Invitational round | 15 points | 85.71% | Problem statement | Official solution | Tags: SemanticsPuzzle
By the end of the 9th round, the board of player 1 looks like this (cross means "hit", circle means "miss"):
We know that hitting "scribble" shrinks a rowboat, so this rowboat must be at scribble-mark. Therefore, the boat at "modify" must run from "modify" to "dry" and be a yacht. The frigate runs create-produce-print. So to sink the frigate, call "print" meaning "produce" (as opposed to as a manner of writing): "The teacher will print all exam papers". To sink the yacht, call "dry" as a verb: "The sun will dry the clothes".
Now for player 2's board:
Calling do-modify-mark sinks a frigate; calling "serenade" sinks a yacht, so the yacht is at perform-serenade; that leaves the rowboat at produce-generate.
In the advanced setup, we have a bunch of nouns. We can't necessarily construct the whole tree, but we can do as much as we can. For example, the one-noun-to-rule-them-all is obviously "entity" (the very definition of "noun"), from which we have "physical entity" and "abstract entity". Under "physical entity" we have "person" and "object". Under "abstract entity" we have "quantity", "event", and "communication". All it takes is to sort the remaining nouns under one of these buckets. The nouns with blank sentences are left out for now, because we don't know what exactly the intended meaning is.
The blanked ones are: ruler (2 meanings), play, publication (distinct from the object one), pitcher (distinct from the object one), book (distinct from the publication one).
Just take out the more general nouns and put the more concrete ones under them, and get a tree like this:
Now we look at the game record.
At the end of the game, the board looks like:
We have an aircraft carrier of length 5 and a submarine of length 3 left. The remaining hits we can use are: abstract entity, event, social event, ball (the event), (k), play (position unknown), communication (status unknown), written communication (status unknown). (I've left out "centimeter" because it's so far from everything else so it's obviously a miss.) These add up to exactly 8 hits, so they must all be hits.
abstract entity-event-social event-ball already forms a length 4 path, so the aircraft carrier should use it. However, the last hit at (k) cannot be "entity", because player 4 hit "entity" earlier, and we want the two players to have matching last hit. Therefore, the last hit must be something under "abstract entity" along this path, but we don't know what yet.
communication-written communication is a length 2 path, so the submarine should use it. "Play" is last hit for this submarine—and it kind of fits under "written communication" as a type of written work: (i) The play was written in the playwright's early years.
Now onto the board of player 4.
Here's the final board, where the only two unmarked hits are "book" and (k), and all known hits except "feast" have been accounted for:
Finally, we have a long list of unknown results that eventually sunk an aircraft carrier and a patrol boat. These two boats have total length 7, and we still have 3 known hits: "feast", "book", and (k) to use, so 4 out of the 7 unknown results were hits. The aircraft carrier can only fit if it starts from "entity" and goes down the "physical entity" branch: entity-physical entity-object-publication-book. So the book here is the ordinary "physical object" meaning: (v) The book is very heavy.1
That leaves the patrol boat to use "feast" and (k). Previously, we also known that (k) is along the path of abstract entity-event-social event-ball. How can something both touch "feast" and "ball"? It means (k) needs to be a parent of both these items and also be under "social event". The solution suggests "party": (k) Everyone had a good time at the party.
I realized that the solution separates the physical book from the abstract written "book", and the "every book by Charles Dickens" sentence is meant to refer to the abstract meaning. But even if the two meanings are conflated, the problem can still be solved. Also, the solution wants "pitcher" under "thrower", which makes sense but is again not important for solving the problem. ↩