meta 5 min?
hello, and welcome to episode #873 of matt gaffney’s weekly crossword contest, a week 4 (of 5) puzzle called “Sweet Sixteenths”. this week’s instructions asked us to find the letter that goes in the lower-rightmost square in this grid. NOTE: in order to get credit for this meta, you MUST submit a brief (one or two lines) explanation of your reasoning. okay then—this is kind of the spiritual sequel to mgwcc #94 from … *checks calendar* 15 years ago. where does the time go? anyway, what do we have for that bottom-right square?
- {It may grow off a coastline} REE_, which could be either REED or REEF.
- {Non-responsive to “Are you OK?,” in a way} DEA_, which could be DEAD or DEAF.
(for what it’s worth, REEL and DEAL also make valid words there, but not ones that can fit those clues.) so here’s the thing: i have an answer, and i have reason to believe it’s correct, or at least defensible. but i don’t have a huge click, so i might not be right, in which case i’ll have to just be okay with not being right. but i’ll talk through what i’ve got. (well, i’ll type through it, anyway.)
the title draws attention to the fact that this is a 16×16 grid, which is slightly oversized. not a big deal. there are some long(ish) answers—MONARCHIST, BALANCE DUE, EAST TRIBECA, ELECTRIC EEL—but they don’t appear to have much to do with the theme. the thing that did strike me was the weirdness of the fill in the center section of the grid, with totally unfamiliar-to-me {Dancehall great ___ Ranks} SHABBA and long partial A BRAIN and rather forced texting abbr ICIC. eventually i did notice that there were a whole bunch of B’s in that center section, and also a whole bunch of C’s.
and i think it’s more specific than this—the top quarter of the grid (rows 1-4) has many A’s (ten, to be exact), but pretty much any quarter of any american crossword grid has many A’s. the second quarter (rows 5-8) has ten B’s, and this is highly unusual. the third quarter has ten C’s, and this is also unusual (though slightly less so). the bottom quarter has nine D’s, plus the unknown square in the lower right. so i think to continue the pattern, that last square has to be another D.
so that’s my answer, but i’m not 100% satisfied with it, because it feels a little arbitrary—as i said, there’s no very satisfying click. the title does suggest the 16-ness of the grid, but we’re not doing anything with sixteenths; instead, we’re doing quarters. this is related to the 16-ness—you can’t divide a 15-high grid neatly into quarters—but only weakly. i tried breaking up the grid into 4×4 square sixteenths, but didn’t see any kind of letter distribution pattern correlating to horizontal position. and i didn’t see anything anywhere to indicate that ten was some kind of relevant number. so while i have indeed found a pattern and continued it, the pattern itself feels totally arbitrary—even a little bit more confirmation somewhere would have me quite satisfied, but i’m not seeing it.
the part that i am fairly convinced about is the preponderance of B’s and C’s—that does not happen by accident, and not without some compromises (as i mentioned above). so i’m okay with this answer, but i don’t really know what else to do or say.
well, if i missed something (entirely possible!), let me know about it in the comments.
You can label the 16 4×4 sections of the grid with 1-4 along the X-axis and A-D along the Y-axis, and each section will have exactly that many of that letter in it:
1A 2A 3A 4A
1B 2B 3B 4B
1C 2C 3C 4C
1D 2D 3D 4D
Top-left 4×4 section has 1 A in it, bottom-right 4×4 section has 4 D’s in it, etc.
oh that is much, much better than what i had. i suppose i should have thought of that—adding across the entire width of the grid got me to 10 but only because 1+2+3+4 = 10.
Did you get credit?
I was curious if I would have gotten credit for my initial thought, where I saw the column of 4s without understanding the left 3/4 of the grid.
I see joon did get credit! I was wondering if people who just noticed the ten-per-row would.
The fact that there are others of those letters elsewhere in the grid threw me off. Like, I didn’t see 10 Bs, I saw 13 Bs. So I never noticed the 10 per row thing. I realize though it would have been impossible to construct the grid without any extra of those letters.
i got credit for 10 letters per quarter
WOW. That’s wild. I saw the preponderance of Bs, Cs, and Ds, and figured D was more important than F so I figured D was the answer, but didn’t submit because I couldn’t see the real connection.
After marking the grid into 4×4 sections, there were so many crossword fill words (by themselves or spread across a black square) that I was certain I needed to do something with them. There’s ORA LBS STEN TBAR ELIA MALI DBA ELI and so many more. Certainly never saw the correct meta pattern though it’s a really good one.
An overwhelming number of As through Es (I think nearly half of the whole grid!) was my eventual in – I caught a proliferation in the last column after I realized I had to divide the grid into sixteenths.
Submitted explanation: The answer to the meta is D. Split the grid into sixteenths: 16 4-by-4 squares. The first row contains 4 squares with, going from left to right, 1, 2, 3, and then finally 4 As. The second row repeats with the letter B (1 B, 2 Bs, 3 Bs, 4 Bs), the third row repeats with three Cs (1 C, 2 Cs, 3 Cs, 4 Cs), and then finally we have the fourth row. We need 1, 2, 3, and 4 Ds, respectively. Since there are only 3 Ds so far in the last quadrant, we need 4 Ds, meaning the missing letter has to be a D (as opposed to F, the other choice, which wouldn’t work).
Great construction!