Listener No 4270 Alma Mater By Oyler

[Ruthrobin]

Full marks, Oyler! Sheer joy to have a numerical Listener with a theme. I never thought I would open the thread for a numerical. This will make our Listener year!
Yippee - great fun!

[emcee]

Just found this thread after starting a new one!

I found this quite tough; headway into finding the first value was slow but the rest of the values came out reasonably easily after that.

I'm afraid I 'cheated' and didn't use modular arithmetic to solve the 'last 2 digit' clues.

Final stage was interesting!

Thanks Oyler for a decent workout

[Geber]

Greetings from an occasional lurker and first time poster.

I found this an enjoyable puzzle which had a nice, logical entry point and didn't require multiple spreadsheet tabs to solve.

The time saved from the quick(ish) solve will no doubt be cancelled out by this month's E grade Sabre.

[jim360]

The number work wasn't too bad once you found the right starting points (the preamble information helps tremendously in that regard), though took a bit longer to find the right thematic dates and their second appearance in the grid. This last step isn't necessary, perhaps, which is a pity as it ties the whole thing together. Never mind, a good exercise in logic from Oyler.

[olichant]

Good fun, and all extremely clever - I have no idea how these setters give just enough information to make the solution possible, without being a giveaway. Having said that, I did make a lucky prediction right at the outset which made things a little easier. Thanks, Oyler - really enjoyed it.

[JackDeCrow]

First ever Friday night finish for a numerical here as well, but definitely no complaints about that! Thanks Oyler.

[olichant]

I should have added - how nice to have a little wry humour in the clues - particularly the swat and the nerd, Drew and Stan.

[crosswhit99]

Thanks Oyler (I'd have been cross not to finish this today !)

[trux]

Nicely put together and excellent use of theme to tie the elements together, but, if I can do it in an hour in my office with a calculator, then even the most numericophobe should think about giving this a crack. Many thanks, Oyler, for the fun and pleasure of having something quite so approachable.

[Contrarian]

Great puzzle.

I'm afraid to say that I cheated with a few lines of code.

[Ruthrobin]

Contrarian, I suspect that your 'cheating' was the way all of us who solved quickly proceeded. Is it 'cheating' if you see a direct way to a solution and make a few correct assumptions? I know there is a lot of discussion of this but, to my mind, 'cheating' is going to the other website and saying 'I have C?A?L?T?N' for 99dn. What is the answer? (borrowed that idea from Alan Connor's 'Two Girls on One Knee' which I thoroughly recommend!) He has some interesting comments on 'cheating'. I maintain that on this thread we give ourselves the opportunity to react to a puzzle without that dull three week wait but studiously steer clear of cheating (with the rare exception - to which we quickly react and even ask for deletion).

[dr b]

I made a lucky, inspired, or perhaps obvious stab at how the numbers and letters lined up, after which the grid fill took perhaps 5 minutes. Having girded my loins for battle, metaphorically, I was thus all dressed up with nowhere to go. This left more time than I was planning to spend with the weekend's house guests.

[trux]

dr B, you obviously have less fat fingers than I do ... even with my calculator by my side and having made most of the likely stabs, I took a tad longer than 5 minutes. But then again, I'm tickled pink that I managed to complete a numerical. (My downfall this year was the Radix. What a pleasure this sort of puzzle is instead!).

[jim360]

Radix's puzzle was a beast... though apparently if you thought to actually learn how base-24 arithmetic works then it became rather a lot easier.

[olichant]

For what it is worth, I agree wholeheartedly with ruthrobin. A little focused "cheating" (in the loosest possible sense) at an early stage meant I could engage more quickly with the gridfill. By contrast, the Radix puzzle (for which I most certainly didn't brush up on base 24!) required, for me, rather more use of a bashed-up BBC.

[upsetter]

OK we admit that we used the hint on this blog to ID the alma mater, but googgle would have flushed it out sooner or later. The problem with a puzzle like this is that,either you make a careless mistake or it just grinds itself out, without requiriing any inspirational thought

[dr b]

By the way, the calculator at Wolfram Alpha will show every digit of Y^X, which is useful to confirm those clues.

[Contrarian]

Ruthrobin,

You are right, of course, that there is an important difference between taking a short cut to a solution by writing a computer program, and simply asking someone else to provide the solution. The fact is, though, all of these Listener numerical puzzles have, or ought to have, an ideal, elegant solution path that is reachable without computer assistance.
Here I took the lazy route, as I did with Radix's 'Boxes' puzzle from a few months ago, of writing a short program that just sifted through all the various possibilities to come up with the answer. The fact that this is not the ideal, intended solution path is a point in its disfavour.

[Oyler]

If a puzzle can only be solved by writing computer programs it won't be published. You only need at most a scientific calculator for this one as indeed is the case for probably all my puzzles! It seems to me that some solvers just want to solve a puzzle as quickly as possible and move on to doing something else. Try savouring them a bit!!!

[Ruthrobin]

Oyler, we solved it quickly but savoured it every bit of the way. Speed and pleasure can go together. I do hope you will give us a blog at Listen With Others.

[starwalker]

I have never been a lover of numerics, but I did enjoy the generosity if this one.
Thanks Oyler. ( Never thought that I would ever say that !)