SPEAKER 1: OK, and our second puzzle of this year
was called Problematic Conundrums.
For this one we had about 1,000 correct submissions and 500 good guesses,
but not quite the correct answers.
So let me again turn it over to our friends at Meta
to lead the walk through for Problematic Conundrums.
JAMES WU: Yep, so this is Problematic Conundrums.
This puzzle was written by me.
And I hope you guys had fun with it.
To start out, when you first look at this puzzle,
the first thing that should jump out to you
is a bunch of crossword clues with fill in the blanks next to them.
The blanks gave you the length of the clue.
And your goal here should be to solve as many of these crossword clues
as you can.
We have a table here of all of the answers to them.
And you can see, like for each one this part of the puzzle
was written so that hopefully you were able to find
a good chunk of all of these answers right away,
just by thinking about what it could be.
Some of the ones, for example, a tribe called
blank is something that you could look up or know
of in terms of a hip hop group.
And as you solve a lot of these answers, you
might notice a pattern start to emerge from the answers themselves.
Specifically, if you were to put a certain set of prefixes
in front of these words, you actually get new words out of them.
Specifically here, if you look, the puzzle's name
is Problematic Conundrums.
And that's a hint towards the pro and con type of words
that we're looking for.
And the flavor text itself says something about benefits and drawbacks,
just like a list of pros and cons.
And it turns out that if you take each of the words from the first section,
and you add pro or con in front of them, you get new words.
So, for example Bing, which was a Google competitor, becomes probing.
Claimed becomes proclaimed.
Science becomes conscience, et cetera.
And so you end up creating this list of pros and cons
on each side of your list.
And you have one of each for each category.
Once you get this list, you actually now have the opportunity
to look at the second part of this puzzle,
where the second part of the puzzle consists
of much more cryptic clues that are harder
to solve from the crossword side.
And it turns out the answers to each of those consists of one of the pros
and one of the cons.
So as an example, a misunderstanding while questioning
is a probing confusion.
A suggestion, Xbox?
Could be considered a proposition console.
A partial change is a prorated conversion.
Artificial intelligence was programmed conscience.
Overpopulation perhaps, is a procreation consequence.
And declared victory is a proclaimed conquest.
So if you take each one of those, the numbers next to those clues
weren't, in fact, links, but, in fact, indices into each of the words.
You can end up with letters extracted from each of the pros and cons.
So like you take the fourth letter of probing
to get B, and the fifth letter of confusion to get U, and so on.
And after you do that, you end up with two letters from each of these,
and a total of 12 total letters, which gives you the clue phrase,
build or erect.
And this is another crossword clue that then
solves for the final answer, which is a con,
it turns out, in construct, which means to build or erect.
So that was Problematic Conundrums.