Potlines (solution)
by Kai Huang
First, you need to figure out what domain this puzzle is from. The main clue here is the title “Potlines”, which is obviously a parody of “Plotlines” from MIT Mystery Hunt 2011. The word “pot” has a few different meanings, but sooner or later you should figure out that these might be diagrams of cooking recipes.
Following the instructions in the puzzle, you should be able to verify that indeed these are referring to recipes. Looking up cooking sites on Google, the top ranked site is allrecipes.com, which is “all” the reference you’ll need, at least so it claims. Furthermore, the site has recipes categorized into “collections”. You should be able to correspond the given collection codes to the “Courses” collections on the site: AS = Appetizers and Snacks, B = Bread, BB = Breakfast and Brunch, D = Desserts (not Drinks in this case), MD = Main Dish, S = Salad, SD = Side Dish, and SSC = Soups, Stews and Chili. This provides verification that you’re on the right track.
The instructions say to only consider the “top score” from each collection, which is slightly tricky. Each collection of recipes has a “Top 20” list, and you have to realize that this is what the instructions are talking about. (The word “score” means 20 in this case, as in “Four score and seven years ago”.)
There are 8 potlines and 8 collections represented, so a reasonable guess is that each potline maps to one collection, and in this case that is what happens. Within each Top 20 list, you should be able to find one recipe that corresponds to one of the given potlines. The exceptions are the collections “Bread” and “Breakfast and Brunch”, which have such high overlap that the two recipes used in the puzzle both appear in both collections. Thus, we have notes in the puzzle to disambiguate the collection mappings for these two recipes.
Here are some rules for interpreting the potlines:
- The x-axis is time.
- The lines are the ingredients (separated at the start, and later combined).
- Colored rectangles are things that the ingredients are put into. They’re all marked with the initial(s) of their names.
- The color of the rectangle denotes whether the item is designed for heating (red), cooling (blue), or neither specifically (green).
The potlines are listed in alphabetical order by recipe name. The hope is that you would conjecture this ordering after identifying a couple of them, and thus have an easier time finding the remaining recipes.
To extract the final answer, you need to reorder the recipes alphabetically by collection name (or equivalently, by the order of the list of collection codes given in the puzzle) and then use the number given with each potline to index into the letters of the recipe name. This produces one letter per recipe.
The following table lists the correct recipes as well as the extracted letters, in alphabetical order by collection name/code.
| Plotline | Recipe name | Collection | Given index | Letter |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 8th | Sugar Coated Pecans | Appetizers and Snacks (AS) | 10 | E |
| 5th | Fluffy Pancakes | Bread (B) | 9 | N |
| 4th | Downeast Maine Pumpkin Bread | Breakfast and Brunch (BB) | 8 | T |
| 3rd | Double Layer Pumpkin Cheesecake | Desserts (D) | 17 | I |
| 2nd | Baby Back Ribs | Main Dish (MD) | 7 | C |
| 7th | Strawberry Spinach Salad I | Salad (S) | 13 | I |
| 1st | Awesome Sausage, Apple and Cranberry Stuffing | Side Dish (SD) | 21 | N |
| 6th | Italian Sausage Soup | Soups, Stews and Chili (SSC) | 13 | G |
The final answer is ENTICING.