BANG 25: A Study in Scholarship, Part One

Prologue: Eye on the Prize

A week or so before BANG 25: Back to School, I stood in Kmart's electronic division and gave Jonathan a call. I explained to him where I was and that I had found a candidate for our prize to bring to the event. "It's Guitar Hero 3 with guitar for the PS3," I told him, "only instead of being $70, they've discounted it to [BANG prize level]."

He did not believe me. I spent fifteen minutes trying to convince him that I wasn't mistaken, lying, or just confused, before he looked up the ad for it on the Internet and was finally convinced. "Go ahead and get it for the prize," he told me, "and for that price, buy me one too."

Clue Zero: We Cheat

With Rob — practically a core member now — and William joining Jonathan, Given, and me, we arrived at Stanford for the fourth time (No More Secrets, Midnight Madness, and a GC Conference were my previous visits). It was beautiful weather, a perfect day for a hunt. We gathered around Bob of Team Longshots, who I was thinking I'd met during the MSPH 123 playtest, only he was wearing a cap at the time so I wasn't sure.

As a blimp floated by overhead (and me having one of those "Wouldn't it be cool if...?" moments), the standard Reading of the Rules commenced. As the BANG's title suggested, we would be revisiting different school subjects and experiences today. We would be graded on each puzzle. The neat thing, though, was that a web app was to be used for answer submission and live team rankings. To make sure everyone was able to use it properly, we were given a trivia question, which simply wanted to know the name of the tallest mountain in North America was. None of us knew, so, feeling somewhat sheepish, we looked it up using Rob's iPhone.

Clue One: Our Decent into Hell

Our first clue was in some sculpture garden. We claimed a spot in front of a sculpture we were soon to find out was named "The Gates of Hell", pretty near to where we had reluctantly dropped off the cube a few years ago in No More Secrets.

I usually expect a kind of lightweight puzzle for the first clue, something to ease teams into the hunt. But looking over the thirty some-odd closeup B&W photos of sculptures we were given, it was pretty clear that we'd have to find out which statue went with which picture. In other words, a lot of data gathering, and just from looking at it, no clear extraction method.

So we split up the photos among the five of us and went around trying to find them. Some were pretty obvious, others seemed to take forever to find. We even had a list of names as well as all the other teams gathered around sculptures as a hint, but it again became apparent that data gathering is one of our weaknesses. There was a map, but it didn't provide enough information. After I located and labeled most of my pics, I handed them to Jonathan, and took some that others hadn't been able to find. We all repeated this process several times.

When we had about half of the sculptures named, I discussed how we were going to get an answer out of all this with Jonathan. Neither of us had any ideas, which is kind of sad for the first clue. At one point, he mentioned the somewhat odd border around the names of the sculptures. "I bet this is the key," he said. "I just have no idea how." I didn't think much of the idea, though; I had wasted many hours on some puzzles thinking that the border might be relevant and was kind of jaded.

Teams dwindled out of the large courtyard as we finally finished labeling each photo. Our location in front of the Gates of Hell began to heat up, so we moved over to a table in the shade. We still had no idea how to get an answer from all this and were beginning to feeling pretty dumb. There was no call for a hint yet, though, because we still were eligible for a speed bonus (anyone solving this clue within fifty minutes got a relative bonus). That bonus would automatically be forfeit if we did ask for a hint.

With no clear indication of what to do next, some of us started scrutinizing the sculptures for any additional data. Sculpture creator? Some had it inscribed, some didn't. Photo capturing something with a letter one it? Not really. Numbers? Well, this one has a "3/12" and another had a "7/12" on it... and there were twelve sculptures named! Maybe the number of the sculpture could indicate a letter to use? But then why did we have all these photos? But no, not every sculpture had a "x/12" on it. One sculpture was so high that it was practically impossible to view any inscriptions on it without a ladder... meaning that it was a pretty sure bet that any extra information on a sculpture was irrelevant.

Back at the shaded table, Jonathan agonized with what to do with all our discoveries. Rob suggested that maybe the dots and dashes in the border I'd dismissed earlier indicated something to do with Morse code? There was silence and I looked at Jonathan expectantly... But after a few seconds, Jonathan went on to another theory, seemingly having examined Rob's idea and discarded it.

