Puzzle Fantastica #1: The Answer.

Let me be the first to. *slap my forehead* Doh!

I was kinda of close with my last guess about cloning animals for food, and for conservation, but still off base.

Sweet Moses - that's cool...

Well I didn't nearly get it or anything, but I suspected that it was a word puzzle near the end. I was playing around with cow-fish-elvis and cow-fish-king(very difficult to make new words with all those consonants). I don't think anyone would have gotten clone from the first 3 clues alone, but it was implied that you could. If I had realized that the remaining clues were of equal importance, I might have had a chance. I think some people got pretty close to this but they were never going to get it exactly right. The fish, elvis, and the clip were the best realized clues. The cow and the novel not so much. No one associates cloning with cows or factories at it's currently infant stage, and the bed reference to sleeping DNA is obscure for us non-scientists. As far as the Colin Ng thing, that's kind of neat, but if you present something as a work of fiction, why would I fuse it with reality and give Colin David's last name? I would call that stretching if someone had brought that up.

Instead of the cow I would use a banana. Bananas are clones, and the most popular banana is the Cavendish. I would just change the clues in the novel. I would begin it with "First things first..." or something like that, and it needs to refer to what type of puzzle it is in some way. I came up with 'word puzzle' in the end just because it seemed like the best fit.

Just because a puzzle is difficult doesn't mean it was well made. That picture is a complete mess, there's no structure to it at all, that's why no one got it. If someone other than the creator had posted this answer, I wouldn't have bought it. It seems equally ridiculous as any of my answers. A well-made puzzle of this sort would have an elegant visual representation of it's solution. A way to prove that it is, in fact, the solution. The solution doesn't look like a proof to me, but someone's wild conjecture. This puzzle is like "What have I got in my pocket?" being presented as a riddle. One actually needs to start with the structure of the puzzle and move backwards, coming up with the clues last. There needs to be more of a plan.

I did have a good time thinking about this for awhile, it was fun, and I'm sorry to criticize, but there is an art to making puzzles, and a puzzle of this type needs to be designed well to be solvable. I honestly don't think that anyone would have ever gotten the answer exactly right.

Having a bad day, Jim?

I'm having an ok day, I'm just disappointed to find out what a convoluted, poorly designed puzzle this was. I expected to see something something clever and elegant, but simple. The answer appears made up after the fact. One could come up with any number of alternate solutions that would be just as convincing and convoluted. If the only way a puzzle can be solved is by getting lucky, and making fairly sketchy leaps, I challenge that it is really even a puzzle.

Ultimately I feel tricked. The puzzle was a great idea, and I admire that but, it didn't work. It was not realistically solvable.

It is convoluted, but maybe that was the point. What's remarkable is the diversity in all the answers attempted, which again is maybe the point. Being on the scienceblogs, you can see how there are similarities between the puzzle here and how the act of trying to figure things out occurs in the sciences, which is primarily based on recording observation and the formulation of hypotheses to fit these observations. Viewed in this way, I think the solution is very pretty to look at, since "puzzle" in the context of scientific investigation is never guaranteed to be tidy, direct, or clever even. When one is given an empirical piece of information, there is no prior understanding that all aspects of this observation builds on your solution, since some elements are there for the sake of being there, or are maybe involved in an alternative function.

Anyway, I kind of like it because it's almost like a microcosm of the whole scientific query process, and I assume the wordplay stuff is meant to be the Eureka moment. I do admit that like Jim, I liked the process more than the part about being given the answer, but hey, I think every scientist would feel the same way.

Not sure how effective the wordplay stuff is though - it looks clear now, with maybe only the "ostracionte" word being the one not blatent, but maybe it's only clear because it's given to us. You know they say that hindsight is twenty-twenty, which is ironically fitting since that phrase applies equally well to the sciences itself.

Hey Jim, Sorry you're not fond of the answer. I actually thought it was kind of neat, but I guess it's always hard to second guess these things. I will say, however, that we had intended the cow clue with its connotations to factories to be one of the more obvious connections to cloning. Somatic Nuclear Transfer (i.e. the whole Dolly thing) is a form of research whose primary intent was, and still technically is, to provide a manner to standardize livestock, and especially livestock with desire characteristics. This could be as straightforward as meat quality, milk production, running fast, or in the more high tech sense, the ability to raise animals that are GM with some specific function (like biopharmaceutics).

