# Making Things Difficult

An entry in Fortnightly Topic Challenge #35: Restricted Title 1.

1. ### Factoring the Time

Think fast! If you're looking for meaning, these clocks have some for you.

2. ### Keyboards are Disgusting

Gunky keyboards can malfunction; for a deep clean, some boards have keys that can be removed and put back.

1723 ths text s me takng my new keyboard for a tral run. the key s broken but can work 0422 aprge ydayv rd ip.ayw r, y-o jdaii nafrgyo ae aryd.p t.f xprt.v ydo o 0315 nlrg gppbi. ayghp iajylg chad as myp bpye ejr. ss wpyd rymbysj? r ghr 2315 eawlm vaoam? apbyw oajpfb sda! wpvavoj agwh by gph pt pttm sfosi sypfoh waj 06-11 ahı ahıücii; uhtı vtuü ha ludhrb uhti çihm md. şll ıhçuçld lhi shsrs ihh ue 1405 ifv afv. ffr f sfccfc ui si ucuocus zäfmi ii uz f z haciffa, zh rfv su yi 0212 dqyh ygf, ysdj eh sbydfi edh ty edpfr dq efypt dpd yp,

3. ### Snacktime Rules

Everyone from age 1 to age 99 should establish routines for when to eat.

No, dear. You know you only get that privilege when your age is an odd number that divides the factorial of its digit sum.
No, dear. You know you only get that privilege when your age is abundant.
No, dear. You know you only get that privilege when your age is a Mersenne prime.
No, dear. You know you only get that privilege when your age written in binary is prime when interpreted as octal.
No, dear. You know you only get that privilege when your age is a two-digit number that is divisible by the product of its two digits.
No, dear. You know you only get that privilege when your age has an odd square factor greater than one, but no odd fourth-power factors greater than one.
No, dear. You know you only get that privilege when your age is the largest number in a primitive Pythagorean triple.
No, dear. You know you only get that privilege when your age is a palindrome in binary.

4. ### Making Hash Browns

The racket would melt before it got hot enough to make hash browns. Just use a griddle.

# Making Things Difficult

No relation to the comic this time, other than the title.
If I was going to make these puzzles harder, I'd add a little something to each of them, mix them up, and I'd definitely try to get answers that were more thematic. As it is, how hard would you rank this puzzle set, in a single word of an appropriate length?

• If you have the chance, I'd love to see a making-of post for this puzzle. – GentlePurpleRain May 30 '18 at 16:11
• @GentlePurpleRain I've just added one now. Hopefully it's got the right tone. (Also, I just realized I hadn't given you the checkmark yet. Fixed!) – ManyPinkHats May 31 '18 at 21:35

This solution was a collaborative effort between several people. If you like the answer, please also upvote those answers (linked below). I have pulled everything together here so that there is one comprehensive answer.

The times on the clocks in Part 1 are all

numbers that have exactly 2 prime factors.

The "Think fast!" written on the 7th and 9th clocks indicate that we should consider those clocks in 24-hour time (as per the linked comic).

Here are the numbers I got:

$851 = 23 \times 37$
$217 = 7 \times 31$
$527 = 17 \times 31$ (rotated +225°, or $\frac58$)
$559 = 13 \times 43$
$1147 = 31 \times 37$ (rotated +90°, or $\frac14$)
$259 = 7 \times 37$ (rotated +180°, or $\frac12$)
$1739 = 37 \times 47$ (rotated +45°, or $\frac18$)
$413 = 7 \times 59$ (rotated +135°, or $\frac38$)
$1643 = 31 \times 53$ (rotated +135°, or $\frac38$)

ffao points out in their answer that

all of the factors are below 60. If we think of them as pointing at the minutes of a clock face, and then interpret that as semaphore code, we get the following:

This gives us the word NEUROLOGY

For Part 2, I will copy phenomist's excellent answer verbatim:

1723 ths text s me takng my new keyboard for a tral run. the  key s broken but  can work
Which is to say:
this text is me taking my new keyboard for a trial run. the i key is broken but i can work
Easy enough, the letter I is removed.

