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Wake Up, Neo.
After about eight hours I had started to feel run down. ACRONYM Headquarters was divided into three rooms, a working room (where we solved puzzles), an anteroom (where visitors could be entertained without worrying about them seeing answers on the walls) and a sleeping room. I went into the last of these, and stretched out on a table. I wrapped my winter coat around me and closed my eyes.
It had been a hard eight hours. After a strong first round, we were starting to get worn out. I was, at least. There was still a bunch of shredded paper, there was a whole new round of puzzles that I hadn't looked at, and it was very, very, very, very, very, very cold. That last one bugged me the whole weekend. I was starting to wonder how much I could really help, and what I was doing there. Slowly, I drifted off to sleep.
I didn't stay asleep for long. I was restless. There was so much work to be done. It was cold. Also, they past eight hours had been very frenzied, compared to a very slow, relaxing, rejuvenating week in Providence. So I lay on the table with the coat over my face. I could see a faint light from outside the window, and two years away. From two rooms away, I could hear Sax's voice explaining something. I couldn't understand what it was she was saying, but it was present enough that I couldn't return to my brief, blissful slumber. It was like a splinter in my mind, bringing me back to life, toward reality. I pulled myself up, rubbed my eyes and went back to work. I was about to realize what I'd gotten myself into.
What a difference an hour makes. While I was asleep in the other room, ACRONYM had been busy. Obviously, I wasn't a witness to the happenings, but here's what I believe happened, based on what I've heard and learned since:
ACRONYM got another phone call, much like the two before it, saying that we had missed something in The Office. So the troops were rallied to examine what it was that had been missed. As I mentioned earlier, we had some loose ends hanging from Round One, even though we solved most of the puzzles. Most notably, the closest we could get to an answer for Puzzle 3 was the bigram "TH", and the closest we could get to an answer for Puzzle 7 was the bigram "LL". Hrm. Two bigrams. And we found another bigram when following a red herring in Puzzle 5. There turned out to be conspicuous bigrams in every puzzle, in order: TA KE TH ER ED PI LL. Take the red pill. Wonder[land]ful.
When that message was called in, the operator said "THAT ANSWER IS INCORRECT!" Then added, quietly, "I must be brief -- this line is tapped. Someone will be in contact with you shortly." What followed was a peculiar runaround, in which ACRONYM members were directed to computer terminals and phone locations where they were very dramatically contacted by secret agents by phone or wearing dark clothes and glasses. Eventually, they were brought to Morpheus, who informed them that something was wrong with the Hunt. "The Matrix" was, apparently, all around us. Of course, we could not be told what "The Matrix" was, we had to see it for ourselves. So we took the red pill and were informed that we had left the Matrix.
See, apparently, everything up to this point had been entirely "in the Matrix" and wasn't quite real. Now, in addition to being employees of Acme within the Matrix, we were agents of VILE without. The assassinated president of Acme had apparently also been a VILE agent and had been killed because he had learned something important about the AIs running the Matrix. To follow the trail he left, we had to continue solving the puzzles in the Matrix, we also had to solve the Training puzzles that would help us to understand the Matrix, and we had to solve the Reality puzzles that represented the Desert of the Real, and provided a complex landscape of the futuristic world beyond the Matrix.
The practical outcome of all this was that at about 9 o'clock, we had twenty-two more puzzles that had to be solved, in addition to the ones from Rounds Two and Three that we hadn't finished. It was at about this point that all Hell broke loose. Actually, there wasn't all that much Hell to break loose, but what there was, did. No longer would we be able to count on the simple beauty of the "Wall of" system of organization. Signing off on puzzles was dropped. With so many puzzles, things started to blur, and continued to be blurry for about two days. My narrative ceases to be strictly chronological at this point, since most things went on so quickly.