It's funny, but I always thought the fish was the weakest link. The fish was also the first clue put up on the day the blog was launched (with the cow going up a few weeks after, and then Elvis a little after that. It was around this time that we made it public that all this wierd things were converging towards something, and it was during the fifth and final clue that we got boingboing to weigh in, which, of course, was when everything flew way open. Not sure how it got implied you can solve the puzzle, with only the first three clues, but that wasn't the plan.

It's kinda cool how all of this data led to this mini event. I guess now, we should redefine the "definition of a planet, or er I mean, clue," and get rid of one of them.

I suppose there'll be a lot of de-briefing. In that vein...

Strange too, ins't it Dave?, that we were both most worried about making it too obvious with the last "Novel" clue. That saying "plate" or "dish" or something, instead of "bed," would be too big of a tip. And even that saying "bed" was too leading. And *I* was most worried about Elvis the whole time, because I've never been able to see a picture of him without instantly flashing in my mind to the cultural phenomenon of Elvis impersonators, or clones, as I've always thought of them. I almost started a thread about Honeymoon in Vegas probably a half dozen times, only to hold back.

I think the puzzle was a lot of fun because it got people thinking, straining, making cognitive leaps. Thats a rare challenge, and thats where I see the value in lateral thinking exercises like this. The fact that the puzzle was not explicitly solveable (I do agree with Harry and Jim on that point) is immaterial; its the process that mattered. I see the "actual" answer as more of the authors' line of thinking. But obviously, more than one line of thinking was interesting, and made for good brain food. Thumbs up!

The puzzle was indeed fun to work on, entertaining and good mental exercise. But I have to agree with Jim, and I feel cheated by the solution. Several of the other answers I'd read sound as plausible as the given solution. I suspect even now that the answer is a trick, and another more sensible answer is just around the corner.

Not only are some of the connections in the solution schema extremely tenuous (the Bed is DNA at rest? C'mon!), but I feel positively misled on several fronts. Such as:

* The first post about the puzzle presented three clues, and said "There is maybe more, but not yet." This implied that the puzzle could be solved without additional clues, and caused me to presume that anagrams were unlikely solutions.

* "The puzzle is bigger than us." I fail to see what this has to do with cloning.

* I recall reading somewhere that we'd know the answer when we see it. Sorry, but CLONE is not an Aha! answer.

Even in the 5-letter anagram domain, I can think of some other likely answers, mostly off the top of my head:

FEEDS
F is for Fish
E is for birds Eating (I assume that's what they're doing)
E is for Elvis
D is for Dairy Cow
S is for Story (Novel)

Fish, Birds, and the Cow are in the food chain, and the word "feed" is frequently used with these creatures in numerous ways. Elvis obviously had too much feed. And the novel mentioned bed, such as a bed of lettuce.

Or, I could also make:
BEFAT
B is for Birds
E is for Elvis
F is for Fish
A is for "A Novel"
T is for Taurus (as in Bos Taurus, the cow)

If you BE FAT, you should eat Fish.
Birds are eating on the lawn in order to BE FAT for the winter
Elvis BE very FAT
If you stay in Bed too long you will BEcome FAT.
Farmers try to get cows to BE FAT for slaughter.

Other relationships:
- BEFAT sounds like "Beef at," another reference to the cow. "Where's the beef at?"
- The puzzle is "bigger than us." That suggests weight gain.
- Obesity is a Pox on the health of our society.
- Being very overweight can cause otherwise healthy people to not be able to get out of bed.
- You can anagram "Benji Cohen" into "NICE JOB HEN" which is a sarcastic congratulations to fowl for contributing to obesity.

I see that some people dissaprove but the solution seems pretty elegant to me. Personally, I don't think "There is maybe more, but not yet." implies anything related to 3 clues being enough. It just says that there are maybe more, but not yet - and then there were more. And boy were they right about "The puzzle being bigger than us." Not the answer, but the puzzle certainly. The bed thing is now really obvious to me, but maybe that's because I have some training in genetics (the G0 thing, trust me, is really the key part that resulted in Dolly). Anyway, looking forward to part 2 (if you're not scared off!)

That's awesome! And beautiful graphic too. Bring on the second challenge.

