Picture the scene.

You’ve just purchased your cinema ticket and you’re on your way into the theatre. You remember to check your seat coordinates before entering the already darkened auditorium. The moment you find yourself in the dark though, the information leaves your head. Worse, you’ve turned your phone off so the flashlight check option is gone. You have no idea where you’re supposed to sit.

What to do?

Answer: you visit the cinema with these tickets…

…a simple but, I think, elegant example of contradiction solving in action: I want to be able to read my ticket, but there’s not enough light. A problem that maps onto the Contradiction Matrix something like this:

Use a field, use an intermediary, turn something around the other way, remove something – all sound like pretty good clues. Use the light from whatever’s on the screen and remove something from the ticket.

Admittedly, I think I’d ideally like to have seen Principle 31, Porous Materials (or, more colloquially, ‘Holes’), which would have given a pretty direct jump to the holey-numbers solution. But that’s one for Matrix 2022 I think… the place where we finally – fingers-crossed – solve the contradiction that will allow us to provide readers with not just the most frequently used Principles to solve a particular conflict pair, but also the ones that give the biggest, most wow-like resolution clues.