0422 aprge ydayv rd ip.ayw r, y-o jdaii nafrgyo ae aryd.p t.f xprt.v ydo o
Weird. Only gibberish. But the previous sentence was talking about keyboard changing.
What if we changed this from Dvorak?
0422 aroud that. oh great, ow t's chagg layouts ad aother key broke. ths s
0422 around that. oh great, now it's changing layouts and another key broke. this is
Neato. Looks like the N key broke too.

0315 nlrg gppbi. ayghp iajylg chad as myp bpye ejr. ss  wpyd rymbysj? r ghr
This happens to be Colemak, so we can replace to get:
0315 just trrbl, aothr layout xhag ad mor brok kys, dd  wrog sombody? s ths
0315 just terrible, another layout exchange and more broken keys, did i wrong somebody? is this
E key down. Next message.

2315 eawlm vaoam? apbyw oajpfb sda!  wpvavoj agwh by gph pt pttm sfosi sypfoh  waj
Workman keyboard layout...
2315 karmc balac? aothr layout swa! robably agrd th god of offc suls; should ray
2315 karmic balance? another layout swap! probably angered the god of office souls; should i pray
P key. Next!

06-11 ahı ahıücii; uhtı vtuü ha ludhrb uhti çihm md. şll ıhçuçld lhi shsrs ihh ue
The particular diacritic letters seems to suggest Turkish, and indeed this is the Turkish F-layout.
06-11 for forgvss? aohr chag of layou, aohs bsok ky. 'll robably los momum soo ad
06-11 for forgiveness? another change of layout, another(?) broken(?) key. i'll probably lose momentum soon and
The T key was removed.

*1405 ifv afv. ffr f  sfccfc ui si ucuocus zäfmi ii uz f z haciffa, zh rfv su yi *
1405 sow dow. ook o  horror as hs aragrah bcons ss ab o b udrsood, bu kow ha 's
1405 slow down. look to ? horror as this paragraph becomes ? ? to be understood, but know that ?'s
And now, the L key.
This one is the Neo layout.

At this point I realize that the numbers are actually hints for the layouts. (Yes, I identified/trial and errored all of the previous layouts.) Notably, if we take pairs of digits and interpret as A=1 Z=26 code, they give QW for QWERTY, DV for Dvorak, CO for Colemak, WO for Workman, F-K for F-Keyboard, NE for Neo. The next one is therefore BL for Blick.
0212 dqyh ygf, ysdj eh sbydfi edh ty edpfr  dq efypt  dpd yp,
0212 anos ovr. oka, hs kboard has go hawr;  an hrowg  awa ow.
0212 ? over. okay, this keyboard has gone ?; i ? throwing it away now.
Y key is down.


Now taking the keys removed at each run, we get the word INEPTLY for the answer to this part.

I did the math for Part 3.

If we take the count of the numbers that satisfy each property, we get 14-21-3-12-5-15-14-19, which in A1Z26 comes out as NUCLEONS.

Here's the solved nonogram from Part 4.

After staring at it for a while, I noticed that

it contained a bunch of letters:

These spell EUPHRATES.

### Final Solution:

noneuclideanisms points out the solution to the final puzzle:

The puzzle says that

I'd add a little something to each of them, mix them up, and I'd definitely try to get answers that were more thematic.

Each of the answers for the four parts

can be anagrammed, together with an additional letter, to make a new word that is much more relevant to that particular puzzle/comic:

Part 1: NEUROLOGY + M = NUMEROLOGY
Part 2: INEPTLY + O = LINOTYPE
Part 3: NUCLEONS + H = LUNCHEONS
Part 4: EUPHRATES + S = SUPERHEATS

Using the letters we added, we get

MOHS, which refers to the Mohs scale of mineral hardness.

how hard would you rank this puzzle set, in a single word of an appropriate length?

The letter-added solutions to the four parts have an average length of 9.25. The closest number on the Mohs scale to that is 9, which refers to CORUNDUM.

If we add an additional letter to that and anagram, we get

CORUNDUM + N = CONUNDRUM

Which this puzzle certainly is!

Part 2

1723 ths text s me takng my new keyboard for a tral run. the  key s broken but  can work
Which is to say:
this text is me taking my new keyboard for a trial run. the i key is broken but i can work
Easy enough, the letter I is removed.

