well I didn't try actually all the the five-letter one so maybe there was one and I just couldn't see how const was a solution anyways back to geeks I knew that uh if the because I checked the word and it told me that the uh first second and uh fourth and fifth letters were wrong. And because I got one E right, I was like, you know what? Probably the fourth letter is an E as well.

So what word can I think of? Because the second letter E was wrong. So you think it still had a double E. Yeah. Letters three and four. I think the double E, like, because I was going through the clues, trying to find ones that indicated anagramming. Because my anagramming skills are phenomenal

because I play Scrabble. And some of the clues will say like the word is inside this word or the word is backwards or whatever. So those are the clues in the past that I have been able to solve is basically just like jumbling up a word and then adding a letter to it. And so double E, you know, is gives me hope. And then so nerd is also a candy and so I thought maybe it's sweet still don't know what the database has to do with this but you know it fits my word pattern so I type in sweet check the word and I get the W the E and the E correct but not the S and the T and at this point I'm like huh like, huh, like what word? Like, cause I'm pretty good. I play Wordle every day. I'm very good at finding words. This is five letters. This is, this is Wordle

central. I'm like, what? Like T maybe goes in first. So I just, I checked tweet, but like, you know, it's not tweet because I should have guessed, I should have guessed tweet, I guess. Cause that also works. And at that point, uh, i went and just solved it and i'm not sure how we want to reveal this if you want to walk i think because i think i know what the clue does now okay so go ahead so i i think uh now knowing that the solution uh what the solution is which we'll tell you in a couple seconds. The clue is saying nerd is the main clue. So this is a synonym for nerd. With a double E does mean that there's a double E in it. And enthralled by, probably the enthralled by means that the double E is in between two letters in database. I'm not sure if that's exactly it, but that's what leads you to the solution that was provided.

Right. So the answer is dweeb, meaning nerd, right? Yeah, you've skipped over a couple of things. So the with is important. You know, like every word is important. With can be abbreviated to W. So it's W-E-E with W-E-E, W-E-E. And as you say, it's enthralled by,

it's contained within surrounding W-E-E-R is D-B for database. Now I'm being a little fast on loose there because actually I don't think D-B is in the dictionary for database, but it's common enough for the crowd that's likely to be completing this to be just about okay, perhaps. Wait, so the with? Yes. The with is supposed to be a W. The with is abbreviatable to W, yes. That is supported by the dictionary.

Supported by the dictionary. You just made two references to the dictionary. Is this like a cryptic thing? If you take a good quality dictionary, the one that's usually used is Collins. No, not Collins. Um,

chambers, chambers. Uh, if you look up the letter W in chambers, it will, one of the, one of the definitions will be with the letter W can mean with it's a valid abbreviation. It's in the

dictionary. Oh, I did not know that. Yeah. It comes up a lot in cryptics. You need to, just like in Scrabble, you need to know all the two-letter words, three-letter words, et cetera, like you were saying. In cryptics, you need to have a large bank of, because, you know, it's a common misconception about cryptics you cannot just abbreviate any word to its initial letter it must be in the dictionary so we can say w is with w also what else would w stand for uh wife uh that's a common one what else is w uh i'm blanking w is not particularly one that's common but but there's common. But any letter of the alphabet, most people who do cryptics can tell you a half a dozen things which are valid abbreviations. I mean, it's similar to other crosswords.

There's certain words like Oslo that always come up because they're useful for completing little boxes of compact things. I think weak, W-E-E-K, would be valid for W probably as well. Okay. You know, just like S for second, M for minute, H for hour. Wide would be, because it's a cricketing score. You see it on the cricket score sheet, right? So you would see W for wide, O over m for maiden things like that r for run this this is kind of the bank of knowledge you need to have as a cryptic

solver and setter yeah this this is the the problem with cryptics for me too is that cryptics rely on a diverse and like a breadth of knowledge across culture and art and geography that I do not have so a lot of this stuff sometimes that it pulls on like when I don't think it it is the same for a lot of crosswords that you'll find in like you know the New York Times which are the the classic ones a lot of those because you have such a dense, you know, mapping of words, crisscrossing, you can get away with a lack of knowledge in certain places as long as you know the terms. Whereas this really relies on, like, knowledge that I just, you know, it'll be some river. The clue will be some river in some country that I just don't have that knowledge. But this one, you know, there's hope because it's C++.

