The world's longest cryptic crossword clue - puzzle #1

Posted today on the "Cryptic Crossword Society" Facebook Group.

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Anand Manikutty

3 mins

Okay, I am going to make a play for the world's longest crossword clue.

1 Ac. No idea, no idea, no idea, no idea, no idea, no idea, no idea, no idea, no idea, no idea, no idea, no idea, <repeated a million times> (3,1,4).

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Ganesh Nayak NOT A CLUE

Like · Reply · 2 mins

Anand Manikutty Once I reveal the answer, or someone solves it, it will be easy to see - at least for those familiar with mathematics - that this clue can be made as long as you want. In fact, it has cardinality equal to aleph-naught.

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Anand Manikutty Yes.

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I was asked some questions on the "Cryptic Crossword Society" page. I will answer those questions here.

Q1. How is it the longest clue?

Ans. The clue has two million words in it. Therefore, it is the world's longest clue. It breaks all previous records for the world's longest crossword clue.

Q2. You can count 'a million times' literally and what is the purpose of repetition?

Ans. The question is ambiguous. In case people have any questions about this clue, the clue reads as follows:

 1 Ac. No idea, no idea, no idea, no idea, no idea, ... , no idea (3, 1, 4)

 The phrase "no idea" is repeated a million times. The purpose of the choice of words in a clue can be anything. I can think of at least two different reasons for repetition. Can you?

Q3. Is there a limit to the number of times the phrase "no idea" can be repeated?

Ans. No. In the way I have formulated the clue, there is no limit. That is why I said that the clue can be made as long as you want. Its cardinality in the following form is aleph-naught:

1 Ac. No idea, no idea, ..., <infinite times> (3,1,4)

Q4. Is this the longest crossword clue possible?

Ans. Yes. A crossword clue must consist of a sentence. A sentence must have the following grammar:

S => W S

S => W .

Therefore, a sentence cannot have cardinality greater than aleph-naught. This clue has cardinality aleph-naught. Therefore, this is the longest crossword clue possible.

By the way, this constitutes a mathematical proof that this is the world's longest crossword clue.

Update (7:35 pm): Another question just came in.
Q5. Just 'no idea' means "Not a clue". What is the purpose of repetition?

Ans. This clue needs to be "read properly". I will supply here the reading of the clue. Note that like poetry, it is assumed that a cryptic crossword clue must be "interpreted" or "read properly". I will supply the reading below.

The clue is in two parts.

The first part is the phrase "No idea". This clues the final answer "Not a clue". The second part is the rest of the clue "no idea, no idea, ..., no idea". This part is -not- a clue. It is just a long sentence. At least, this is the case in our first reading (call this Reading R1) of this clue. This yields the answer "Not a clue". Thus, the phrase "Not a clue" is clued in two different ways. This satisfies the requirements for a cryptic crossword clue.

There is another neat thing about the clue. The pragmatics of the English language are such that "Not a clue" is a more emphatic phrase than the phrase "No idea". So, as a whole, the repetitions make it sound like somebody is emphasizing the phrase "No idea". This leads us also to the answer "Not a clue".

Q6. What if I don't agree with your interpretation?

Ans. Just like poets are given poetic license, so are setters of cryptic crossword puzzles given license. Even if you don't agree with an interpretation, you must try and see how that reading may be reasonable.

Q7. You said you also set the world's largest crossword puzzle. Can you link to the world's largest crossword puzzle?

Ans. Yes. Since this clue itself is infinitely long, there is no point in going in the other dimension. A two dimension crossword puzzle can never be of cardinality greater than aleph-naught. Therefore, as a mathematician, I stop here. This is the world's largest crossword puzzle as well.

There is a certain beauty in keeping things compact. So, in the interest of compactness, I present to you below the world's largest crossword puzzle in compact notation.

CROSSWORD PUZZLE

1 Ac. No idea, no idea, no idea, <repeated a million times> (3, 1, 4)

[ | | | | | | | ]

SOLUTION:

[ N | O | T | A | C | L | U  | E ]

Q8. Give me a proof that the above crossword puzzle (the puzzle in Q7) is of the same cardinality as a crossword puzzle infinite in two dimensions.

Ans. This question is left as an exercise for the reader.
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INNOVATION: Spin designers

Via MIT News:

Computers are basically machines that process information in the form of electronic zeros and ones. But two MIT professors of materials science and engineering are trying to change that. 

Caroline Ross and Geoffrey Beach are members of the Center for Spintronic Materials, Interfaces, and Novel Architectures (C-SPIN), a University of Minnesota-led team of 32 professors (and over 100 graduate students and postdocs) from 18 universities trying to restructure computers from the bottom up. C-SPIN researchers want to use the “spin” of electrons on nanomagnets — rather than electric charge — to encode zeros and ones. If they are successful, the computers of 2025 could be 10 times faster than today’s computers, while using only 1 percent of their energy.

INNOVATION: Doing more with less: Steering a quantum path to improved internet security

Via EurekaAlert.org:

Research conducted at Griffith University in Queensland, Australia, may lead to greatly improved security of information transfer over the internet. 

In a paper published in the online journal Nature Communications, physicists from Griffith's Centre for Quantum Dynamics demonstrate the potential for "quantum steering" to be used to enhance data security over long distances, discourage hackers and eavesdroppers and resolve issues of trust with communication devices. 

