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        riddles >> what happened >> ABW II – The sports page
        
(Message started by: BNC on Jan 25th, 2005, 2:43pm)
Title: ABW II – The sports page
Post by BNC on Jan 25th, 2005, 2:43pm
OK, it’s time for the second (actually it’s the third in my book, but the second is already on the site) case of Asimov’s black widowers (ABW). I find this story to be devilishly difficult… on the other hand, in the afterward section, Asimov tell us that he got a solution he feels is superior to his own. that solution, unlike the original one, did not involve numbers.


The black widowers guest this time is Mr. Pentili, who retired a few years ago from some intelligence service. He presents ABW with a problem from many years back, which was never solved to his satisfaction.  The story took place in 1961 – just prior to the Bay of Pigs unfortunate incident. The way the Bay of Pigs is presented, it was an intelligence problem that didn’t realize just how strong Castro’s hold on his people was… and as an indirect result led to the Vietnam war.

About half a year before the Bay of Pigs, an operative who had been planted in Cuba (a double agent) was back in Washington with reports he had been unable to radio out. This guy, Stepan, was an earnest man, rather humorless, who went about his task with a conscious dedication. He was determined to learn idiomatic English and to speak it with a general American accent. He was therefore a faithful listener to news programs – for the sanitized pronunciations of men like Walter Cronkite. To develop his vocabulary, Stepan worked at crossword puzzles, with indifferent success, and was very fond of Scrabble, at which he usually lost.  Stepan never achieved his aim fully. He retained his Russian accent, and his vocabulary was never as unlimited as he would have liked it to be.

Stepan arrived from Cuba in September 1960. The agency felt he has important information to convey. Through very indirect means, they arranged a meeting with him at a hotel room; but when the agency man arrived at the hotel room, Stepan was dead – knifed. And so, they never learned what he had to say.

According to the signs in the room, even after he was knifed, Stepan tried to pass the message – just the essential core of his message. He was knifed while standing, and thus was not killed outright. After the murderer had to leave, he managed to drag himself to the table, trying to write a message, but the pen was dry. Probably feeling he was about to die, Stepan resorted to another communication means. They had several pre-set messages, for which they had numerical codes. All one had to do was send the message number (2 or 3-digit numbers) to convey the entire message. On he table, at the time of the knifing, was the Washington Post, folded as it had been when bought few hours before. Stepan unfolded the newspaper to the sports page. He then lifted the top of the box of Scrabble set, removed the board, and managed to take out five letters, which he put in the wooden holder for the purpose. Then he died. The letters were ‘e’, ‘p’, ‘o’, ‘c’, and ‘k’.

The question: what number was Stepan trying to convey?
Title: Re: ABW II – The sports page
Post by Padzok on Jan 25th, 2005, 4:21pm
Mmm, baseball batting averages are 3 digits, right?  (I'm not from US).


So he was referring to the stats, maybe.

The letters could be the initials of the players with the relevant averages ( or something   ;D )
Title: Re: ABW II – The sports page
Post by SWF on Jan 25th, 2005, 7:49pm
Scrabble letters have numbers on them to go with the point value of each letter.  For those letters I think the number would be:
13125
Title: Re: ABW II – The sports page
Post by BNC on Jan 25th, 2005, 11:14pm

on 01/25/05 at 16:21:22, Padzok wrote:
Mmm, baseball batting averages are 3 digits, right?  (I'm not from US).


So he was referring to the stats, maybe.

The letters could be the initials of the players with the relevant averages ( or something   ;D )


Nice :). But,

on April 1977, Asimov wrote:
"The trouble was, you see, that he had opened to the sports page. About the only page in the paper that could have been more littered with numbers was the financial page. How can we look at all the numbers on the sports page and select the one that was significant?"
.
.
"...That page dealt with baseball almost entirely, for the baseball season was in its last few weeks. It had baseball standings on it, the box scores of particular games, some pitching statistics."
"And was stepan knowledgeable about baseball?"
"To a limited extent..."
.
.
"Al right. If Stepan was no baseball expert, he would have to pick something simple and obvious. Batting averages are in the three digits. Maybe there was some batting average that made the headlines."
Pentili shook his head. "There were no numbers in the headlines... I assure you that nowhere on the page was there any one number that stood out from the rest."

