2957: A Crossword Puzzle

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A Crossword Puzzle

Title text: Hint: If you ever encounter this puzzle in a crossword app, just [term for someone with a competitive and high-achieving personality].

Explanation

This explanation may be incomplete or incorrect: CreAAAAAAAAted by AAAAAAAAAA BOT - Please change this comment when editing this page. Do NOT delete this tag too soon. If you can address this issue, please edit the page! Thanks.

• 1 across. Famous pvt. wilhelm quote: Reference to the Wilhelm scream.
• 41 across. Macaulay Culkin's review of aftershave: Famously in the movie Home Alone he puts it on because he's home all alone and dislikes it, emitting a scream, which could be transcribed like A's.
• 36 across. I.e. "open up".
• 1 down. AaAaAA!!! – A Reckless Disregard for Gravity - notably the title is commonly extended in promotional material beyond 6 A's.

Transcript

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Discussion

compare https://www.buttersafe.com/2011/02/17/crosswords/ --162.158.158.236 20:50, 10 July 2024 (UTC)

randall has now updated the header for this comic to "Today's comic accidentally inspired by this Buttersafe comic from 2011!" and i feel bad for having spotted the similarity and commented on it within 1 minute of this page's creation --162.158.62.248 03:48, 11 July 2024 (UTC) (same anon as above)

I have made this trivia about it and updated the Header text with this comics new one. This will ave to be updated after Fridays comic comes out. --Kynde (talk) 12:06, 11 July 2024 (UTC)

it's *A* crossword puzzle for a reason ;) -- 21:05, 10 July 2024 (UTC)

I suspect that that reason is that someone will inevitably compare the information content of solving this crossword puzzle to the information content of narrating 1190. 172.70.35.21 01:25, 11 July 2024 (UTC) I didn't sign. Was that rude? I'm new here, is it ok if I just ask questions?

i’m trying to table-ify it but i keep getting edit conflicted. 172.71.30.93 21:24, 10 July 2024 (UTC)

Surprised something like "Jagged and loose Hawaiian lava flow (2)" couldn't be fit in (unless I've missed it). Maybe because there were no two-letter answers at all, of course. (I think... Again, maybe I'm missing them.) 172.70.86.38 21:30, 10 July 2024 (UTC)

In most standard American crossword puzzles, two-letter answers are not allowed; the minimum answer length is 3. However, judging from the quality of the fill in this grid, Randall might have considered an answer such as "Two jagged and loose Hawaiian lava flows next to each other (4)" for AAAA. --172.69.58.128 03:04, 12 July 2024 (UTC)

unfortunate that "antepenultimate track of They Might Be Giants' Glean" did not make it in --172.70.230.200 21:35, 10 July 2024 (UTC)

And where is "Fonzie's catch-phrase"? Or does that end with a Y? Barmar (talk) 23:02, 10 July 2024 (UTC)

Did I use the calculator wrong, or 12356631 in base 26 equals 111111, not AAAAAA? 172.69.90.180 22:33, 10 July 2024 (UTC)

anyone using base 26 is probably likely to be using all 26 letters, instead of ten numbers and sixteen letters. contextless, i would usually assume any base has standard decimal digits, but liberties have already been taken here so why not (please sign)

I wasn’t sure enough to comment, but it looks like he miscalculated. 26^5 + 26^4 + 26^3 + 26^2 + 26^1 + 26^0 = 12355631 = 111111 in base 26. To be AAAAAA it would have to be 123556310. Of course, maybe he’s using A through Z instead of the expected 0 through 9 followed by letters A through P, the way hexadecimal is. 172.70.210.52 23:16, 10 July 2024 (UTC)

If he’s using the letters A through Z as the ‘digits’ for base 26, then he’s still wrong, because A would be 0, Z would be 25 and 12355631 decimal would be BBBBBB in that base 26. 172.70.210.235 00:54, 11 July 2024 (UTC)

I've often seen the digits for base 10 expressed as 1234567890 - perhaps he did similar in his system and Z is 0. 172.71.194.44 (talk) 17:27, 15 July 2024 (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

It's possibly just a typo and the clue was meant to be 123556310. TimeLurker (talk) 15:21, 13 July 2024 (UTC)

The "Qalculate" program has a number base setting called "Bijective base 26", which outputs the answer as "AAAAAA_B26. Fabian42 (talk) 01:23, 11 July 2024 (UTC)

I'm surprised he didn't make this interactive, so you could type into all the cells to fill out the crossword. Barmar (talk) 23:02, 10 July 2024 (UTC)

I made and discarded various theories what the joke might be while I read through the questions, including all numbers, at least two possible solutions for the entire puzzle (I think that happened once in a newspaper), unknowable answers, … Only when I got to the "disregard for gravity" thing did I suspect the right answer and only because I once saw a meta gaming Stack exchange question about its tag. Otherwise it might have taken me until the Morse code question. This was really well hidden! Fabian42 (talk) 01:23, 11 July 2024 (UTC)

i dare not think about how long this took to make. youtu.be/miLcaqq2Zpk 01:31, 11 July 2024 (UTC)

In all honesty, this is probably easier to make than a regular crossword puzzle. 172.69.3.146 05:48, 11 July 2024 (UTC)

https://crosshare.org/crosswords/2YcIAgtQCMBK6clsrNK4/mini-39-literally-screaming 172.71.146.4 02:29, 11 July 2024 (UTC)

It's traditionally doctors that ask you to "say AAAAAAA" when they examine your throat. I'm pretty sure 36 across is supposed to be a joke about how dentists make smalltalk with their fingers in your mouth. 172.70.126.10 04:24, 11 July 2024 (UTC)