Soon, there were only a few teams left. William grabbed some photos and went to go re-examine a few of the sculptures. A few minutes later, he came back, clearly excited. "They're in order!" he explained. "They go from top to bottom, with no overlap. And," he continued about to point out something we should have paid attention to from the beginning, "some are portrait and some are landscape."

"Portrait and landscape!" Jonathan exclaimed. "That's it!" Duh. The border around the sculpture names that I had discarded earlier as just decoration had dots and dashes... and the dots were in the shape of a portrait photo and the dashes in the shape of a landscape photo.

"Rob mentioned Morse ten minutes ago," I said to Jonathan reproachfully.

"He did?" said Jonathan, surprised. "Well... next time make sure I hear him!"

We quickly translated the photos to Morse and then to English: COOKBOOK ITEM. Jonathan put RECIPE into the web app. Finally, solved... and only then did I noticed the title of the clue was "Orientation".

Longshots was generous for the first clue, though. We were still within the bonus period and earned a few extra points for our "quick" solve.

Clue 2 - Late for Class

In our experience, sleep helps in solving puzzles. I hadn't slept well the night before and felt like my mind was in a fog. Jonathan had stopped at a friend's house on the way up from Southern CA, instead of driving all the way up to Santa Rosa and then back down to Stanford. This was supposed to afford him five hours of sleep instead of his normal three. Only thing is, this friend was having a party and Jonathan ended up only getting two hours.

Somewhat discouraged from our nearly last place solve, we headed to the next clue, hoping that at least Jonathan's and my heads would clear (Rob and William seemed to be in fine form and Given was... well, Given). We needed a moral boost. Unfortunately, we weren't going to get it here.

GC was on the first floor of some building with a lot of exterior glass. Our clue was upstairs in an actual classroom (nice touch). There, we found a bunch of arranged seats, each with a name card on it. We all wrote down the names and saw that each first name was three letters long and each last names was four letters long.

When all the data words are all the same length, it's a good indicator that a sequential index extraction is needed (i.e. the first letter of the first word, the second letter of the second word, etc.). Since each name was seven letters long, we tried that. First, we did it by row and got AIGGVNE and stopped since that was going nowhere. Then we did it by column and got ABOCNND and didn't go any further down that path either.

We then started discussing orientation, i.e. should we start indexing from the front of the classroom or the back? Were we looking at it from the teacher's perspective or the students? We tried various other theories, most of them having to do with extracting a single letter from each name somehow, but none were working. With only five minutes or so left of our bonus time, we admitted to ourselves that we were stumped. Even Jonathan agreed it was time for a hint, which is saying a lot.

Our hint gave us everything we needed to solve it. Instead of sequentially indexing by the full name, we should have been sequentially indexing only the three-letter first name when looking at it by column (since there were three columns) and only by the four-letter last name when looking at it by row (since there were four rows). This gave us ABOVE AMATEUR for the first names and FARMING TRUCK for the last names. PROTRACTOR was our answer.

We didn't feel so dumb when finally solving that. For the first puzzle, there had been a dot and dash border; I mean, how much more obvious can you get when trying to signal that Morse code was going to be used? This clue, though, was a clever offshoot of a standard puzzle type that threw us for a loop. And judging from the average grade for the clue (C+ or so), we weren't the only ones.

Clue 3 - Math vs. Geography

One nice thing about Longshot's scoring system was that it completely eliminated travel time from the equation. Points were only awarded on solve times. Which is fine by me... we're not exactly efficient at getting from one clue to another, although we have been getting better since Rob has taken on our navigator role. Regardless, it's always seemed kind of silly to me to have a contest of mental agility come down to a foot race.

Our next clue, our Math class puzzle, was a 3 by 5 grid, with most cells containing an integer. Some integers were very very large (billions) and others were... three. Some numbers were repeated and three of the corner cells were empty and shaded.

Given took one look at it and said "Prime factorization?" Seemed like as good an idea as any and we soon had them all worked out. A few alternate theories were being worked on in the background, but when all the cells with a 2 as a factor made the letter S, we knew we were nearly done. Taken in order, the factor shapes spelled out SIERRA LAKE. "Tahoe?" I put ventured. It seemed likely, but the Sierra is a long mountain range and I knew Donner Lake was up there too. And wasn't Yosemite considered part of the... "TAHOE is correct!" said Rob, looking up from his iPhone.

Okay, now it felt like we were in the right mental gear.

Continued in part two and part three.