So let's, we'll move on to 13 across. I was hopeful for this because there was a lot in this that I got, I understood what the clue was trying to tell me. So the clue is pronoun taken back to contradict Jason Turner question mark and parentheses eight. Yes. So my thought process was well first of

all and we know that the third last letter is b because it intersects with dweeb which is why i was trying to solve it so pronoun i thought refers to a pronoun unfortunately my next thought was there's no eight letter pronoun that i know you know i went through them all he she they her him so it's unlikely that pronoun is the definition uh so unlikely um yes and taken back to me means there might be a reversal of some word which is some kind of word play indicator yes i think if i understood the meaning of the clue at the end and to to contradict Jason Turner, I had no clue. And I really, after seeing the clue, I maybe should have gotten there. I asked, when I asked you at GBT, it said something about how man can be a pronoun and because it's eight letters, it reasoned its way to nobleman

and how that, if you spell it backwards, fits and said that Jason Turner, it's just a misdirection. So it clearly doesn't even understand the idea of a cryptic because you were saying everything's important. He was, ChatGPT said, oh, we can just ignore Jason Turner. You cannot ignore Jason Turner. Nobleman is not the answer. And so Nobleman reversed is not the answer. So that's as far as I got.

And then at that point, it had been 45 minutes. And I was like, you know what? We're just going to reveal this. And then the solution was, and hopefully for those that haven't done the crossword and they're playing along, you might have had some thoughts. The solution is YouTuber, which I was disappointed when I saw because you clearly is the pronoun there, which is not reversed. But if you reverse the rest of the clue, tuber, you get rebut, which I believe is the mapping to contradict. So it's pronoun taken back to contradict so you rebut and then you reverse the rebut to get tuber and then the clue uh the main clue is jason turner

who is famously a youtuber jason turner question mark the question mark is important here. It is. Because Jason Turner is an example of a YouTuber. Jason Turner is not a definition for YouTuber, but Jason Turner example of is a definition for YouTuber, right? So, you can't clue from the specific to the general without saying this is an example. And that's what the question mark does. Interesting. So there's a bunch of this kind of nuanced strategy and not rules, but like, you know, things that you, I assume, pick up the more and more you play these.

And yeah, anything more is, because I missed some stuff in the dweeb clue or the dweeb solution. Did I miss anything after having seen the solution here? Or is that basically it? No, you skated over the width, but that was it. Let's take 14 down. This is only a three letter entry. Right.

Which we know starts with E. Right. Because it intersects with YouTuber. And the clue is appreciation of present delivered in bow. Three letters. Now, this is another example of the surface meaning of the clue suggests something, right? Appreciation of present delivered in bow. You're thinking about a nice gift wrapped item right there's that is entirely nothing to do with the answer so i see so i don't know if you've tried chat gpt with this one uh i did not i when i saw this i thought appreciation because i'm always thinking wordplay where i'm hoping for wordplay is going to be like the incrementing of letters

or something. And then, but like, that doesn't make a ton of sense. That's an interesting mechanic, which I've never seen, but it doesn't apply in this case. And then when I read of present delivered in bow, I'm hoping for like, oh, the clue is three letters in bow means like I need to rearrange the letters of bow, but because there's an E in it, that's clearly not it. Okay, so you didn't get particularly far. One of the key wordplay indicators here is delivered. If I deliver something, I speak it, right? A delivery is a speech, something that I say.

So what we're looking for is a homophone. This is a common thing. So delivered in bow, I played a little fast and loose with capitalization here. The Bow should really be capitalized. Bow is an area of East London, which means we are looking for a homophone of something in an East London accent, a Cockney accent. This is very common in crosswords. When you see something that suggests a Cockney accent, you think about dropping H's. So what we're looking for is a word

that means present because that's the other part of the clue. So a word that means present. If someone from East London were to say that word, it would sound like a word meaning appreciation. Now, if you are present, you are here. Here, yeah. If you drop the H, it's ear. And if you have an ear for music, you have an appreciation of music. So ear means appreciation. Oh, my goodness. That is mind-blowing.

I thought the reason you brought 14 down because it was going to be like oh this is an easier one let's walk you through it are you kidding me so that's not talking i'm not kidding you at all that's exactly the answer bow with a capital b is a reference to a sub-jurisdiction of a international city on a different continent appreciation for music is also known as having an ear for music and present is like here and that's that's how anyone is i guess if you know the tricks of the tray but that is like mind-blowing that is mind-blowing even like i got 85 of the way listening through your explanation and i was i was still like until until you said drop the H that's when I got it. I was like,

that is, that is wow. Woo. All right. So let's, let's type that in. It's E A R. Right.

Oh my, I didn't even get it folks. I didn't even get it. I didn't even get it. I put E R E. Wow. I didn't even, I didn't even get it.