0422 aprge ydayv rd ip.ayw r, y-o jdaii nafrgyo ae aryd.p t.f xprt.v ydo o
Weird. Only gibberish. But the previous sentence was talking about keyboard changing.
What if we changed this from Dvorak?
0422 aroud that. oh great, ow t's chagg layouts ad aother key broke. ths s
0422 around that. oh great, now it's changing layouts and another key broke. this is
Neato. Looks like the N key broke too.

0315 nlrg gppbi. ayghp iajylg chad as myp bpye ejr. ss  wpyd rymbysj? r ghr
This happens to be Colemak, so we can replace to get:
0315 just trrbl, aothr layout xhag ad mor brok kys, dd  wrog sombody? s ths
0315 just terrible, another layout exchange and more broken keys, did i wrong somebody? is this
E key down. Next message.

2315 eawlm vaoam? apbyw oajpfb sda!  wpvavoj agwh by gph pt pttm sfosi sypfoh  waj
Workman keyboard layout...
2315 karmc balac? aothr layout swa! robably agrd th god of offc suls; should ray
2315 karmic balance? another layout swap! probably angered the god of office souls; should i pray
P key. Next!

06-11 ahı ahıücii; uhtı vtuü ha ludhrb uhti çihm md. şll ıhçuçld lhi shsrs ihh ue
The particular diacritic letters seems to suggest Turkish, and indeed this is the Turkish F-layout.
06-11 for forgvss? aohr chag of layou, aohs bsok ky. 'll robably los momum soo ad
06-11 for forgiveness? another change of layout, another(?) broken(?) key. i'll probably lose momentum soon and
The T key was removed.

*1405 ifv afv. ffr f  sfccfc ui si ucuocus zäfmi ii uz f z haciffa, zh rfv su yi *
1405 sow dow. ook o  horror as hs aragrah bcons ss ab o b udrsood, bu kow ha 's
1405 slow down. look to ? horror as this paragraph becomes ? ? to be understood, but know that ?'s
And now, the L key.
This one is the Neo layout.

At this point I realize that the numbers are actually hints for the layouts. (Yes, I identified/trial and errored all of the previous layouts.) Notably, if we take pairs of digits and interpret as A=1 Z=26 code, they give QW for QWERTY, DV for Dvorak, CO for Colemak, WO for Workman, F-K for F-Keyboard, NE for Neo. The next one is therefore BL for Blick.
0212 dqyh ygf, ysdj eh sbydfi edh ty edpfr  dq efypt  dpd yp,
0212 anos ovr. oka, hs kboard has go hawr;  an hrowg  awa ow.
0212 ? over. okay, this keyboard has gone ?; i ? throwing it away now.
Y key is down.


Now taking the keys removed at each run, we get the word INEPTLY for the answer to this part.

• It looks like ns appear in place of ms in a number of places (and s in place of r). I'm not sure if that's a mistake in the original text, or a hint to help decode it, or a quirk of a specific keyboard layout. I think the phrases you're missing are "look on in horror", "becomes less able to be understood", "know that it's almost over", and "has gone haywire; I am throwing it". – GentlePurpleRain May 30 '18 at 14:37

Part 1, finished

From @GentlePurpleRain's answer we have that

the times are all numbers that have exactly 2 prime factors.

Furthermore, looking at the prime factorizations, we might notice that

all factors are smaller than 60, so they correspond to directions in a clock. Connecting the specified directions of the factors to the center (in the same orientation as the clock is originally) gives us flag semaphore for NEUROLOGY.

# Wrap-up: The Making Of Making Things Difficult

This is not a solution to the puzzle, but provides notes from its poser. This type of answer has been approved by the community.

Caution: This post contains lots of spoilers, right from the start.

### Inspiration

I drafted a lot of ideas for various titles in this FTC, but I really wanted to make a small metapuzzle if I could. When I saw "Making Things Difficult" as a title on the list, I latched on to that one as my metapuzzle title, and with transadditions (anagrams plus a letter) as a mechanic that provided flexibility and a possible hook back to the title.
The Mohs scale was an early idea, because I wanted to make puns about how "hard" the meta was; one trip to Wikipedia later, I had decided quickly on what would end up being the final payoff of the puzzle set. (Some puns that did not make it into the set: "scratching the surface", "on a scale from 1 to 10", several 'rock' puns. It's probably a good thing that these never came to light.)