We may safely assume the no players with those initials had relevent statistics.



on 01/25/05 at 19:49:33, SWF wrote:
Scrabble letters have numbers on them to go with the point value of each letter.  For those letters I think the number would be:
13125


That actually never came up  :o
However,

on April 1977, Asimov wrote:
"...It has to be very simple... I suspect he could no longer see the tiny symbols on the newspaper page. He regnized the sports page as a whole, and he could still see the large letters of the Scrabble set..."

So he probably couldn't see the numbers... and besides, where does the sports page fits in?
Title: Re: ABW II – The sports page
Post by asterix on Jan 26th, 2005, 9:23am
Maybe he was trying to write Expos (c is Russian s) and the k refers to strikeouts. (How do you know he couldn't see the numbers anymore?)
Maybe he died before he finished writing "THE POCKET" and he had the right amount of change in his pants pocket; the sports page was just a red herring.
Maybe it's not sports that's important but newspaper section C-3 or whatever. (which could refer to the number 103)
Maybe the guy who killed him actually planted all that evidence to lead us astray and we'd be fools to believe anything that comes out of this.
Title: Re: ABW II – The sports page
Post by Padzok on Jan 26th, 2005, 2:30pm
Did he mean "epoch", not epock?

Do the numbers on the scrabble letters matter at all?

Did he get out all the letters he wanted befor he died?

If he had lived long enough would he have got a sixth letter out?  a seventh?

Were the 5 scrabble letters intended to be :

a word?
an anagram?
an acronym?

If the letters were hinting at a word solution (by whatever means) then was the word in English?

Was he giving a clue to the phonetic sound of the word, not its proper spelling?

If so, was the phonetic clue to his own pronunciation rather than to standard US English pronunciation ?
Title: Re: ABW II – The sports page
Post by Grimbal on Jan 26th, 2005, 3:10pm
The letters could all be cyrillic
 E = ye or yo
 P = r (with the tongue)
 O = o
 C = s
 K = k

I have no idea if it brings anywhere.  But given the insistance on the fact that he never got rid of his mother-tongue...


[edit] ee -> ye [/edit]
Title: Re: ABW II – The sports page
Post by BNC on Jan 26th, 2005, 3:31pm

on 01/26/05 at 09:23:02, asterix wrote:
Maybe he was trying to write Expos (c is Russian s) and the k refers to strikeouts.
Maybe he died before he finished writing "THE POCKET" and he had the right amount of change in his pants pocket; the sports page was just a red herring.

Asimov made it quite clear that the five letters are all Stepan intended to use.

on April 1977, Asimov wrote:
 Rubin said, "He could still have been incomplete, though. He may have given up on the sports page altogether, started fresh, and intended to take out those five letters plus a 't,' rearranging the whole to spell 'pocket'. There may have been something in his pocket that carried the message..."
 "There wasn't," interupted Pentili curtly.
 "It may have been removed after the knifing and he was too far gobe to realize it."
 "That's a second order conjecture. You assume an additional 't' and then a pocket-picking as well to accout for it. Unlikely!"
 "Might 'pocket' have been a code word?" said Rubin.
 "No!" Pentili waved his hand left and right, palm outward, in a gesture of impatience. "Gentlemen, it is amusing to listen to your conjectures but you are moving in the wrong direction. Habit has a firm hold even at the moment of death. Stepan was a neat person, and when death came he had his hand on the top of the Scrabble box and was clearly making an effort to replace it. There is no question in my mind that he had taken out all the tiles he was going to. We have those five letters, no more."



Quote:
(How do you know he couldn't see the numbers anymore?)

I don't. But Asimov clearly did  ;).


Quote:
Maybe it's not sports that's important but newspaper section C-3 or whatever. (which could refer to the number 103)




on April 1977, Asimov wrote:
 Avalon said, "...It may have been the number of the page that counted."
 "First thought! However, it was page 32, and 32 stood for 'Cancel previous message.' There was no previous message, and that was not it."