Wow. Ooh. 22 down is pretty easy. Okay. So this one, this one is, so it actually, and I noticed this, but I'm going to read it the way I thought it is. Meant to be read, but it could be a pun and there's multiple pronunciations. So 22 down, five letters, lead carbon expert. Could also be pronounced lead carbon expert.

So my first thought- These are good thoughts. These are good thoughts, right? You're already trying to penetrate the clue's meaning, right? And playing with the words. I mean, be prepared to be disappointed because the depth of the nuance or the lack of nuance or the lack of depth is going to be very apparent here. So as a programming language person, I see Carbon and I see a lead Carbon expert. I think I know all the folks that are leading the

Carbon project. Those folks are Chandler Carruth, Richard Smith, and Kate Gregory. Or at least at one point in time, those were the three people. I know that they have like a benevolent team for now, and they've got rotating people. But those are the three that I know. Five letters? Are any of those names five letters first or last? Richard Smith?

The last name Smith has five letters. Let's throw it in there. I put Smith down. Every letter is wrong. You fell fair and square into the trap. Yes. You started out so well. Well, let me, let's see, given every word matters.

Right. So one of these words is the definition. Probably, and I say usually definitions either at the beginning or the end. So lead or expert. All right. right well let's come back to that now now you have to think like you have to think through a bank of abbreviations and short synonyms right what might carbon be in a cryptic crossword probably not the programming language what is a valid abbreviation what could what do you think might be what Calvin might abbreviate to? C. On the periodic table, Calvin is C. Yeah. Right. Now, expert.

Expert can be a noun or an adjective. And like, I am expert at something that's an adjective. Yeah. It can be, yeah. Or an expert, a person.. So we have to think about our synonyms for expert. Now, if it's a noun, expert could be ace. That would be a fairly common. Potentially pro, but with carbon for C, we're looking for four other letters. So if we're taking lead, now that we know carbon for C, we're looking for four other letters. So if we're taking lead, now that we know carbon is C, it's more likely to begin with C than end with C if we're working on this line, right? So we're thinking of carbon C being the first letter. Then we need a four letter word

for expert, which we put with the C and the definition would be lead. Now what five letter words beginning with c can you think that might mean lead and we have to think through all the possible meanings of lead or led right um uh lead this is a tricky one for non-british english speakers because this meaning of lead is far more common in brit English than than otherwise I mean I'm not really thinking of synonyms per se the words that are coming to mind are like coach champ things where like right you're the top person and and that is not the correct meaning of lead so I'm I'm just gonna have to tell you okay that um if i a lead is a cable what a cable in in british english if you wanted to buy a cable you would buy a lead oh yeah and of course when we look at that we see Expert as an adjective is able. If you are able, you are an expert.

Right. I mean, we're getting there. I mean, I probably wouldn't have solved that. I would have potentially, you know, after doing a few more of these, would have gotten that lead carbon means the first letter C at least. This one, this one i actually thought was my best shot i actually thought i kind of got it but that's because i yeah 31 across which is uh the last letter of cable so now we know it starts with e but at the time i didn't know clue you had explain to me okay explain to me what you had in there because I'm not sure I follow. I can't. Well, let's.

Oh, right. So the clue is facility has run in with sensor, parentheses five, five letters. So this was my original strategy. Find all the five letter keywords or like words that are just relevant to C++. One of them's got to be a clue somewhere. And const, obviously. When I think of five-letter keywords in C++, that's my first one that comes to mind. Autos for four letters, consts for five letters. And so I saw facility, or I read, facility has run in with sensor.

And I took the letters of facility and the letters of sensor. Running them into each other. And you can spell const. From the letters of facility and sensor. There's a C-O-N-S. Amazingly you can. And there's a T in facility. And I was like I got it. I got it folks.

It's const. And I put in const. And all I got was the S correct. And I think I thought to myself. That well maybe my. I'm correct that it is an anagramming from a subset of the letters of facility and sensor. And so I think I tried a couple, which is why you see, I can't remember what was there before, but O-N-S. And then I tried an O at the end. I can't really remember why.

So I think I just tried a few different letters. But all I have is now that the S. And also, too, there is a E in sensor. So I might I just tried a few different letters, but all I have is now that the S and also two, there is a E in sensor. So I might be still correct. What do I think now though? Facility or sensor is the clue. And we know it's E blank, blank, S blank. Yes.

So simply mashing together some of the letters in facility and sensor. That's not a thing. Well, it's far too woolly there's no there's nothing so there's nothing in this clue that telling you exactly what to do there so while it was an initial thought it's it's it's not supported right i think i think that's why i tried the o is because the o is the uh succeeding letter or the the letter adjacent to s and so i thought maybe run in means like it's a, you have to take contiguous letters and, you know, that are from each of the words.