All of this got explained to me by Sax and others as I woke myself up. I looked around to see what had been going on. Progress had been made on Round Two. The Shredded Paper Puzzle had been finished and confirmed. It looked something like this. (This is another team's submission. ACRONYM went the extra mile and filled in those little blanks as well.) It was a pretty picture, but nobody knew what it was. It got pasted onto the Wall of Triumph where I could wonder if there was supposed to be an "M" box too. The Scavenger Hunt had been (or was about to be) finished too, just like Confusing Programming Puzzle I Didn't Pay Attention To. A Problem with Printing had also been finished by![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
davidglasser, a notable achievement for someone who is colorblind. (Ziggy's colorblindness was made clear to most everyone there, by the frequent calls of "Will somebody who's not colorblind please look at this?") So all of the Round Two puzzles had been solved, except for Stairway to Heaven. Spelvin was very upset by this, and played it several times.
Despite having seven out of eight clues, we knew that two of these answers weren't actually the answers we needed to solve the metapuzzle. To do that, we'd need to solve two of the Training Puzzles, which we did later.
Meanwhile, I was surveying the puzzles I hadn't seen in Round Three. With eleven puzzles, it was quite a doozy. Bogots had already been finished, I believe. It was a nice little puzzle, I thought, but I moved on. Ziggy was working on Stained Glass with Cazique, I believe, giving him more opportunity to talk about being colorblind. Don't Make Me Say This Twice looked to be a complicatedly coded version of Shakespeare's grave. Sax and others were working on what appeared to be an MIT-centric puzzle called Paranoia, which included the names of some MIT students and grad students. Campaign Speeches appeared to be a logic puzzle based on a game of Dungeons and Dragons. Slik jumped onto this one because of his familiarity with D&D. This puzzle was the bane of his existence for some time. Slik's problems with the puzzle also caused some problems for its creators, since Slik actually works for Wizards of the Coast and thereby carried a certain amount of authority on the subject matter. (Apparently, issues like this are not uncommon to the Hunt. A few years previous, trouble was stirred up when one player asked if an out-of-print game had been spelled with one word or two. Normally not a big deal, but more so because the player was also the inventor of the game in question.) Spelvin, angry at being unable to finish Stairway to Heaven, jumped on the next music puzzle, Titles. A few people grabbed the necessary equipment for Lost in a Maze and started working on that. Some other puzzles stayed on the Wall of Fear for a bit with nobody to work on them. There was a lot going on.
I managed to find a puzzle that hadn't been started on yet, but that I felt I could do some damage on, Unprecedented Discovery. Although the directions were obscure, on its surface it was pretty obviously an Odd Man Out puzzle. In each grouping of five, there would be four items that had a specific property and one that had a different (similar) property. For example, in the list "SHINTO, THUNDER, DRAFTER, NEVER, COUPON", four words become prepositions after removing the first two letters. The last word becomes an adverb if only one letter is removed. I had a lot of fun with this puzzle, the groupings were often very clever. I stuck with it for a while and ended up solving with a few different people. My favorite group (which, I'm proud to say, I solved) was "PRAIRIE KINGSTON SHERLOCK CAMILLA GUY". Although we eventually worked our way down to only three missing, we were stumped as to what might come next. One would often expect that the five answers in a row would combine to form a new list, but that wouldn't account for the last row, which had only three members. The flavor text talked about five repeats which might need to be returned to the list, but forty-three seemed just as unhelpful as thirty-eight. It was set aside.
Meanwhile, Paranoia had also stalled. There had been a complicated logic problem, but unraveling it didn't seem to have helped at all. Cans and Donations Gratefully Accepted had started to look more promising after a while. A little bit after Round Three began, Acme sent out a huge spam message to all teams. Har Har, a little bit more of corporate reality. But they kept resending the same message over and over again. Someone made the connection between Spam and asking for money and canned goods. More work got done on that puzzle. Jenn and Codex made the first step of slow progress on The Property of Others when they recognized that the second poem was a pastiche of "We Real Cool." The Price Is Right, however, was pegged as a Cambridge puzzle requiring business hours, so it stayed undone for a bit longer.