Quote:
Maybe the guy who killed him actually planted all that evidence to lead us astray and we'd be fools to believe anything that comes out of this.

It wouldn't be interesting then, now would it? And besides, to quote Asimov once more...

on April 1977, Asimov wrote:
"I assure you we are expert at this"

where 'we' is the inteligence service, and 'this' is restructuring the events in such cases.
Title: Re: ABW II – The sports page
Post by BNC on Jan 26th, 2005, 3:40pm

on 01/26/05 at 14:30:20, Padzok wrote:
Did he mean "epoch", not epock?


Well,

on April 1977, Asimov wrote:
 "Epock is a period of time in history, isn't it?" said Gonzalo.
 "It's a point in time," said Rubin, "marked by some significant historical event and later used as a reference, but it's spelled e-p-o-c-h. It ends with an 'h.' "
.
.
 Pentili said, with a trace of impatience, "That is not really the point. 'Epock' or 'epoch,' 'k' or 'h,' what does it mean?"




Quote:
Do the numbers on the scrabble letters matter at all?

No.


Quote:
Did he get out all the letters he wanted befor he died?

Yes. See above.


Quote:
If he had lived long enough would he have got a sixth letter out?  a seventh?

No.



Quote:
Were the 5 scrabble letters intended to be :

a word?
an anagram?
an acronym?

A word. But in Scrabble, you're always arranging and rearranging your letters -- like in anagrams.


Quote:
If the letters were hinting at a word solution (by whatever means) then was the word in English?

The word? Yes.


Quote:
Was he giving a clue to the phonetic sound of the word, not its proper spelling?

No.


Quote:
If so, was the phonetic clue to his own pronunciation rather than to standard US English pronunciation ?

Irreleant.
Title: Re: ABW II – The sports page
Post by BNC on Jan 26th, 2005, 3:45pm

on 01/26/05 at 15:10:48, Grimbal wrote:
The letters could all be cyrillic
 E = ee or yo
 P = r (with the tongue)
 O = o
 C = s
 K = k

I have no idea if it brings anywhere.  But given the insistance on the fact that he never got rid of his mother-tongue...



Almost! But you got one of them letters wrong.
Title: Re: ABW II – The sports page
Post by Padzok on Jan 26th, 2005, 4:40pm
Silly question, but - for elimination purposes - did any significant sports personality retire on this date?
Title: Re: ABW II – The sports page
Post by Icarus on Jan 26th, 2005, 8:09pm
Since Grimbal got all but one letter right, I looked for alternatives. The only possibilities that stood out to me were all for E:

I see 4 cyrillic letters that the E could stand for, identified here by sound: ye, yo, z, e (short e). In the latter two, the E would be upside down.

From the rest of the description, the letters ought to be in order (does Russian read from left to right, or from right to left?). If he attempted to put the scrabble box away, he clearly should of had time to put the tiles in the correct order.
So the word possibilities are:

yerosk
yorosk
erosk
zrosk

Nothing jumps out at me from this list, though.

So, BNC, was the E upside down?
Title: Re: ABW II – The sports page
Post by MisatoAeris on Jan 26th, 2005, 8:54pm
I really don't know much about cyrillics, but anywho...

epock-erosk
krose, skore, sroke, sreko, krose, sorke, roske

epoch-erosn
nrose, snore, srone, sreno, nrose, sorne, rosne

kcope-ksore

hcope-nsore

...yeah. That did not help. Unless snoring has anything to do with it, which I doubt very much.
Title: Re: ABW II – The sports page
Post by BNC on Jan 26th, 2005, 10:51pm
Padzok,
No, they would have seen it.

Icarus and MisatoAeris,
I don't even read Cyrillics, so I have to take Asimov's word for it...
The E was not upside-down
And none of the alternatives suggested is the one Asimov used.
Title: Re: ABW II – The sports page
Post by SWF on Jan 27th, 2005, 6:56pm
One of MisatoAeris' anagrams is 'skore'. Perhaps the number being conveyed was the sports score on the sports page.

