BANG 25: A Study in Scholarship, Part Two
(Part 1)
Clue Four - Handwriting Analysis
Eliminating travel time from scoring consideration had some side benefits: We could grab food and/or take care of other things before requesting the puzzle. That way our team isn't discombobulated and split up doing several different things instead of all of us working on the puzzle. Since our next clue was at a campus eatery, we went ahead and got lunch orders taken care of, then sat down as a team to solve.
The clue explained about being borrowed notes from a friend with bad handwriting. The paper contained a typewritten interpretation of those notes and it was up to us to understand them. They went along the lines of "The E is L at 0 DL" and "There are 4
C in a HH", so we needed to reconstruct the sentence with words for each capital letter. One of the more obvious ones was "9 I in a BG", which meant "9 innings in a baseball game". It was pretty fun as we worked on getting all forty-five notes deciphered; there are lots of mini-ahas and good of team solving.
The instructions said we needed to keep track of which class each note was from, and gave us a line-up of the three Tuesday and three Wednesday classes they could be from. So the nine innings one was from P.E. Four chambers in a human heart would be biology. Knowing that the equator is as at 0 degrees latitude would be geography. What would we do with that data in the end? Someone, probably me, suggested that since there were three classes in two columns, maybe it was a Braille encoding? But the lack of delineation between glyphs as well as a note in the flavortext about Tuesday being an "off day" discounted that idea. Instead, binary was noted with each solve.
Which was working pretty well, except that there seemed to be a few that we just couldn't crack. What the heck was "10 P (and 3 T) in C" anyway? So Jonathan started doing either/or checks for them to see what letters would come of it. While he was doing that, the rest of us were able to get some of the remaining. We even forced a few by looking up likely information in the almanac. Soon we had enough to realize the message was simply DO TERNARY.
Ternary is one of Jonathan's favorite encoding methods, since all twenty-six letters are represented by complete set of the first three digits. Having a puzzle solve to a message that tells us to solve it again only this time the right way, is one of my least favorite extractions.
We quickly realized that the position of a note's class in each days lineup (first, second, or third) meant to use zero for the first, one for the second, and two for the third. We still had a couple missing, but I didn't think we needed them now. We got some strange looking letters to start out with: CINWHI. So Jonathan started double-checking them, but they were legit. If this was the correct decoding method, this was the secret message GC was trying to tell us. The next two letters, CH, made it clear, though, that it was "C IN WHICH...", or basically another class note. And the city in which JFK WAS S was DALLAS. It took as about a half hour to get there. Not a superfast solve, obviously, but we still got a twenty point bonus and some important confidence from solving a tricky puzzle without every having been stuck.
And I'm not sure we ever figured out there are ten provinces and three territories in Canada.
Clue Five - Spell-checking Twitter
"Hey, we've moved up a few spaces!" said Jonathan as we walked towards our next mental challenge. It was true: We'd started in the bottom five after the first puzzle, maybe even dropped a place or two after the second, but after the previous two clues we were ranked at 15th. Those bonuses were making a difference and gave us some confidence that we could make up for our earlier blunders.
We received a page of tweets at our next location, all from, amusingly, Tweety Bird. The paper clue was well designed: It was like we were looking directly at the webpage. A Post-It was attached and directed us to look at mispellings, of
which there were plenty (it's Tweety Bird, after all). We started counting them, thinking to index in to the tweet, when Jonathan and Rob noticed that the user names of the people Tweety was tweeting at described people with birds in their names: "@gulliverwriter" was SWIFT and the @1stidol was Kelly cLARKson.
The other ones began to fall, sometimes with iPhone help. The only one I figured out was who "@isignbig" was (hanCOCK) and maybe the Walter cronKITE. The first one, @wsvp, seemed incomprehensible until someone realized that it wasn't a Tweety-ized version of RSVP, but referred to Dick cHENey. We then used the misspelling count to index into the bird names to discover HAN SOLO SHIP. Since we were using bird names, we answered simply FALCON.
Clue Six - A Sound Solve
At the Standford Oval, where about a year ago we'd been chased with giant inflatable hammers while trying to determine what had been written on giant inflatable volleyballs (see Snotfart), we found a bunch of people gathered around six white things divided into two rows and spaced a ways apart. Huh, I thought, it kind of looks like a giant Braille pattern. I wondered why so many people were gathered around some of them.
The first white thing we passed looked like a speaker wrapped in a white Glad bag, only no sound was coming out of it. We waited a bit, thinking that something eventually would come, but no. We moved on to the next one and heard a repeating loop. It was Reagan's famous "Tear down this wall" speech, although it sounded like someone was taking a shovel to the wall during the speech. If it was a Braille encoding, which seemed all but a given, using sound to transmit that was kind of a cool idea.