Sorry guys, you are doing a cool thing here, that was just my two-cups-of-coffee gut reaction to finally seeing the solution. I agree, the cow seems like a good clue, I just didn't have the knowledge that you have(a sheep would have been too obvious, I realize). I also understand that a lot of progress in science involves leaps that are not inherently obvious(except in retrospect). I am currently competing for an internship as a 'designer' for a game company, and I have design on the brain.

Towards the end, I did come up with the idea that it was an anagram, I just didn't use the last two clues when trying to come up with something. I had no real, justifiable reason, given the data, to assume it was an anagram outside of the fact that an anagram is a puzzle. I turned to the anagram because I could find no underlying structure to the clues that was clearly better than any other. When I was trying different permutations of king-cow-fish I did come up with a name, it escapes me now, something ng, that popped up on wikipedia. Someone who discovered a vaccine or something, I don't remember now.

While my critique was unneccesarily blunt and insensitive in retrospect(sorry about that), I still stand by it. The elegant solutions of problems are the ones that stand the test of time. The inelegant and problematic theories are the ones that everyone is trying to get rid of, or make more elegant at least. For example, I can't think of his name off-hand, but he came up with an elegant way to calculate the movements of heavenly bodies, and it worked perfectly, except for the planets(which were perhaps undiscovered at this point? I don't remember), and he had to add things to explain the abberant motion of these few heavenly bodies, and it was ugly. I feel that the modern day ideas of dark matter and dark energy are ugly in the same way. Anyway, I digress as I tend to do. My point is, I guess, is that the most elegant, simple way of interpreting information is what rises to the top. We can not force reality to conform to this ideal, but we can create something that does. This was a good concept for a puzzle, but you won't be able to make another puzzle in this same vein, it would be too easy to figure out. Just think about the design, the structure, underlying your next puzzle idea. What you want is something that will be difficult to solve but has an elegant solution.

All and all, I do think that it was a neat concept for a puzzle, exercising one's brain is never a waste of time, and I thank you for the stimulation. Keep up the good work!

Yeah - what you all said. I don't have much new to add since Jim, Alan, Harry, et al. kind of said what I wanted to say.

When I was in good ol' grad school for writing, I actually had a long talk with a smart advisor about puzzle-making (and writing in general, i guess). There is always that fine balance: make the puzzle too easy to solve, and it becomes irrelevant. Make the puzzle too esoteric or difficult and, well, it again becomes irrelevant to the larger public. There is a sweet spot, I'm sure, somewhere in there - it just depends on your target audience.

Finnegan's Wake? Maybe it IS a work of pure genius. But I'll never know because it is so boring and prickly to read that I just don't care to put in the effort. But that's me.

My two cents: That the answer to the puzzle is an anagram, after all, is kind of shaky to me because the individual clues -- what they *should* be named -- was very much up to interpretation. Kind of along Jim's reasoning, there was not a logic to it (even if it would have been hidden). One clue should be an animal's scientific name (ostraciontes); another it's generic name (cow); one is not named after the animal (birds), the subject, the foreground -- which would fit a kind of solution pattern --but the background (lawn). And so on. [I think Alan's post teases sufficiently about this].

Back to that writing your novel-puzzle making mixing of metaphors: it is always a challenge to try to step out of your own skin, your own network of associations, to try to understand how someone else might perceive writing/clues. It appears that Elvis brings immediate assocations of Elvis impersonators for both of the puzzle creators. But when you tell me "elvis" I think of Graceland or kung-fu and not much else. "The most fitting metaphor for the desire of human cloning" might be robotics to me, blow-up dolls to someone else. You can't build a puzzle for the general public built upon mostly subjective associations. It, by its very nature, will be unsolvable. [I'm assuming the COLIN NG=CLONING anagram to be an inside joke...as there is no humanly possible way that anyone other than DN himself would ever be able to piece that together.]

Yet, again, this is no sour grapes post. The process of solving it, the myriad of inventive interpretations that all the different people came up with was exponentially more interesting than the reveal of "C.L.O.N.E." (although bonus points for the great graphic). I'm still giving a small bowling trophy to the "pesticides" guy -- back off, you haters -- since I feel he could build a credible defense of his alternate solution from the clues given.

I'm no black and white guy; as frustrating as it is, the world seems made of so many shades of gray interpretation. What is the ultimate audience of the World's Fair? Is it for super science geeks? Do you want to bring in more of the general public, albeit those with a slight science bent? Myself and a coworker are not lab rats, PhDs, or biology fellowship winners. We like science stuff, but remain fully integrated members of the rest of the non-science world. We both liked the puzzle at the beginning and then grew bored (in a small response to the "what happened to our web traffic?" post). Which might be okay, depending on who you want your audience to be.

