A Serving Of Spaghetti
The MIT Mystery Hunt is just a few days away, which means it’s time to sharpen your puzzle-solving skills on something that is in no way actually a puzzle. A puzzle by its nature is something purposefully constructed, often with painstaking effort so as to have the right difficulty for its intended audience. When I was part of the Mystery Hunt constructing team last year, many of the puzzles took weeks or longer to put together.
As opposed to a round of Spaghetti, which I construct by choosing five words at random from a pocket dictionary.
You’re saying to yourself, “Wait, how can a handful of random words be a puzzle?” To which I respond: It isn’t. But in the game of Spaghetti, we pretend these words are a puzzle, and then we try to solve it.
If that sounds ridiculous and impossible, you are both right and wrong. It is ridiculous. But we have seen over the years that it is not impossible — every time we run this bizarre experiment, participants point out complex patterns in the given words. Sometimes those patterns are convoluted and absurd, and there is a certain amount of fun in that. But other times what the solver discovers is so surprising and elegant it makes you wonder if the words really are chosen at random (they are).
Here are the five words for this round of Spaghetti:
VERIFY
WHITE
EMULSION
JOCULAR
SQUAT
To help you arrive at your solution, you may add a sixth word of your choosing to this list. Perhaps obviously, don’t just say “The answer is [whatever]” — you need to explain how you arrived at that answer.
Even if you can’t come up with a solution to this puzzle (and why should you, seeing as it is NOT A PUZZLE), check back on this post throughout the day, and read the submissions from other solvers. Give a thumbs-up to the solutions that you like. You can vote for as few or as many comments as you wish. The player who submits the solution that attracts the most likes will be the winner of the game.
(Pictured above: What DALL-E returns on the prompt “spaghetti puzzle.”)
19 Replies to “A Serving Of Spaghetti”
We’re missing the extra answer IRONY, which does make the meta quite easier since it does hint at one of the themes. This meta is nominally about game shows.
First, notice that each answer contains (perhaps several) two-letter element abbreviations (to make a “chain reaction”), since we’re not satisfied with just a single letter:
VERIFY = ER
WHITE = TE
EMULSION = SI
JOCULAR = CU, LA (from the flavortext we need to be greedy and take the earliest full elements, so AR is blocked by the LA)
SQUAT = AT
IRONY = IR
What part of the elements have we not used yet? That’s right, atomic numbers, fitting for “letters and numbers”. Since we’re trying to “count down”, we want to consider these numbers in reverse order:
AT (85), IR (77), ER (68), LA (57), TE (52), CU (29), SI (14)
Finally, we want to look at the differences: 8, 9, 11, 5, 23, 15, 14 (counting down to zero at the end). Aha, we can convert these differences A1Z26 to get our result at the game show: HIKE WON.
Each answer has a different length in Boggle cubes (where Qu is a single cube); write them right-justified in length order:
S QuA T
W H I T E
V E R I F Y
J O C U L A R
E M U L S I O N
Note that the author’s name (ERIC) appears as an L-tetromino crossing one of the I’s in the antepenultimate column; the two other I’s are similarly crossed by the L-tetrominoes QUITE, LION, which form WHITE LION with an initial /k/ sound. The answer is thus the White Lion with an initial /k/ sound: KIMBA.
Well, the right-justification didn’t take; let’s try padding with actual characters:
# # # # S QuA T
# # # W H I T E
# # V E R I F Y
# J O C U L A R
E M U L S I O N
There we go.
Obviously the missing answer is PLATE. By organizing the answer words into pairs, you can get pairs of answers that serve as clues for other answers:
JOCULAR WHITE = JALEEL
WHITE EMULSION = TOOTHPASTE
EMULSION PLATE = GELATIN
PLATE VERIFY = LICENSE
VERIFY SQUAT = TRAINER
By reading down the diagonal of the answers (starting at top left), you can see JOLEN. By reading the other diagonal, going up from bottom left, you can see TILTE. By adding an E and and R to the ends of those words you can get another two-word clue: JOLENE TILTER. There is one woman is famous for tilting at a woman named Jolene, and that’s our answer, DOLLY PARTON.
Adding the answer IMPROVE, each answer contains a two-letter “country code” in the first, second, or third position. One answer, JOCULAR has a code in the first and third position, but we must take the first in order to pair the answers.
1st: VERIFY (VE= VENEZUELA); JOCULAR (JO = JORDAN)
2nd: SQUAT (QA=QATAR); EMULSION (MU=MAURITIUS)
3rd: WHITE (IT=ITALY); IMPROVE (PR=PUERTO RICO).
Puerto Rico is not an independent nation currently, which is why we refer to “country codes” in air quotes.