The next speaker had more sounds, like a dog barking and cheering that made it obvious that the cheering from the previous speaker hadn't just been about Reagan's speech, but was a separate sound altogether. "I'm thinking each sound represents a single Braille letter," said Jonathan, writing down the sounds. If that was true, it certainly explained why there had been no sound on the first speaker we'd encountered: The lower right Braille spot was rarely used.
We went through each speaker, gathering sounds. What had seemed like a neat idea was starting to become tedious. Eventually, we found our way to the one that
everyone had been gathered around before. It had tons of sounds coming out of it, which made sense, since that Braille spot would be used in all but three letters. It was difficult to decipher with twelve sounds intermingled and sometimes sounding the same. GC had kindly provided water and snacks near the speaker to aid in listening. Having a list of all of them also made us realize that we needed to revisit some of the other speakers, as Jonathan, Rob, Given, and William argued about which sounds were which. I heard, "I think this sound is really two different ones," on more than one occasion.
So we went back through all of the speakers and refined our the sound list. I say "we", but I was content to watch the rest of the team do it. I wasn't that interested in fine data delineation and besides, apparently I wasn't all that good at it. In the end, the Braille spelled out ROCK PAPER AND. We put in SCISSORS for the solve.
Clue Seven - Meta Deja Vu
I walked alongside Jonathan as we headed to our next clue. "That didn't seem all that challenging," I remarked. "Not really a puzzle at all: We all knew it was Braille from the outset and the rest was just data gathering."
"Maybe," he responded, "but we've got a lot of experience now. If it had been our first BANG, we probably would have thought it was pretty challenging puzzle and really enjoyed the Braille-as-sound aha." He considered. "Well, maybe not. Still, it was kind of a cool setup."
We arrived at our next location, grabbed a picnic table and had a quick break before retrieving our clue. It had two pages worth of trivia and fill in the blanks, so we divvied up, with one half of our team working on each page. Only after solving a few, Jonathan and I noticed something, probably due to the meta for BANG 22 that we'd written as it had used a similar mechanism to this puzzle. What we noticed was that WHEREFORE, UNTO, and SEVENTH, all had a phonetic number in them. The puzzle indicated to take one letter from the word, so we used the phonetic number to index into the word (UNTO -> N).
There were some gray boxes, though, that weren't connected to any of the trivia answers. When we had GR_NESS filled in, though, Jonathan had the great idea of putting numbers back in, and then using that number to extract a letter again. This got us more words with missing letters, so we had to do it again, until we finally got UTENSIL OR TUNING BLANK. Our answer, FORK, allowed us to move on.
Concluded in part 3.
Clue Four - Handwriting Analysis
Eliminating travel time from scoring consideration had some side benefits: We could grab food and/or take care of other things before requesting the puzzle. That way our team isn't discombobulated and split up doing several different things instead of all of us working on the puzzle. Since our next clue was at a campus eatery, we went ahead and got lunch orders taken care of, then sat down as a team to solve.
The clue explained about being borrowed notes from a friend with bad handwriting. The paper contained a typewritten interpretation of those notes and it was up to us to understand them. They went along the lines of "The E is L at 0 DL" and "There are 4
C in a HH", so we needed to reconstruct the sentence with words for each capital letter. One of the more obvious ones was "9 I in a BG", which meant "9 innings in a baseball game". It was pretty fun as we worked on getting all forty-five notes deciphered; there are lots of mini-ahas and good of team solving.The instructions said we needed to keep track of which class each note was from, and gave us a line-up of the three Tuesday and three Wednesday classes they could be from. So the nine innings one was from P.E. Four chambers in a human heart would be biology. Knowing that the equator is as at 0 degrees latitude would be geography. What would we do with that data in the end? Someone, probably me, suggested that since there were three classes in two columns, maybe it was a Braille encoding? But the lack of delineation between glyphs as well as a note in the flavortext about Tuesday being an "off day" discounted that idea. Instead, binary was noted with each solve.
Which was working pretty well, except that there seemed to be a few that we just couldn't crack. What the heck was "10 P (and 3 T) in C" anyway? So Jonathan started doing either/or checks for them to see what letters would come of it. While he was doing that, the rest of us were able to get some of the remaining. We even forced a few by looking up likely information in the almanac. Soon we had enough to realize the message was simply DO TERNARY.
Ternary is one of Jonathan's favorite encoding methods, since all twenty-six letters are represented by complete set of the first three digits. Having a puzzle solve to a message that tells us to solve it again only this time the right way, is one of my least favorite extractions.
We quickly realized that the position of a note's class in each days lineup (first, second, or third) meant to use zero for the first, one for the second, and two for the third. We still had a couple missing, but I didn't think we needed them now. We got some strange looking letters to start out with: CINWHI. So Jonathan started double-checking them, but they were legit. If this was the correct decoding method, this was the secret message GC was trying to tell us. The next two letters, CH, made it clear, though, that it was "C IN WHICH...", or basically another class note. And the city in which JFK WAS S was DALLAS. It took as about a half hour to get there. Not a superfast solve, obviously, but we still got a twenty point bonus and some important confidence from solving a tricky puzzle without every having been stuck.