I mean - c'mon - someone has to keep James Joyce company, right?

I'm looking forward to PFII regardless. Viva World's Fair.

Yeah - what you all said. I don't have much new to add since Jim, Alan, Harry, et al. kind of said what I wanted to say.

When I was in good ol' grad school for writing, I actually had a long talk with a smart advisor about puzzle-making (and writing in general, i guess). There is always that fine balance: make the puzzle too easy to solve, and it becomes irrelevant. Make the puzzle too esoteric or difficult and, well, it again becomes irrelevant to the larger public. There is a sweet spot, I'm sure, somewhere in there - it just depends on your target audience.

Finnegan's Wake? Maybe it IS a work of pure genius. But I'll never know because it is so boring and prickly to read that I just don't care to put in the effort. But that's me.

My two cents: That the answer to the puzzle is an anagram, after all, is kind of shaky to me because the individual clues -- what they *should* be named -- was very much up to interpretation. Kind of along Jim's reasoning, there was not a logic to it (even if it would have been hidden). One clue should be an animal's scientific name (ostraciontes); another it's generic name (cow); one is not named after the animal (birds), the subject, the foreground -- which would fit a kind of solution pattern --but the background (lawn). And so on. [I think Alan's post teases sufficiently about this].

Back to that writing your novel-puzzle making mixing of metaphors: it is always a challenge to try to step out of your own skin, your own network of associations, to try to understand how someone else might perceive writing/clues. It appears that Elvis brings immediate assocations of Elvis impersonators for both of the puzzle creators. But when you tell me "elvis" I think of Graceland or kung-fu and not much else. "The most fitting metaphor for the desire of human cloning" might be robotics to me, blow-up dolls to someone else. You can't build a puzzle for the general public built upon mostly subjective associations. It, by its very nature, will be unsolvable. [I'm assuming the COLIN NG=CLONING anagram to be an inside joke...as there is no humanly possible way that anyone other than DN himself would ever be able to piece that together.]

Yet, again, this is no sour grapes post. The process of solving it, the myriad of inventive interpretations that all the different people came up with was exponentially more interesting than the reveal of "C.L.O.N.E." (although bonus points for the great graphic). I'm still giving a small bowling trophy to the "pesticides" guy -- back off, you haters -- since I feel he could build a credible defense of his alternate solution from the clues given.

I'm no black and white guy; as frustrating as it is, the world seems made of so many shades of gray interpretation. What is the ultimate audience of the World's Fair? Is it for super science geeks? Do you want to bring in more of the general public, albeit those with a slight science bent? Myself and a coworker are not lab rats, PhDs, or biology fellowship winners. We like science stuff, but remain fully integrated members of the rest of the non-science world. We both liked the puzzle at the beginning and then grew bored (in a small response to the "what happened to our web traffic?" post). Which might be okay, depending on who you want your audience to be.

I mean - c'mon - someone has to keep James Joyce company, right?

I'm looking forward to PFII regardless. Viva World's Fair.

[sorry that long post got put up twice; a little glitch on the company network tricked me into pushing the post button twice. my bad.]

Oh, so that's it [slaps forehead ironically].

Great idea guys, it got me reading your blog, but I'm disappointed by the answer, like those above. It's true that the process was the interesting part. A few things occur to me. First, the collective brain power of people on the internet was applied to this (it was on Boingboing after all, forgive my assumption!) and noone got the 'answer'. Given the number of puzzle-literate people around, I really did expect someone to get it. Not to mention those of us who are scientists like yourselves.

However, I suspect that many of us who are scientists were looking at the clues in our usual way, coming up with hypotheses and falsifying them. I was at the time most interested in seeing how a scientifically-minded group of people would approach the answer, and trying to divine whether the crucial step would be reasoning or something else. I can now look at how I was reasoning but now with knowledge of the answer, and see how that process prevented me from getting your answer. The idea of copies did present itself after the idea of simulacra was raised. Even if I had had the hypothesis of 'clones' from the cow or novel clues (the most convincing) then I reject(ed) that idea because the other links to clones are so tenuous (birds' 'cloned' behaviour, Haekel's 'cloned' drawings, cultural 'cloning' of Elvis) in that they are not so much clones as *copies*. The whole point of cloning is to produce something that is *identical* in whatever sense you care about, e.g. in the cow's sense genetic cloning. I'll accept that the other clues (Elvis, Fish, Birds) refer to *copying*, but not that one would ever link them to 'cloning' without knowledge of the anagram. Indeed, in later hints and in your answer, you point out that the hint involved *changing* something about each clue. While that is reminiscent of genes (imperfect copying), it puts me right off the track of *clones*, for the very reason that they are not now identical.