With Unprecedented Discovery starting to stall out, I moved on to take a good look at the Training Puzzles. These were the puzzles that needed to be solve in addition to the normal puzzles of the Rounds in order to get metapuzzle answers. In retrospect, I think that these were many of the best puzzles in the entire Hunt. Each puzzle led to an instruction, something that could be used to modify an answer, and many did so in very creative ways. Furthermore, the more direct references to The Matrix began here: all puzzles were framed as dialogues between Morpheus and Neo, and all puzzles began with Keanu's trademark "Whoa!"
The first one to be solved was Whoa--I Know Dialects!, which got taken down by Sax and someone else having a grand old time. I played around with this one later and understood why. It's a great little take on Cockney rhyming slang. ("Hooked on Gins"! BWAHAHAHAHA!) The next was, I think, Whoa--I Know Windows!. Cazique came into the room after it was finished and asked if there was anyone who really liked cryptic crosswords. If we did, he said, we should not look at the answer to this puzzle, since it was really solid. I played around with this one after the Hunt was over, and agreed. Whoa--I know Shoe-Buckling! also fell relatively quickly to people who enjoyed it. Many others were harder, some took some odd work, but most of them were pretty fun.
The one I did the most work on was another fun one: Whoa--I Know Doctoring! Spelvin and someone else started work on the first part of this puzzle, identifying the two celebrities whose faces had been photoshopped together. I added a few names, but moved on. Later, I saw a mostly complete set of celebrities on the sheet, now abandoned to the Wall of Shame. I picked it up and did what seemed logical, plugging the names into IMDB. Sure enough, each pair of celebrities had been in exactly one movie together, and the movie had a number in its title. After filling in the pairs that only had one answer, there were a few pairs that I still couldn't figure out. I pulled out the letters from the movie titles, but still couldn't make sense of an answer. Someone else (boy, I wish I could remember who) finished off those, mostly by going through a name database, and trying to think of celebrities with likely first names. Unscientific? Maybe. But it certainly got results. We quickly finished off the last of the movies and pulled out the rest of the letters. With the puzzle almost finished, we pulled a few people over to talk out the end of the puzzle. I mentioned that I saw, "GOLF HOLE" spelled out in a line on the page. Someone else noticed that there were two pairs highlighted in green and red. We quickly drew out a path with the message: "TIE THE SCORE AT A GOLF HOLE." Well, that was an answer, but it didn't quite seem like an instruction. I called it in. (Yeah, that's right, this is the first one I got to call in. There were one or two others, but this is the one I was most proud of.) Unfortunately, it was wrong. The operator did give a subtle hint by saying that he thought that seemed a bit long for an answer. I tried our alternate answer, "PAR". Also wrong. I hung up the phone, frustrated. Luckily, Cazique had been right next to the phone and hand overheard the exchange. He also happened to know that in match play golf, tying the score at a hole is called "halving." I quickly called back and very assuredly told him the answer was "HALVE". It was. Booyeah!
Boy these things are long. Next episode: Round Four, the Acme Fight Song, Acme starts to Hint, Climbing the Stairway to Heaven and the Round Two Metapuzzle.
It had been a hard eight hours. After a strong first round, we were starting to get worn out. I was, at least. There was still a bunch of shredded paper, there was a whole new round of puzzles that I hadn't looked at, and it was very, very, very, very, very, very cold. That last one bugged me the whole weekend. I was starting to wonder how much I could really help, and what I was doing there. Slowly, I drifted off to sleep.
I didn't stay asleep for long. I was restless. There was so much work to be done. It was cold. Also, they past eight hours had been very frenzied, compared to a very slow, relaxing, rejuvenating week in Providence. So I lay on the table with the coat over my face. I could see a faint light from outside the window, and two years away. From two rooms away, I could hear Sax's voice explaining something. I couldn't understand what it was she was saying, but it was present enough that I couldn't return to my brief, blissful slumber. It was like a splinter in my mind, bringing me back to life, toward reality. I pulled myself up, rubbed my eyes and went back to work. I was about to realize what I'd gotten myself into.