There was originally an attempt to use transadditions of other Mohs scale minerals, but ultimately I scrapped that idea and tried the mechanic seen in the puzzle. I think I prefer the method I ended up using; it doesn't require as many answers, and it was less restrictive. (Answers that were in the original list included CANTICLE (puzzle would have referenced A Canticle for Leibowitz) and the LEFTORIUM, Ned Flanders' southpaw store from The Simpsons.)

After changing the meta mechanic, I generated new answer lists. The individual puzzles came about from looking for satisfying pairs between my generated answer lists and the FTC titles.

The mechanic from Factoring The Time was one of the first ones added to my list of possible subpuzzle ideas. To me, clocks in puzzles almost always guarantees how the final answer is extracted; the comic gave a really nice way to go from clock to numbers to clock again, on the way to the answer. (There's a joke in my puzzle hunt team about how to use clocks in different ways, so that's why this mechanic was at the top of my list.)

Keyboards are Disgusting was the last puzzle to be made. The other puzzles were all mathematics-based in some way, and I wanted to include a word/cipher puzzle somehow. The keyboard cipher puzzle was on the draft list, and I found an answer I was happy with on the list.

Snacktime Rules is directly inspired the comic and the belief that the puzzle set wouldn't be complete without a strictly mathematical puzzle.

I really like making grid deduction puzzles, and a nonogram puzzle gave a lot of flexibility for an answer. Originally, the griddle pun was just meant to play on grid and grill/grille from the comic; when I found out that one of the many alternate names for the nonogram puzzle type is 'Griddler', it was just icing on the cake.

### Creative and Logistical steps

Creativity and logistics ended up somewhat intertwined, by the nature of the meta mechanic restrictions. Note that there are even more explicit spoilers in this section.

Making Things Difficult
I wrote a Python program to go through the UKACD word list and output words that, say, began with N and had a unique transaddition in the list, where the added letter was M. I filtered these later through https://nutrimatic.org and threw out any where there were other English transadditions that were more common. (The answer to Making Hash Browns has five other transadditions according to nutrimatic, but they are four capitalized names (one Greek, one Jewish, and two Indian) and one Latin scientific name.)

Factoring the Time
Logistically, I would have preferred if I didn't have to rotate any of the clocks, but unfortunately the prime positions that would spell U and O don't multiply to valid times. (e.g. 22:79) Since some of them had to be rotated, I decided to rotate a lot of them, so that it didn't seem weird/inconsistent that just a few were rotated. To distinguish between the 12-hour time and the 24-hour time, I was originally planning to use just a simple P.M. indicator, but I decided to go with the "Think fast" line from the comic instead, which was specifically used after the clock was switched from 12- to 24-hour.

Keyboards are Disgusting
xkcd has been making jokes about Dvorak for years (personal fave) There's lots of other keyboard layouts, but I tried to stick to non-QWERTY-based Latin-script keyboard layouts from the linked Wikipedia list.
By losing a letter each time, it meant that this cipher wasn't just something to dump in a cryptogram solver. I was also happy to realize how much the layout changes were going to mess with the punctuation, turning commas into letters and letters into semicolons, even as the spaces were conserved normally. The actual message wasn't written with a particular story goal in mind, but I wanted to make sure each line had the new missing letter removed from either an obvious word or from a word that is clued from the context of the previous line; each new layout starts with two words ending the sentence from the previous line. With that kept in mind, it was mostly free flow.
In an early draft, I thought about doing this with just QWERTY, Dvorak, and Colemak, and having the story involve the narrator relearning the layout as it changes each time; in this way, the cipher would be changing each time, starting with QWERTY->Dvorak, and then Dvorak->Colemak, etc. I decided that was probably more confusing than interesting, and changed the text to always use QWERTY as the basis with a greater variety of other layouts.
The numbers were a late addition; originally, I was just going to let the changes be sudden and leave the solver to figure them out. But I was worried that not having easily defined start points and end points would be discouraging for the later sentences, which still look like nonsense once properly deciphered. So I added in the A1Z26 codes for the first two letters of the name of the keyboard layout, hoping that with QWERTY and Dvorak (and possibly Colemak) as well-known, the others would be meaningfully distinguished. As it turned out, phenomist solved this section almost completely before realizing what the A1Z26 codes meant, so the first draft wouldn't have been too bad. Still think it was a good idea to add them, though.

