mittesuu

Mittesuu is a term used in online puzzle communities and fan wikis to describe a heuristic for selecting a central or most consistent solution from among multiple candidate answers suggested by a set of clues. It is applied mainly in collaborative puzzle design, riddle collections, and narrative-driven games where the goal is to reconcile diverse clues into a single theme.

Etymology and origins: Mittesuu is a constructed term with no widely agreed etymology. The form combines a root implying "middle" or "mid" with a suffix borrowed from puzzle jargon. The earliest documented uses appear in informal forum posts and wiki guides in the early 2020s, and the term has spread through community glossaries since then.

Method: In practice, mittesuu is implemented by scoring each candidate answer against each clue and aggregating those scores. A simple approach counts the number of clues that support a candidate; a more analytic method uses a distance or similarity metric in a feature space related to clue content (word overlap, thematic alignment, etc.). The candidate with the smallest total distance or highest support is labeled mittesuu.

Variants and example: Some variants weight clues differently or apply mittesuu only after preliminary filtering. For example, given five clues suggesting A, B, C, C, D, the mittesuu would be C because it best aligns with the overall clue set. Critics argue that mittesuu can encourage overfitting to the present clues and obscure alternative interpretations, while supporters see it as a practical tool for coherence in puzzles. See also consensus decision making, majority rule, central tendency, puzzle design heuristics.