I filled in the answers. Can someone add the solved image? I don't have file upload permissions. https://i.imgur.com/AlDIT1p.png --Elfakyn (talk) 06:47, 11 July 2024 (UTC)

We need someone to make a picture where it has been solved... :-) --Kynde (talk) 10:15, 11 July 2024 (UTC)

It seems useful (and funny) to supply the answer(s). Should we show the completed puzzle (which raises questions of font choice) or add a column to the table? My preference would be adding the column. -- Dtgriscom (talk) 11:01, 11 July 2024 (UTC)

The two above comments was made after Elfakyn's post. I have moved them both here. And then I have downloaded the image and added it to the trivia segment of the explanation. Thanks Elfakyn. I will credit you, please change the credit if you wish to be credited otherwise or not at all. --Kynde (talk) 12:13, 11 July 2024 (UTC)

bro tried to nerd-snipe us 😭 172.69.194.96 07:30, 11 July 2024 (UTC)

People without aphantasia can visualize words in front of them to solve puzzles like 18-across? That's quite impressive, I have to painstakingly count the letters in my head! Maplestrip (talk) 08:05, 11 July 2024 (UTC)

Some people. It's not an all-or-nothing - you can have access to some sorts of visualisation but not others, and it may be clearer or vaguer from person to person.141.101.98.118 07:45, 12 July 2024 (UTC)

Every third letter in 'aphantasia' is 'hti'.172.70.162.18 08:17, 11 July 2024 (UTC)

The clue is written like EveR... to give that hint, that it starts on the first letter. Also if you need 4 letters startign on the first and ending on the last is the only way to get a 4 letter answer out of it. --Lupo (talk) 12:12, 11 July 2024 (UTC)

What?172.69.195.230 15:02, 11 July 2024 (UTC)

Oh - now I'm looking at the comic itself I see what you mean. I was just looking at the explanation before, which was lacking the emphasis - I've put it in now. Still a bit lame as a clue IMO though.172.70.163.120 15:08, 11 July 2024 (UTC)

The Ruby Rhod one is misleading; his actual catchphrase in the movie is "green", which fits perfectly in the given space. -Nyerguds (talk) 09:22, 11 July 2024 (UTC)

SHA256 can be cracked much faster than 100 tries/sec. See this performance discussion from 10 years ago, which found that a single thread could do 9068K hashes per second. Recalculating the time for [A-Z]{8}, we find that it would take around 6.4 hours to crack. Still a while, but a far cry from 66 years. Using any form of parallelism (GPU, multicore CPU) would reduce the time further. --199.111.224.109 16:37, 11 July 2024 (UTC)

As nobody is doing it this, it's an entirely theoretical speed. And you can rather envisage something happening at a rate of "a hundred a second" for years better than "more than nine million a second" for hours, and thus what it would mean to do something at this rate for this long (or as long as necessary). Though, traditionally, it would perhaps be "one a second" for approximately 6,600 years, I think I rather like the '66 years' value, aesthetically, so one full test every hundredth of a second seems to be nicely demonstrative.

And going, needlessly, through them at the rate which 'solves' the problem in 6.5 hours doesn't so much impress upon you the difficulty of the task as much as it does the speed one can attempt such a classicly time-consuming problem. Even if you then add the overhead needed to check/collate all the collisions you get along the way. Every time you hit a 'possible', you'd probably do at least a disk-IO to keep a record of it, as you couldn't be sure that you won't have untold number of right-looking but incorrect results and at some poine you probably need to sanity-check and rank what you have in order of most to least likely. 172.70.90.122 17:34, 11 July 2024 (UTC)

I haven't thought about Dejobaan Games in a very, very long time. Such a shame Drop That Beat Like an Ugly Baby never finished, the whole "play rhythm games to your own music" niche never seemed to have gotten off the ground. Still, what a throwback. --172.69.22.57 19:32, 11 July 2024 (UTC)

Randall should know that a 1.5V storage device is a cell, not a battery. HughNo (talk) 19:46, 11 July 2024 (UTC)

It's a battery consisting of a single cell.141.101.98.225 07:50, 12 July 2024 (UTC)

There are multiple opportunities for a rebus in here. Are we sure the answers are correct? I believe the first cell of 8D could be a rebus of great length...--172.70.100.92 21:35, 11 July 2024 (UTC)

I'm really tempted to write a program to find out if there's another answer to "string whose SHA-256 hash ends '…689510285e212385'". —megan ^talk/_contribs 03:36, 12 July 2024 (UTC)

For bonus nerd-points, also find out all the other alternate answers that slot across that different answer (and down over the alternate acrosses, and...). For all we know, the whole grid might have a valid entirely different solution, but we're feeling so smug for solving it all the 'wrong' way, diverted by fiendishly multivalent clues... ;) 172.70.90.98 11:03, 12 July 2024 (UTC)

Eh? 172.70.90.129 (talk) 07:37, 12 July 2024 (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

I wonder if the black squares could be a pattern for Conway's Game of life... —Potiron^talk 08:58, 12 July 2024(UTC)

It doesn't look interesting. - CipherGuide (talk) 12:38, 12 July 2024 (UTC)

There are exactly 60 clues, by the way, although I’m not sure where it would be useful to include that information. Usb-rave (talk) 14:53, 12 July 2024 (UTC)

If there had been 65 (or U+0041) clues, that would have been worth mentioning it. Do you know any character encoding where A is encoded as the number 60? 162.158.203.68 (talk) 20:30, 23 July 2024 (please sign your comments with ~~~~)