Snacktime Rules
My only rule for making this one is to have a mix of easily recognized traits, simple but probably new calculations, and one hard calculation. By 'easily recognized traits', I mean ones that would have sequences in OEIS, like this or this. I wanted the other calculations to be just weird enough that they probably didn't have OEIS entries, and I wanted most of them to be doable by hand. (For example, 'binary palindrome' is really easy to do by hand, once you realize it's faster to work backwards by simply generating the binary palindromes in order until one is more than 99.)
The binary-to-octal one almost definitely requires a computer; there's some shortcuts that can narrow it down by hand to at most a couple dozen candidates, but finding the factors of 0o1100001=294913 is not something that I imagine has an easy shortcut. (Though looking at the answers now, I realize that if one were to assume wrongly that they only had to look at the prime numbers, they'd still have gotten the right answer; the first composite number to give a prime binary-as-octal is 115.)

Making Hash Browns
I only briefly considered trying to clue the answer pictorially in the nonogram, but that would have made the grid very large, and I'm not sure how many people would recognize the land between two rivers from a pixellated attempt to draw the rivers. So I decided on 3x5 letter shapes. At first, the letters were in the black cells and the letters were aligned, but that made the nonogram too easy, since so many of the rows/columns had a unique solution. Then I tried staggering them in a couple ways, before choosing the version seen in the puzzle. At this point, I switched which cells were shaded and which cells weren't, to make the letter shapes less obvious while solving the grid. Finally, I added some symmetric salt-and-pepper in the unused corners, since once again, the puzzle was made far too easy by having the edge rows/columns as single blocks of cells. I was using http://a.teall.info/nonogram/ to quick-check solvability at each point, and then solving myself to check difficulty/strategies.

### Resources

Most of my resources are mentioned above. Wikipedia for keyboard layouts, OEIS for parts of Snacktime Rules, my own Python code for another part of Snacktime Rules, and http://a.teall.info/nonogram/ for quick-checking nonograms. I wrote my own Python code to check the UKACD wordlists for possible answers to feed the meta, and used https://nutrimatic.org/ to check those answers.

### Evolution

This puzzle had a few typos when it first went up. In one case for Snacktime Rules, I forgot that $98<99$, and so I appended a condition to fix the answer counts. There's also some typographical errors in Keyboards are Disgusting, but luckily those didn't affect the solve majorly.

Most of the time what was running through my mind is, "Gosh, I hope this is actually as fun to solve as I think it is." My great fear is that I'll make a puzzle that I think is interesting and fun, but everyone else finds mind-numbing and tedious. Luckily, the puzzles are all pretty small, and often have a way to write a program to help with parts that might otherwise be tedious.

### Takeaway

The meta ended up being overclued, but I don't think it suffered from that in the same way that it would have really suffered from being frustratingly underclued. If I did it again, I wouldn't change this meta, but I'm definitely planning a harder one for the future.
This was my first meta posted to PSE, and I'm pretty happy with how this all went.

Meta?

In the flavortext it says

I'd add a little something to each of them, mix them up, and I'd definitely try to get answers that were more thematic.

which likely means that we should

Applying this to the puzzle answers, we get

NUEROLOGY + M = NUMEROLOGY
INEPTLY + O = LINOTYPE
NUCLEONS + H = LUNCHEONS
EUPHRATES + S = SUPERHEATS

which are definitely more thematic to the flavortexts of their corresponding puzzles.

The

Added letters spell out MOHS, possibly referring to Mohs' scale?

• _OHS -> something about MOHS hardness scale probably? – stacksfiller May 30 '18 at 3:34
• We've been talking about this in chat, and we've likely solved the meta. Not sure why nobody has edited it in yet, but [rot13] gur nafjre vf yvxryl "pbahaqehz", na nantenz-cyhf-bar bs pbahaqehz (juvpu vf n avar ba gur Zbuf fpnyr) – Deusovi May 30 '18 at 3:39
• @Deusovi I believe you mean "na nantenz-cyhf-bar bs pbehaqhz" – Leo May 30 '18 at 6:05
• @Leo My mistake! Yes, I do. – Deusovi May 30 '18 at 6:07