Each country also has a 3-digit numeric code. We can sum these codes and then sum those digits:
(VENEZUELA/862) + (JORDAN/400) = 1262. 1+2+6+2 = 11
(QATAR/634) + (MAURITIUS/480) = 1114. 1+1+1+4 = 7
(ITALY/380) + (PUERTO RICO/630) = 1010. 1+0+1+0 = 2
Taking these sums as alphanumeric representations, we get KGB, fitting for a round about international espionage.
This was one of the simpler metas. Just sort the answers alphabetically
EMULSION
JOCULAR
SQUAT
VERIFY
WHITE
and read down the fourth column to understand one way to program the solution to this puzzle – LUA IT
Adding one entry from the blog title gets our full answer list for this multimedia round Tune In, Drop Out:
EMULSION
JOCULAR
SERVING
SQUAT
VERIFY
WHITE
The Tune In, Drop Out puzzle page also has six definitions given:
Act of pulling away
Sound of a pie in the face
Of the neck
Make clean
Whoosh through the air
Toadyish
OK, now you all can solve it. SPOILER below for solution:
Definitions resolve as follows:
Act of pulling away AVULSION
Sound of a pie-in-the-face SPLAT
Of the neck JUGULAR
Make clean PURIFY
Whoosh through the air WHIZZ
Toadyish SERVILE
These are all two letters off answers from our list. If you drop out the letter pair from our list and tune in the pair from the definitions, you get the replacements:
EMULSION to AVULSION – AV
SQUAT to SPLAT – PL
JOCULAR to JUGULAR – UG
VERIFY to PURIFY – PU
WHITE to WHIZZ – ZZ
SERVING to SERVILE – LE
Teams that enter AV PLUG PUZZLE into the checker will be given an AV Plug to begin the final phase of this multimedia round…
The EMU in EMULSION makes it clear we’re looking for birds — and we can see partial birds in each of the other words: plover, bobwhite, quail, lark.
(PLO)VERify
(BOB)WHITE
sQUA(IL)t
jocuLAR(K)
The added letters spell PLO BOB ILK. Googling for PLO BOB gives this recent headline as one of its top hits: “Is PLO’s Little Bob too frightened to eat? And other news in Bird World.” At the PLO (Port Lincoln Osprey nest), both Big Bob and Little Bob, and their ilk, are OSPREYS.
A little bird told me…
The answer is OSPREYS
This meta is very meta: it refers to itself.
To solve any puzzle, you need a way in: an ENTRY point. Here, that’s easy: rearranging the clues, their last letters spell ENTRY.
___𝚆𝙷𝙸𝚃𝙴
𝙴𝙼𝚄𝙻𝚂𝙸𝙾𝙽
___𝚂𝚀𝚄𝙰𝚃
_𝙹𝙾𝙲𝚄𝙻𝙰𝚁
__𝚅𝙴𝚁𝙸𝙵𝚈
By right-justifying, we’ve created 5 columns of 5 letters. ENTRY is the rightmost one. Looking at the leftmost one, we rearrange the clues again — to spell what we’ve been looking at this whole time: CLEWS!*
* (a jocular, British way of spelling “clues.”)
_𝙹𝙾𝙲𝚄𝙻𝙰𝚁
𝙴𝙼𝚄𝙻𝚂𝙸𝙾𝙽
__𝚅𝙴𝚁𝙸𝙵𝚈
___𝚆𝙷𝙸𝚃𝙴
___𝚂𝚀𝚄𝙰𝚃
I never met a meta-meta I didn’t like.
It was mean of you not to have mentioned that the metapuzzle was titled “Three, Two, One, Look!, nor to have mentioned the sixth word BLASE, but luckily I managed to infer all of that. This is a meta all about OneLook results. Taking each of these words and replacing the first letter with ???, and sorting by commonness on OneLook, we get:
(EST)erify
(GOT)hite
(ORI)mulsion
(BIN)ocular
(KUM)quat
(AMY)lase
We’re no dummies. We know what the title is telling us. So we take each of those trigrams, replace the first letter with two ??, and OneLook gives us:
(PO)st
(FO)ot
(PE)ri
(SK)in
(DR)um
(AR)my
Taking those bigrams, rinse and repeat with a single ?, and you get:
(C)o
(C)o
(R)e
(O)k
(O)r
(O)r
Using the ordering indicated by the graphic on the meta page (which, sadly, is too complicated for me to reproduce here), we get the final answer, ROCOCO.
The last remaining answer is NORMAL.
What really clued me in on this meta was that none of the answers repeated a letter. From that, I decided to make a little chart with all of the answers based on their letters. It turns out, that we were given the answers in order, it’s just that NORMAL goes between JOCULAR and SQUAT.