"Quantum physics promises the possibility of absolutely secure information transfer, where your credit card details or other personal data sent over the internet could be completely isolated from hackers," says project leader Professor Geoff Pryde.

ECONOMICS: Should foreigners be charged more?

Should foreigners be charged more?

That is a sign from either the Mysore Zoo or the Somnathpur temple in Mysore. It may well be some other place. It doesn't matter. This practice of charging foreigners more is commonplace all over India. At virtually every major tourist attraction, you see something like this. The question is : is it fair to charge foreigners more? I used to feel differently about this. It seemed to me, at one point, grossly unfair. But I have now made my peace with it. It is just a case of price discrimination.

Price discrimination is used in a variety of industrial sectors. (For example: you pay a lot more for cellphones than people in other countries, e.g. India.) This particular instance seems to be a form of subsidy to Indian nationals, which seems okay. As I was saying, there is price discrimination going on in many other tourist attractions as well. And why is that? Because it is more costly for the government to go after someone who does deface monuments and other tourist structures if he is a foreigner. Why not pass the cost along to the consumer? It is annoying, yes, but I think it is because it is so in-your-face. It is not because it is inherently unfair.

Even in the United States, there is virtually the exact same phenomenon going on with out-of-state tuition rates. Out-of-state tuition rates are often ridiculously high. And then, these higher rates are used to subsidize people who are from the state. This is not unfair. It is just the economics of the matter. It is just the way the cookie crumbles.

Acknowledgements: picture courtesy Bhaskaran Raman (modulo some minor photoshopping).

Our very own Krishnan Shankar on Three Quarks Daily!

Research from our very own Krishnan Shankar is now on Three Quarks Daily. Check it out!

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The mathematics of the everyday is often surprisingly deep and difficult. John Conway famously uses the departmental lounge of the Princeton mathematics department as his office. He claims to spend his days playing games and doing nothing with whomever happens to be in the lounge, but his conversations about seemingly mundane questions has led to no end of delightful and deep mathematics. Chatting with math folks about the everyday can quickly lead to undiscovered country.


A much loved tradition among any group of mathematicians is talking math in the department lounge at afternoon tea. Nearly every department has such a tea. Some are once a week, some every day. There may or may not be cookies. What is certain, though, is that everyone from the retired emeriti to undergraduate students are welcome to stop by for a revitalizing beverage and a chat. More often than not it leads to talk about interesting math. You can begin to imagine why John Conway hangs out in the Princeton math lounge and Alfréd Rényi joked "A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems" [1].

You might think the conversation swirls around the work of the latest winners of the Abel prize or folks trying to impress by describing the deep results of their morning's efforts. There is some of that. But just as often the conversation turns into an energetic discussion about the mathematics of the everyday. Several years ago I was involved in a heated discussion about whether or not the election laws of the State of Georgia could allow for a certain local election to become caught in an endless loop of runoff votes. The local media's description of the electoral rules seemed to allow this absurdity. Of course the argument could easily be resolved with a quick Google search, but where's the fun in that? A search was done, but not until all possible scenarios were thoroughly thrashed out and a nickel wagered.

My colleagues, Kimball Martin and Ravi Shankar, asked themselves an innocuous tea-time question: "How often should you clean your room?" Easy to ask, the question is surprisingly difficult to solve. In math problems come in three flavors: so easy as to be not very interesting, so hard as to be unsolvable, and the sweet spot in the middle where the questions are both interesting and solvable. When to clean your room turns out to be a question of the third kind.

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The Stockholm Public Library

- See more at: http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2015/06/how-often-should-you-clean-your-room.html#sthash.9o54Xfyr.dpuf

TECHNOLOGY: The W3C and OGC pledge to ease the path for developing location-enriched Web data

Via Computer World:

From ordering pizza online to pinpointing the exact location of a breaking news story, an overwhelming portion of data on the Web has geographic elements. Yet for Web developers, wrangling the most value from geospatial information remains an arduous task. 

Now the standards body for the Web has partnered with the standards body for geographic information systems (GIS) to help make better use of the Web for sharing geospatial data. 

Both the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) have launched working groups devoted to the task. They are pledging to closely coordinate their activities and publish joint recommendations.

TECHNOLOGY: Columbia Engineering Team Finds Thousands of Secret Keys in Android Apps

From Engineering.columbia.edu:

In a paper presented—and awarded the prestigious Ken Sevcik Outstanding Student Paper Award—at the ACM SIGMETRICS conference on June 18, Jason Nieh, professor of computer science at Columbia Engineering, and PhD candidate Nicolas Viennot reported that they have discovered a crucial security problem in Google Play, the official Android app store where millions of users of Android, the most popular mobile platform, get their apps. 

“Google Play has more than one million apps and over 50 billion app downloads, but no one reviews what gets put into Google Play—anyone can get a $25 account and upload whatever they want. Very little is known about what’s there at an aggregate level,” says Nieh, who is also a member of the University’s Institute for Data Sciences and Engineering’s Cybersecurity Center. “Given the huge popularity of Google Play and the potential risks to millions of users, we thought it was important to take a close look at Google Play content.” 

Nieh and Viennot’s paper is the first to make a large-scale measurement of the huge Google Play marketplace. To do this, they developed PlayDrone, a tool that uses various hacking techniques to circumvent Google security to successfully download Google Play apps and recover their sources. PlayDrone scales by simply adding more servers and is fast enough to crawl Google Play on a daily basis, downloading more than 1.1 million Android apps and decompiling over 880,000 free applications.