Ignite Portland 7: "How to Solve Any Puzzle in Less Than 47 Minutes"
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Can you understand Morse Code? What if it's encoded as images instead of sounds? What if those images are cancelled postage stamps, and you have to first sort them based on their colors and the dates in each postmark? Puzzle hunts come in many shapes and sizes, but they all test players' mental agility by presenting information in unusual ways. I'll give a brief history of my involvement in this unique community, show some clues from past Games, and do a quick recap of the Portland "DASH" event which took place on September 13, 2009. MORE INFO: http://snout.org/game
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Ignite Portland 7: "How to Solve Any Puzzle in Less Than 47 Minutes"
- 1. 0 “How to Solve Any Puzzle in Less Than 47 Minutes” Curtis C. Chen Team Snout
- 3. 1 These are puzzles. Images from Wikimedia Commons
- 4. 1 This is also a puzzle. MegaHard (2000) Clue #13 provided by Jeff Stribling
- 5. 0 ???
- 6. 0 PATTERNS 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21,... 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128,... 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23,...
- 7. 1 CODES 1 = A 2 = B 3 = C ... 00001 = A 00010 = B 00011 = C ... alpha = A bravo = B charlie = C ...
- 8. 0 BACKSOLVING Are you looking for: •English words? •A location name? •GPS coordinates? •Phone number? •Padlock combination? •Quotation? •Something else?
- 9. 0 The Clue:
- 10. 1 WTF?
- 11. 1 44 stamps 16 denominations All postmarked
- 12. 0
- 14. 1
- 15. 0
- 18. 1 “The Game” Midnight Madness Shinteki Microsoft Puzzle Safari SNAP (Seattle and Nearby Adventures in Puzzling) Microsoft Intern Puzzle Day BANG (Bay Area Night Game) DASH (Different Area—Same Hunt) San Francisco Chinese New Year Treasure Hunt Ravenchase Adventures Stumptown Challenge Dr. Clue Treasure Hunts Microsoft Puzzle Hunt MIT Mystery Hunt The Go Game Washington Post Hunt Miami Herald Tropic Hunt The Da Vinci Code Quest on Google
- 20. 1 http://snout.org/game Did you solve the puzzle embedded in these slides? Tweet @teamsnout
Hinweis der Redaktion
- Hello! I’m Curtis Chen, President of Team Snout. I’ve played and organized a variety of puzzle hunt events since 1996, and today I’m going to discuss one specific type of event, called “The Game.”
- What is “The Game?” You can look it up on Wikipedia. I’d describe it as a “puzzle adventure.” If you’ve seen movies like MIDNIGHT MADNESS or NATIONAL TREASURE, it’s kind of like that, except NOT LAME.
- Let’s talk about puzzles. These are puzzles. You’ve probably seen them in newspapers, magazines, books… crossword puzzles, cryptic word puzzles, sudoku.
- This is also a puzzle. This is a “clue” from The Game called MegaHard, which took place in the SF bay area in the summer of 2000.
- What do these more traditional puzzles have in common with Game Clues? You can use the solving methods: PATTERNS, CODES, and BACKSOLVING.
- Sudoku is all about patterns—actually, one specific pattern: fit the digits 1-9 into each row and column. In The Game, you may need to recognize more complex patterns. These numerical sequences are just a few examples: Fibonacci, powers of 2, prime numbers.
- This analogy is a bit looser, but the concept is the same. To solve a crossword, you transform each hint phrase into a keyword of the specified length. In The Game, you’re usually trying to turn whatever pieces of data you have into letters which spell out a message. Some examples: number-to-letter, binary, phonetic alphabet.
- Last but not least, what I call “backsolving.” If you know what kind of a message or answer you’re looking for, you can limit your search space. For starters, is it going to be words or numbers?
- Let’s look inside that MegaHard clue…
- Every team experiences this. It’s perfectly normal to spend 5-15 minutes just staring at a clue and going “WTF?”
- A bag of 44 postage stamps. Each stamp carried a denomination, and most indicated their issue dates. There were 16 denominations represented (half-cent to 29c), each by up to 4 stamps. Each stamp was cancelled, showing either a circular postmark or straight lines.
- Group by denomination, ordered low to high, then sort within each denomination by issue dates. No row has more than 4 stamps in it.
- Here’s the data. PATTERNS!
- Now look at postmark shape (circular or linear)…
- It’s a CODE! Morse, to be precise.
- OLD DANVILLE RR STA. Note that the “S” is all dots, so ordering didn’t matter in that row.
- And that’s how you turn a pile of stamps into the next location.
- The Game is just one type of puzzle hunt event. There are tons of different formats out there.
- My wife and I ran DASH Portland in September. There may be another DASH in the spring of next year.
- See the web site for more info. If you solved the puzzle embedded in this presentation, tweet @teamsnout. Thank you!