This chart really needs monospaced formatting, so you can see it at this link: https://imgur.com/a/FylumY2
When you look at that chart, you can clearly see the letters of CLOWN in the chart. (Okay, the C is a little tough, but when you eliminate the Xs that go with other letters, it’s much clearer.)
The meta answer is MONOPOLY.
Each feeder answer is the anagram of a member of a canonical ordered list plus two letters:
VERIFY = ry + FIVE, the 5th Fibonacci number
WHITE = wi + THE, the 1st most common word in English
EMULSION = lu + SIMEON, the 1st of the 12 tribes of Israel as listed in Deuteronomy
JOCULAR = ju + CORAL, the 35th anniversary gift (traditional)
SQUAT = sq + TAU, the 19th letter in the Greek alphabet.
Ordering these numbers numerically gives 1-1-5-19-35. Obviously the two ones go together, so this is read as 11/5/1935, which just so happens (https://time.com/3546303/monopoly-1935/) to be the date that Parker Brothers started marketing Monopoly, a notable source of another common ordered list for puzzlers.
VERIFY
WHITE
EMULSION
JOCULAR
SQUAT
This puzzle is by definition a Make Your Own Story.
These words describe a DIY project, and the joy a successful outcome brings.
In this case, that project is making your own mayonnaise.
Which is a WHITE EMULSION.
After you have blended and seasoned it, you must VERIFY that it is edible.
Bemused when it is more delicious than you imagined, you become JOCULAR.
If you had just bought this condiment, it would most likely have come in a SQUAT jar.
Which leads us to BEST or HELLMANN’S.
But that is incomplete.
Because those have one thing in common.
A BLUE RIBBON.
Which you’ve just won for solving SPAGHETTI!
In the “Weaponry” round of the Medieval history hunt, the flavortext reads “Swordplay is well and good, but sometimes that’s not enough to protect you.” Together with the sixth answer ATREUS, we see that what we really want is S-wordplay. In each answer, one letter can be changed to S, but that’s not enough; a second letter must also be changed (possibly to another S) to make a new word:
VERIFY becomes SERIFS – V/Y becomes S/S
WHITE becomes WHIPS (out of the possibilities for this one, we choose WHIPS to be thematic) – E/T becomes S/P
EMULSION becomes EMISSION – L/U becomes S/I
JOCULAR becomes SECULAR – J/O becomes S/E
SQUAT becomes SKUAS – T/S becomes S/K
ATREUS becomes STRESS – A/U becomes S/S
If we arrange the answers so that their last letters spell SENTRY (as hinted by “protection”) the second new letters from the six pairs spell SPIKES, which is the additional weaponry we need.
Even with WAREHOUSE, the answers aren’t enough on their own, you need the titles as well. Each answer can correlate with a title in a cycle with EMULSION first since it’s alphabetically first.
RGB Ternary:EMULSION
Like Oil and Water:SQUAT
Crouch Potato:JOCULAR
Exuberent Comedians:VERIFY
Confirm Your Identity:WAREHOUSE
Storage Placer:WHITE
The diagonal of the puzzle titles spell RIO BIG and since the round is themed around water, the answer clearly is GRANDE.
All of the words contain an outer shell which is also a common word:
VERIFY – VERY
WHITE – WE
EMULSION – EON
JOCULAR – JAR
SQUAT – SAT
[BROOK] – BOOK
These shells can all be replaced with synonyms of the same length:
VERY – MUCH
WE – US
EON – AGE
JAR – CAN
SAT – LAY
BOOK – TOME
Taking the first letters of these synonyms gives us MUACLT, which has a single anagram, our answer:
TALCUM
The puzzle title is “EIEIO”, which leads us to look at the vowels. We see that there are no repeated vowels in the words. We can convert the presence or absence of each vowel into 5-digit binary (AEIOU), and then to letters:
VERIFY – EI – 01100 – L
WHITE – EI – 01100 – L
EMULSION – EIOU – 01111 – O
JOCULAR – AOU – 10101 – U
SQUAT – AU – 10001 – Q
Reading upwards we get the answer QUOLL, a small animal.
This solution written by ChatGPT.
1. Take the first letter of each of the five answers to form the word “VWEJS”.
2. Arrange these letters in a 5×5 grid, with “V” in the upper left corner and the other letters filling in the grid row by row.
3. The grid will contain a message written in a simple substitution cipher, where each letter of the alphabet is replaced by a different letter.
4. Using the word “VERIFY” as a clue, try to decode the message by making educated guesses about which letters correspond to which.
5. When the message is fully decoded, it will read “CONGRATULATIONS, YOU HAVE SOLVED THE PURE METAPUZZLE”.
Did your prompt mention “pure metapuzzle” or did the robot figure that out on its own?