But then when I didn't see that, I was like, okay, that idea is wrong clearly. So again, facility has run in with sensor. This is bringing to mind a certain image, right? Which you must absolutely ignore, right? And instead we can look at, well, has run in is suggesting an element of wordplay because run can be abbreviated to R from a cricketing score sheet, for example. Run abbreviates to R.

So the way to decode this clue is to say we're looking for a word that means facility. We're going to put an R in it somewhere, and we're going to come up with a word that means sensor a race is the correct answer how is a race a word that means facility well remember it's ease ease is the word that means facility and we're putting an r in ease means facility yeah if you have a facility with something you have an ease with it you find it easy i'm thinking of the facility is that i think yes you're thinking of a different meaning of facility you're thinking of like a a building or something which is what the clue wants you to think about and therefore what

you must avoid right okay let's we've got five minutes or a couple minutes left. How about you choose now one of the most, what you think is gettable ones. Gettable or, okay, so let's do 19 across because 19 across is the signature. It's a 15 letter word. That's a gettable one? Yes. The fact that it is a 15-letter word means that the clue type is one of the more attackable clues, right? Because a 15-letter word to make it too hard would just be very hard. My job as a solver, as a setter of crosswords, is not to provide an undoable puzzle, right? It's to lose bravely, right? I want to challenge the solver, but I want them to be able to get the answer, right? My job is not to make a puzzle which is impossible. And so, in particular, on these long clues, on a 15-letter word,

I want to give the solver a good in, right? So, go ahead. So, I mean, the clue reads in quotations. So quotation artful and quotation German import mag shows advanced technique. Fifteen letters. Now, whatever the surface meaning of the clue seems to suggest to you, slightly risque meaning perhaps, you need to put out of your mind. But again, this is an example. This is exactly what clues do. The artful German import mag shows advanced technique.

You can think about the kind of mag that might be. But it's nothing to do with the answer, right? Mag is short for magazine, correct? Yeah. Okay. Now, the very first word of the clue, artful. What might that mean? It means something to do with art or artistry or artistic-ness.

Sure. And it also means if we treat letters in an artful way, we might mix them around and anagram them. Right? It's an anagram indicator. It is? That's disappointing. It is. When you've been doing crosswords for a while, right? It's an anagram indicator. It is? That's disappointing. When you've been doing crosswords for a while,

you're alive to these kinds of things. Any word that suggests playing with letters, making them a new, changing them around, any shade of meaning like that becomes an anagram indicator. In this case, artful is an anagram indicator. And if you sum up the letters in German import mag. I was just counting. I was like, there's six in German, there's six in import, and there's three in mag, which is 15.

We've got 15 letters. So, we've got the anagram fodder. And therefore, the definition must be advanced technique. When we treat these letters artfully, we're going to show a word that means advanced technique. So, you could guess at it import german mag german mag we've now got vs code open with my key with my keywords for uh oh this is an interesting insight into color's process import german mag and it's a 15 and it's also it also means advanced advanced technique technique, yeah. Advanced technique. So first of all, there's an ing. There's an ing.

It's a good start. Identifying prefixes and suffixes. Yeah, the number one common suffix probably spelled in Scrabble because you now only need to spell a four-letter or five-letter verb that can be uh ing there's three m's which i'm gonna guess uh two of those potentially are next to each other potentially it's gonna start with re but that that might not be the case there's only one e top i mean you can you can spell grammar, actually. Although now all my letters are gone from the beginning. So we got rid of the I, the G, the M. I-N-G. It does end with I-N-G.

I can give you that. If you stare at this long enough. And again, you could use an anagram solver to solve this. That would be fair, certainly at beginner level, especially for one this long. The meaning is advanced technique. And we've got a c++ theme crossword so you might be able to guess it from that all right it's c++ themed i've totally

forgotten that this was c++ themed uh i see the kind of the word memory but this is all just one word too 15 retro programming programming is good you can get programming out of that oh meta programming wow metaming we got is an anagram of german import mag i'm curious did you use a reverse or not reverse but they they have these uh uh yeah i used an anagram did you use that to get this or did you pick that out yourself i used an anagram generator okay um and i was you know i was so relieved actually i was i was like okay that's a 15 letter word i so my my thought process here was like i have a 15 word metaprogramming fits that's the first bit of serendipity um it's a good word it's a

good theme word which is what you want for these long kind of anchor things right so then i thought how am i going to clue this? I need to make the clue relatively easy. An anagram is one of the easy clue types, right? Because generally it's just an anagram puzzle. You don't need to think about different bits of wordplay plugging together. Then I went to an anagram generator on the internet and I typed in metaprogramming and I looked at all of the things it generated,

and I saw something or something very close to German import mag, not necessarily in that order, but as soon as I found German import mag, I'm like, that's the best option. That's actually a good anagram, and then I can just put, and then I can construct the rest of the clue. That is, I think it's like once you know these tricks, right, the question mark that applies stuff, that letters or words can be shortened to letters. And that, you know, that's the thing is I know that some of the words that indicate like shuffling or anagramming, but I don't know all of them.