Here is another possibility that fits the clues pretty well: Since the victim could not read the numbers on the Scrabble tiles or small print on the sports page, about all he could see would be the large heading at the top of the page: "SPORTS".  Combined with EPOCK, this is an anagram of "S. POP ROCKETS". As this was before this Bay of Pigs and the agent was Russian and stationed in Cuba, it makes sense that the imporant information he discovered had to do with the Soviet missile build up that led to the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962.
Title: Re: ABW II – The sports page
Post by Grimbal on Jan 28th, 2005, 1:42am
Sports+epock is an anagram of "prospects ok".

Maybe he wanted to tell his colleague before dying that he managed to evaluate some prospects and that they are OK.
Title: Re: ABW II – The sports page
Post by asterix on Jan 28th, 2005, 7:21am
How about COKEP as his way of spelling soccer?
Or maybe the K was the closest letter he could come to the complex Zheh. Maybe "sozher" was his way of pointing to Soldier Field?
If he couldn't read the numbers on the sports page, then maybe it refers to a number that he knew, a sports statistic, like Rose K, Pete Rose's strikeouts. (Okay, he probably wouldn't know that). Maybe Zhoe is Joe Dimaggio, his Runs? His Zhorsey (Jersey) number?
Title: Re: ABW II – The sports page
Post by BNC on Jan 28th, 2005, 8:45am
OK, Henry is definitly very inteligent, but I suspect 11-letter anagrams are beyond even his ability to figure out -- and then to back them up by other means.
Also, a complex Zheh was not a part of the solution.

I must say, though, that a remark made above is very close... ::[hide]some words have more than one meaning[/hide]::.
Title: Re: ABW II – The sports page
Post by packo on Jan 30th, 2005, 6:38pm
I was also thinking about soccer. A two digit score for a team is very unlikely and therefor probably unique in a sports page.Combined with the one-digit score of the oponents this gives the secret code? But then again, it's an american paper, so the soccer results probably will be printed rather small, redering them difficult to read for our agent.

Maybe there was a big three digit score (SKOPE) printed? When is basketball played in the US?
Title: Re: ABW II – The sports page
Post by Padzok on Jan 31st, 2005, 2:08pm
did he mean epoch = time?

Must have been loads of times on the page, though?

Don't suppose it was a clue to Time Magazine?


Also, epoch = age.

Must have been lots of ages on the page, too though   :-/

Don't suppose the newspaper's age appears on (only the) sports page  (est.  1800 or whatever..)
Title: Re: ABW II – The sports page
Post by Noke Lieu on Jan 31st, 2005, 4:01pm
like packo's thinking. Knowing next to nothing about american sports, maybe this (http://www.baseballlibrary.com/baseballlibrary/chronology/1960SEPTEMBER.stm) will help. Especially 12th or 19th?
Oh, the olympics were running too. Maybe the skope at basketball vs USSR  (81 57) is important.
Title: Re: ABW II – The sports page
Post by Icarus on Jan 31st, 2005, 5:11pm
BNC/Asimov has already told us that he likely could not read the small characters on the page, and that there were no large numbers on the page anywhere. Therefore, we can assume that Stefan was not trying to indicate some score. (Besides which, a solution dependent on particulars the reader is unlikely to be familiar with does not make a good mystery story. As the most prolific published author in history, Asimov knew how to write good stories.)

His clue must refer to some generic number related to baseball, or at least something expected to be seen in a headline.
Title: Re: ABW II – The sports page
Post by SWF on Jan 31st, 2005, 5:17pm
Very good, that might be it: "Soccer Score". But what soccer score would be September 1960? The 1960 Summer Olympic Games in Rome were probably going on in September. What day would have only one soccer game?  The day with the gold medal game. So maybe the number is the score of the gold medal game in the 1960 Olympics. Now, which digit comes first?  If score was 2-1 is the number 21 or 12?  Whichever one translates most closely to "Help me. I've been stabbed."