And I'm not sure we ever figured out there are ten provinces and three territories in Canada.
Clue Five - Spell-checking Twitter
"Hey, we've moved up a few spaces!" said Jonathan as we walked towards our next mental challenge. It was true: We'd started in the bottom five after the first puzzle, maybe even dropped a place or two after the second, but after the previous two clues we were ranked at 15th. Those bonuses were making a difference and gave us some confidence that we could make up for our earlier blunders.
We received a page of tweets at our next location, all from, amusingly, Tweety Bird. The paper clue was well designed: It was like we were looking directly at the webpage. A Post-It was attached and directed us to look at mispellings, of
which there were plenty (it's Tweety Bird, after all). We started counting them, thinking to index in to the tweet, when Jonathan and Rob noticed that the user names of the people Tweety was tweeting at described people with birds in their names: "@gulliverwriter" was SWIFT and the @1stidol was Kelly cLARKson. The other ones began to fall, sometimes with iPhone help. The only one I figured out was who "@isignbig" was (hanCOCK) and maybe the Walter cronKITE. The first one, @wsvp, seemed incomprehensible until someone realized that it wasn't a Tweety-ized version of RSVP, but referred to Dick cHENey. We then used the misspelling count to index into the bird names to discover HAN SOLO SHIP. Since we were using bird names, we answered simply FALCON.
Clue Six - A Sound Solve
At the Standford Oval, where about a year ago we'd been chased with giant inflatable hammers while trying to determine what had been written on giant inflatable volleyballs (see Snotfart), we found a bunch of people gathered around six white things divided into two rows and spaced a ways apart. Huh, I thought, it kind of looks like a giant Braille pattern. I wondered why so many people were gathered around some of them.
The first white thing we passed looked like a speaker wrapped in a white Glad bag, only no sound was coming out of it. We waited a bit, thinking that something eventually would come, but no. We moved on to the next one and heard a repeating loop. It was Reagan's famous "Tear down this wall" speech, although it sounded like someone was taking a shovel to the wall during the speech. If it was a Braille encoding, which seemed all but a given, using sound to transmit that was kind of a cool idea.The next speaker had more sounds, like a dog barking and cheering that made it obvious that the cheering from the previous speaker hadn't just been about Reagan's speech, but was a separate sound altogether. "I'm thinking each sound represents a single Braille letter," said Jonathan, writing down the sounds. If that was true, it certainly explained why there had been no sound on the first speaker we'd encountered: The lower right Braille spot was rarely used.
We went through each speaker, gathering sounds. What had seemed like a neat idea was starting to become tedious. Eventually, we found our way to the one that
everyone had been gathered around before. It had tons of sounds coming out of it, which made sense, since that Braille spot would be used in all but three letters. It was difficult to decipher with twelve sounds intermingled and sometimes sounding the same. GC had kindly provided water and snacks near the speaker to aid in listening. Having a list of all of them also made us realize that we needed to revisit some of the other speakers, as Jonathan, Rob, Given, and William argued about which sounds were which. I heard, "I think this sound is really two different ones," on more than one occasion. So we went back through all of the speakers and refined our the sound list. I say "we", but I was content to watch the rest of the team do it. I wasn't that interested in fine data delineation and besides, apparently I wasn't all that good at it. In the end, the Braille spelled out ROCK PAPER AND. We put in SCISSORS for the solve.
Clue Seven - Meta Deja Vu
I walked alongside Jonathan as we headed to our next clue. "That didn't seem all that challenging," I remarked. "Not really a puzzle at all: We all knew it was Braille from the outset and the rest was just data gathering."
"Maybe," he responded, "but we've got a lot of experience now. If it had been our first BANG, we probably would have thought it was pretty challenging puzzle and really enjoyed the Braille-as-sound aha." He considered. "Well, maybe not. Still, it was kind of a cool setup."
We arrived at our next location, grabbed a picnic table and had a quick break before retrieving our clue. It had two pages worth of trivia and fill in the blanks, so we divvied up, with one half of our team working on each page. Only after solving a few, Jonathan and I noticed something, probably due to the meta for BANG 22 that we'd written as it had used a similar mechanism to this puzzle. What we noticed was that WHEREFORE, UNTO, and SEVENTH, all had a phonetic number in them. The puzzle indicated to take one letter from the word, so we used the phonetic number to index into the word (UNTO -> N).There were some gray boxes, though, that weren't connected to any of the trivia answers. When we had GR_NESS filled in, though, Jonathan had the great idea of putting numbers back in, and then using that number to extract a letter again. This got us more words with missing letters, so we had to do it again, until we finally got UTENSIL OR TUNING BLANK. Our answer, FORK, allowed us to move on.
Concluded in part 3.
posted by Skott at 4:23 PM
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