We started this puzzle in March 2006, and it was finished in July.
A very early postamble explains:
The French mathematician Edouard Lucas invented the game “The Tower of Hanoi” (“La Tour d’Hanoi”) in which a set of rings of different sizes must be moved from one of three pegs to another, with no ring ever being placed above a smaller ring.
Prior to offering the idea to the other Mangoers — John Guiver (Shackleton) and Roddy Forman (Radix) — I had been trying to find some way of depicting The Tower of Hanoi in a grid. I was using something like:
A B CD EF GHI JKL with three bars representing the peg. My first efforts had the three pegs along the bottom of the grid, as I thought solvers wouldn’t like them floating around, but Roddy and John quickly rejected this, so after three attempts I produced a basic carte blanche idea, also using their suggestion LA TOUR DHANOI:
The grid is symmetrical when rotated 180 degrees. Seven horizontal sequences of length 2, 4, or 6 letters must be moved (and their starting cells blanked) to another row so that half, two thirds, or all of each sequence forms the second half or all of a new word in the destination row. The starting column and row of the first cell of each sequence and the destination row are given by [3 extra letters in 7 clues? Or extra letters in 21 clues etc. Maybe try for correct case?]. After these moves, solvers must enter nine thematic bars and remove all remaining letters except those depicting a thematic phrase that has moved entirely and the creator (1,5), who remains undisturbed by the moves.
I had earlier stared at the middle set of cells for a few hours wondering how to make use of the fact that there are only ever one or two rings on that peg. I was looking for a 6-letter word that would be appropriate. In a rare moment of inspiration I saw that E (1) + LUCAS (5) = 6! I mean surprise, not factorial. This was good, especially since he is ‘unmoved’. Roddy pointed out that the evidence that Lucas was the inventor was not overwhelming, but ‘probable creator’ was deemed OK. One scheme whereby real words or abbreviations result from all moves involved this kind of thing: PAGINAL becomes PALANAL PAL + ANAL THREADEN becomes THRETOUR RET + OURS REALRCALFA becomes REALLAALFA LL + AA PALANA(L) becomes DHANOIL SIDHA + NOIL D……L becomes D..LA..L L + A (LIPOMA)ROSA(GE) becomes LIPOMATOURGE POMATO + URGE (SHAW)MU(NN) becomes SHAWLANN AWL + ANN Roddy was convinced that we could not make this work, and produced version 6 (I’ve skipped some!):
Roddy insisted that we could have real words in the grid both before and after the moves. John agreed. I doubted this could be done. I should learn not to doubt. We had some versions that had 2-letter lights, and a low average entry length, but eventually John produced version 10, which I described at the time as ‘brilliant’:
He improved on this with version 14. Many of the later versions were concerned only with the preamble and the gimmick by which we would indicate the start and destination cells of the ‘moves’. I’m not at all against the ‘extra words’ gimmick, but Mango is. We decided it would be nicely thematic if a word must be ‘moved’ to the right in certain clues. By the way, if anybody has an unused gimmick please let me bid privately before you try Ebay. By version 17, all our doubts and worries had been resolved (I hoped): In thirty-two clues (eight groups of four) a misplaced word must be moved to the right before the clue can be solved. Once the grid has been filled, three across ‘words’ must be moved from row to row in a sequence of seven moves. In each of these seven moves, the starting and finishing positions of the ‘word’ are indicated by the initial letters of misplaced words (the solver may find the eighth group of assistance too), and the source/destination cells are blanked/overwritten. Once the moves have been completed, there will be eighteen blank cells, and if these are ignored the grid will be found to contain proper words. Solvers must finally highlight six cells that spell out the probable creator of the theme, who remains unmoved throughout. John and Roddy spent a lot of time on the preamble. I pointed out that ‘thirty two’ should be hyphenated. I pull my weight, you know. We just had to write the clues then. Version 13 of the clues document met with umangomous approval. One clue that didn’t make it: Sprightly enchantress, no sign of frigidity at 32 (4) [F]AIRY F=Fahrenheit Steve Mann Chief Typist Mango
I was worried that ‘fas’ is only a proper word by the skin of its teeth (the plural of ‘fa’). Fair dos?