I still like the Soviet Missles answer better. I think it fits the situation very well, and don't believe the CIA would have much trouble with such a simple anagram. There are just too many ways to extract numbers from letters: values on Scrabble tiles; numbers for corresponding letters on a phone dial...  Plus how are we supposed to know what the numbers mean to verify if we  have a reasonable number.
Title: Re: ABW II – The sports page
Post by asterix on Jan 31st, 2005, 7:02pm
Quoting BNC: [hide]some words have more than one meaning[/hide] I have a hunch the Skope we're looking for is 20.
Title: Re: ABW II – The sports page
Post by BNC on Feb 1st, 2005, 2:16am
Yes!
Title: Re: ABW II – The sports page
Post by Noke Lieu on Feb 1st, 2005, 3:13pm
eh? Please explain?
Title: Re: ABW II – The sports page
Post by Icarus on Feb 1st, 2005, 3:16pm
So the sports page was a red herring? Why did he lay out the sports page when his purpose was simply to say "score"? Or did Asimov not address this?
Title: Re: ABW II – The sports page
Post by SWF on Feb 1st, 2005, 5:55pm
I can see how score=20, but also miss the relevance of the sports page. Maybe it is to give a clue that the word is score (but causing confusion in the process).

Although it is BNC's approved answer I like some of the others better.  Turns out there was a single "socer score" on September 10, 1960.  Yugoslavia defeated Denmark 3-1 for the gold medal in Olympic soccer.
Title: Re: ABW II – The sports page
Post by Padzok on Feb 1st, 2005, 6:21pm
Is that the final answer (20), or is there more?

Its clever that there is a double clue to the same result, of course.

But was there any reason not to spell the six letters of "twenty" rather than the five he did pull out?   ;)
Title: Re: ABW II – The sports page
Post by BNC on Feb 2nd, 2005, 3:02pm
Hey, don't shoot the messenger...

Don't have the time now, will reply with Asimov's full answer later.

[e]
OK, this is "later". Here is what Asimov had to say:


on April 1977, Asimov wrote:
  "Ah," said Pentili, "then it comes to Henry in the end. What does all this mean, Henry?"
  Henry, who had been remaining silently at the sideboard throughout the discussion, said, "I cannot say, sir, unless the number 20 would be of signify-"
  He was interrupted by a suddenly frowning Pentili. "Twenty! Is that a guess, Henry?"
  "Not entirely, sir. Is it significant, then?"
  "Significant? I've spent years gloomily suspecting he was trying to tell us twenty. Twenty meant 'government in firm control.' I haven't mentioned twenty in the course of the story, have I?"
  There was a chorused negative.
  "<snip>But I don't see how you get twenty out of this, Henry."
  "Why, sir, if it is true that Mr. Stepan was only moderately knowledgeable in baseball, then he would see on the sports page only what other moderately knowledgeable people would see – like myself, for instance. As Mr. Gonzalo would say, I speak from ignorance when I say that all I see on the sports page is the result of the games – the score in other words – and that brings 'twenty' rather forcibly to mind."
<Snipped section about "Fourscore and seven years ago">
  Pentili looked disappointed. "It's a clever notion, Henry, but not convincing. Too bad."
  "It becomes convincing, sir, when you realize that the Scrabble letters also signify twenty."
<snip>
  "I'm not thinking of Russian words," said Henry. "As you have said, habits are hard to break even at the point of death, and Mr. Stepan must have found himself using Russian letters…"
  "The Cyrillic alphabet," said Rubin.
  "Yes, Mr. Rubin. Now <snip> the Russian 'c' is equivalent to our 's' and the Russian 'p' is equivalent to out 'r' <snip> and the Russian 'k' is equivalent to our hard 'c' so that in our letters, 'epock' becomes 'erosc', and that can be rearranged to read 'score.' "


Now, the other solution (suggested by his readers) does not involve numbers... and it does required "some" knowledge of baseball. Note that I know next to nothing about the game, but the readers wrote to Asimov that "Any person 'moderately familiar' with baseball is <the other answer>". Care to give this a try?
[/e]
Title: Re: ABW II – The sports page
Post by BNC on Feb 3rd, 2005, 8:27am
Sorry for the double post... just wanted to let you know I entered Asimov's solution...


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