I did at one point write down all the words I could think of for each clue, and put them all on one page. To get the answer from that, I would have had to find all the acrostics, and narrow it down to 5-letter ones. If one accepts that the word 'clone' is both the answer, and is necessary to confirm that one has the 'correct' answer, then it would have been impossible before the last clue was given to solve this. But I digress. Even had I picked out the word 'clone' as one of many possible acrostics, I believe I would still have rejected it as so much in the clues pointed to 'change' being important rather than constancy. A copy is not a clone, and I'm surprised that a geneticist would use them as logically the same thing, given the importance of that difference in nature! :P

It was certainly fun though :)

One more point about 'copies' and 'clones'. It's clear that even organisms produced by somatic nuclear transfer are not identical at the organismal level, (the calico cats come to mind, as do the 'natural clones' identical twins) and presumably they diverge at the genetic level also through subsequent mutation in the resultant organism itself. Environmental, including epigenetic factors mean that there is no such thing as a perfect 'clone' of an organism in nature. In that sense, I suppose, one could conflate a clone with a copy. However, if the answer is 'clone' but not 'copy' (Cow, Ostraciontidae, Presley, Yearlong-sighted bird?!) then something in the clues should suggest strict identity over mere similarity.

I had similar thoughts to Dave, probably having nothing to do with the fact we have the same name! To me, a clue is additional information to assist in solving the puzzle, although the puzzle is solvable without it. In this case there really was no way to solve the puzzle until all the "clues" were revealed. In that sense, they were not actually clues at all, but pieces of an irreducibly complex whole.

In addition, a good puzzle to my mind means the payoff is worth the effort in solution. That when the solution is revealed (for those of us unable to solve it) there's that "DOH, of course, that has to be the solution!" moment. Here, it was more like a "Oh, O.K., that makes sense I guess.", moment.

Still, a worthwhile diversion and interesting to watch the many minds at work.

Just so you know I'm not completely full of it in my post above, I managed to find the scrap of paper on which I made some notes after you posted your final hint. I had in fact got to the stage of trying to find a 5 letter anagram from five keywords. Unfortunately, I had 1.5 letters wrong (as you can see, I thought 'Nets' instead of 'Lawn' and 'Fish' instead of 'Ostraciidae':

http://img365.imageshack.us/img365/7697/scan001001asw7.jpg

Now what interests me is the process, and what stopped me from getting the answer you gave. Clearly, had I spent longer than about 10 minutes on that day pursuing this I might have come up with "CFONE" instead of "CBFNE". A reread of the comments on all the posts might have suggested 'lawn' as another potential word. So near, and yet so far. My conclusion and future strategy? Don't get distracted :)

Yikes! I also was hoping for a "shortest distance between two points is a straight line" type of answer rather than a "CowBirdFishBedKing=CBFBK" type of answer. But, I guess we can all accept this one.

At any rate, wasn't the journey supposed to be more fun (it was fun!) than the destination...

No, the destination should be just as great as the journey! And the journey was a ton of fun, but I have to agree with the criticisms of the solution. However, I'm still excited about the next one. Think of how much our novice puzzle masters have learned in this effort. Can't wait to see the next one!

.
very disappointed
not at all an 'aha' moment
many other constructions equally plausible
like mine posted previously
.
. . .
.
a royal flush?
.
A > Ace of Spades > the death card > the pox

K > Elvis > the king

Q > cow > the dairy queen

J > jack > a common reef fish > the Jack of Spades is one-eyed, like this fish

10 > a flock of black birds, like the flock of black spots on the 10 of Spades
.

Ok, so it wasn't an "Aha!" moment, but it was a relief to know that, in all my reasoning, ultimately I was over-intellectualizing the whole of the puzzle when the answer was so simplistic. I don't feel like a big dummy for not having guessed the answer, I'm just glad to have had the opportunity to exercise my brain and then to have gained insight into myself and the inner workings of my own mind.