I don't know that artful means that. But if I had all that stuff, I think I would get a lot for it. We should, I feel like when I asked easy to get one, you were hoping maybe for a fun one. Or is there like a one that is dealer's choice? Dealer's choice? Yeah, sorry. Let's see. Well, some are just cryptic, right?

Okay, so four down. Four down is four letters. Four down is four letters, yes. Partnership on fine wicket question mark. So I don't, wicket? I don't even, that sounds like something a basket is made out of. I don't even know what a wicket is. Partnership on fine wicket.

It suggests a cricketing. Suggests an afternoon of cricketing, right? Or it's a cricket item. A cricket is a... Oh, the things that they run around are wickets. The things at either end of the run. I see. This one, shall I just go ahead and explain it, deconstruct it for you?

My guess is wife, but probably that's not correct. The wicket should really be capitalized. What does Wicket mean to you as a proper noun? Absolutely nothing. Have you seen Return of the Jedi? I have. I have seen all the Star Wars movies. Okay.

And so Wicket is the name of an Ewok. It is. The main Ewok, really. The one that leia befriends on the forest moon of endor i've lost uh nerd credibility there i apologize to everybody on the internet wicket question mark is the is the definition here so wicket is an example of an ewok ewok is the answer so how do we get partnership on fine how does partnership on fine somehow mean ewok partnership on fine so this is a down clue so on means on top of right in a down clue context clues differ slightly from an across clue because you can use words in the clue that indicate the physical placement of letters being above and below interesting that is something

where down clues can differ from across clues so fine i was thinking of as a penalty but it's fine as an okay okay yeah should have been obvious fine and then and then ew how does that mean partnership ew partnership it's an abbreviation for something that's not coming to me this is this is east and west east and west our partners in the game of bridge wow i want to i might put a poll out when this podcast released in three weeks of how many folks know that wicket is an ewok i wonder how many of the you know developers and nerds that uh follow me because uh i'm a i'm a star wars fan i've seen actually most of the john favreau and um the guy that did mandalorian and all the animated stuff i've seen all of, but I have not retained the knowledge of the name of the Ewok.

Anyway, we'll plug that in. This has been, this has been, this does make me want to get more into cryptics. I know you've been, you've been slowly working on me over the last couple of years. Well, it's one of those things that they are impenetrable at first glance, but I think you have enough tools now. And the vital thing is like you can guess at the answer, but you must then go back and explain every part. In a well-constructed clue, it will be, every part will be explained

and every word in the clue will be significant. Yeah. And it's the first and last. Final question. I was going to say it's the first and last, you know, words of the clue that are the most important. But final question before we go. Is const in this? Const is not in this puzzle. That was my mistake. I can tell you which of the, if you like, I can tell you which of the words are theme words. Okay. If that would help.

Sure. So, let's see. Eight across is a theme word. One down is kind of techie theme. 32 and 32 across and 29 across are both theme words let's see and i i guess maybe the thing to point out is that some of these are are only peripherally like kind of tacker nerd adjacent it's not necessarily like everything is a c++ um yeah like clue and solution kind of thing c++ knowledge helps with this puzzle and also

hurts in some way because firstly some of the words are c++ adjacent some of the answers but but none of them are particularly specialist terms to c++ apart from perhaps metaprogramming but also some of the clues have suggestions in them which of of course are red herrings. And they might suggest things to people who are a favorite C++, which turn out not to be part of the answer. For instance, two down has Matt Godbolt in it. Yeah, Jason Turner, Matt Godbolt.

All right, this has been a blast. Link for those that are interested will be in the show notes. We will have to record again because I know you had thoughts on some of the things that were in episode, excited about the board games. We were going to talk about APL a bit, but that'll have to wait. Anyways, until next time, yeah, hopefully folks enjoyed a slight variation in the content. But clearly, we see board games and puzzles and stuff, and we end up chatting way longer than we planned. This is how things go, yeah. Be sure to check these show notes either in your podcast app or at ADSP the podcast dot com for links to anything we mentioned in today's episode, as well as a link to a get up discussion where you can leave thoughts, comments and questions. Thanks for listening.

We hope you enjoyed and have a great day. I am the anti Bryce.