Hi, no Matt Gaffney crossword this week or next… it’s MIT Mystery Hunt week! I’m off to Boston for my third Hunt. I’m solving with Luck Luck Goose. If you’re there too (and not on my team), come find me and say hi. I will probably have a nametag with “Veep” on it, or get in touch electronically (email, comment here, twitter, etc) if you can’t find me.
I tried and failed to solve “Confession” from the 2008 Hunt for this post. I’m just not the right kind of nerd to get enough of the needed identifications. But I wanted to post, so here’s a quick one Jonathan and I solved together.
The puzzle is here: http://www.asmadigames.com/groza528/sekkrets/legion.php (Careful, the main page of the hunt there exposes all the answers to all the puzzles). The answer checker there works, but the one here at this post should work too.
Jonathan and I solved it in 14 minutes, and our log is after the cut.
Log:
- 0:00:00
- opening puzzle
- 0:00:13
- wow, that’s a long string of characters
- 0:00:38
- J: sir I bear a rhyme is a famous pi mnemonic
- 0:01:16
- 205 chars
- 0:01:19
- J: PI is around letter 30, probably not important
- 0:01:40
- J: Do we get PI to 205 digits? maybe do a casear shift?
- 0:02:14
- J: VERY …
- 0:02:43
- (Shifting by digit of pi)
- 0:03:07
- J: There’s gotta be a way to do this easily in excel or something.
- 0:08:46
- my spreadsheet-fu is failing, writing perl [perl script output follows next]
- 0:13:11
- VERY WELL DONEITSEEMSYOUUNDERSTAND
- THEDEVICEOFTHISPUZZLEQUITEWELLNOWTHEN
- THEMETHODOFFINDINGTHEEXACTSOLUTIONIS
- CHILDSPLAYYOUVEDONETHEDIFFICULTPART
- ALREADYALLTHATREMAINSISTOSUBMITTHE
- LONGESTWORDFOUNDINTHISPARAGRAPH [line breaks added after the fact]
- 0:13:33
- J: PARAGRAPH?
- 0:13:41
- J: UNDERSTAND
- 0:14:00
- correct!
