Struggled with this for about two hours Friday Morning (damn time-stamped leaderboard)… came back to it Friday night and it finally clicked in. One of the metas I missed in the past was one where I just needed to stay focused on the theme entries. That was good advice for this one as well.
(I’m solving CISRA Puzzle Hunt this week, so this is probably the only post for another couple days….)
The crossword is at Matt’s site and my solving log is after the jump.
Jumped right to the right idea, which was nice.
Quick log is below, puzzle is here
Another puzzle where Jonathan came along near the end of the 24 hours and just solved it. Another puzzle where things that were *clearly* part of the important information weren’t (or as in this case they might have been, but were not critical and we never understood them). So, yeah, not much fun for me.
The puzzle and hints are linked here: http://www.ms.unimelb.edu.au/~mums/puzzlehunt/puzzles.html and our solving log is after the cut.
A nice Gaffney again this week, right up my alley as far as subject matter.
Definitely easier than the “Week 1” puzzle last week…. and I had some fun (for me) riffs on the answer at the end.
Puzzle is at http://xwordcontest.com/2012/09/mgwcc-224-friday-september-14th-2012-head-games.html and my log is after the cut.
The hardest Week One MGWCC I’ve seen, and an interesting “lateral thinking” solving path. I was really worried I was not going to get it.
There are always lots of things to explore in the grid, but because I knew Matt thought of it as a week one, it wasn’t going to be something like “decode the numbered squares (as base 26 digits) using VBR MP3 and listen to the result”. And I didn’t see anything for a long time (for a week one.)
Finally, the breakthrough came, and it was a nice meta, even if the connection wasn’t as obvious as Matt had thought.
Find it here if you haven’t solved it, and give it a try (the answer checker above this post should work): http://xwordcontest.com/2012/09/mgwcc-223-saturday-september-8th-2012-digital-audio.html
Okay, whew, round 3 was behind us. It was exhausting, but it was time to get serious. We knew average solving time was the tie breaker, so every minute on every puzzle counts, and with there just being two of us, we knew we had to power through…
So, let’s see… our first solve was Composition A which only took us 21… hours? WTF? Let’s go to the solving log, I guess. Oh, we mostly focused on other puzzles. This one wasn’t too tough, at least for Jonathan. I’m not sure I would have gotten it, but he swooped in to save us.
So, this was a 23 hour solve, basically. This puzzle did not suit us. Too much extra data maybe. Too big a leap at the end? Too much reliance on source material we’d never seen? I don’t know.
This is a long mostly fruitless discussion, that was honestly kind of unpleasant to revisit. But almost the whole mess of our solving log is after the cut.
3.2 Adventure
Like the Ticket To Ride logic puzzle, text adventure-based puzzles are a thing I shy away from. I’ve had experiences (in Mystery Hunt, which seems to have no limit on tedious effort in puzzles) of too much bookkeeping, not enough solving.
This was a small adventure, so my fears were triggered but unfounded. We were pretty slow on this, but it’s ok… we were way slower on 3.3, coming soon.
Our log for this is in lots of places, including in our 3.4 chat as well as gtalk… Let’s see what’s in the 3.4 log. I’ll just combine the posts here.
3.4 The Beatletters
This is a fine puzzle that I recommend solving if you haven’t seen it. We did okay on a hectic night (I believe Jonathan was continuing to plan for that weekend’s DASH, but he swooped in and got the key observation.)
The puzzles are at the MUMS site and our solving log for 3.4 (with parts of 3.2 intermingled) is after the jump. The answer checker above will have 3.4’s answer.
So, pretty straightforward puzzle, since it’s an Only Connect board. We stumbled around for too long. We got the sets. We solved from there… third team to solve it even though it felt slow…
Puzzle is (currently) still online as a live JS app at the MUMS site and our log is after the cut.
Without checking the solving log, I’m pretty sure this puzzle was a beast. I work very hard on logic puzzles trying to prove every step instead of just trying things and adjusting, because the latter never works well for me. However, I tend to make bad assumptions in my proofs, and then I’m toast.
Remember how we were first on 2.2? We were 23rd on this one, marking the early end of of our being in contention on average time.
The puzzle’s here and it’s pretty good. It’s not super quick, but it’s worth solving if you haven’t. Our log is after the jump.