What a difference an hour makes. While I was asleep in the other room, ACRONYM had been busy. Obviously, I wasn't a witness to the happenings, but here's what I believe happened, based on what I've heard and learned since:
ACRONYM got another phone call, much like the two before it, saying that we had missed something in The Office. So the troops were rallied to examine what it was that had been missed. As I mentioned earlier, we had some loose ends hanging from Round One, even though we solved most of the puzzles. Most notably, the closest we could get to an answer for Puzzle 3 was the bigram "TH", and the closest we could get to an answer for Puzzle 7 was the bigram "LL". Hrm. Two bigrams. And we found another bigram when following a red herring in Puzzle 5. There turned out to be conspicuous bigrams in every puzzle, in order: TA KE TH ER ED PI LL. Take the red pill. Wonder[land]ful.
When that message was called in, the operator said "THAT ANSWER IS INCORRECT!" Then added, quietly, "I must be brief -- this line is tapped. Someone will be in contact with you shortly." What followed was a peculiar runaround, in which ACRONYM members were directed to computer terminals and phone locations where they were very dramatically contacted by secret agents by phone or wearing dark clothes and glasses. Eventually, they were brought to Morpheus, who informed them that something was wrong with the Hunt. "The Matrix" was, apparently, all around us. Of course, we could not be told what "The Matrix" was, we had to see it for ourselves. So we took the red pill and were informed that we had left the Matrix.
See, apparently, everything up to this point had been entirely "in the Matrix" and wasn't quite real. Now, in addition to being employees of Acme within the Matrix, we were agents of VILE without. The assassinated president of Acme had apparently also been a VILE agent and had been killed because he had learned something important about the AIs running the Matrix. To follow the trail he left, we had to continue solving the puzzles in the Matrix, we also had to solve the Training puzzles that would help us to understand the Matrix, and we had to solve the Reality puzzles that represented the Desert of the Real, and provided a complex landscape of the futuristic world beyond the Matrix.
The practical outcome of all this was that at about 9 o'clock, we had twenty-two more puzzles that had to be solved, in addition to the ones from Rounds Two and Three that we hadn't finished. It was at about this point that all Hell broke loose. Actually, there wasn't all that much Hell to break loose, but what there was, did. No longer would we be able to count on the simple beauty of the "Wall of" system of organization. Signing off on puzzles was dropped. With so many puzzles, things started to blur, and continued to be blurry for about two days. My narrative ceases to be strictly chronological at this point, since most things went on so quickly.
All of this got explained to me by Sax and others as I woke myself up. I looked around to see what had been going on. Progress had been made on Round Two. The Shredded Paper Puzzle had been finished and confirmed. It looked something like this. (This is another team's submission. ACRONYM went the extra mile and filled in those little blanks as well.) It was a pretty picture, but nobody knew what it was. It got pasted onto the Wall of Triumph where I could wonder if there was supposed to be an "M" box too. The Scavenger Hunt had been (or was about to be) finished too, just like Confusing Programming Puzzle I Didn't Pay Attention To. A Problem with Printing had also been finished by
davidglasser, a notable achievement for someone who is colorblind. (Ziggy's colorblindness was made clear to most everyone there, by the frequent calls of "Will somebody who's not colorblind please look at this?") So all of the Round Two puzzles had been solved, except for Stairway to Heaven. Spelvin was very upset by this, and played it several times.Despite having seven out of eight clues, we knew that two of these answers weren't actually the answers we needed to solve the metapuzzle. To do that, we'd need to solve two of the Training Puzzles, which we did later.
Meanwhile, I was surveying the puzzles I hadn't seen in Round Three. With eleven puzzles, it was quite a doozy. Bogots had already been finished, I believe. It was a nice little puzzle, I thought, but I moved on. Ziggy was working on Stained Glass with Cazique, I believe, giving him more opportunity to talk about being colorblind. Don't Make Me Say This Twice looked to be a complicatedly coded version of Shakespeare's grave. Sax and others were working on what appeared to be an MIT-centric puzzle called Paranoia, which included the names of some MIT students and grad students. Campaign Speeches appeared to be a logic puzzle based on a game of Dungeons and Dragons. Slik jumped onto this one because of his familiarity with D&D. This puzzle was the bane of his existence for some time. Slik's problems with the puzzle also caused some problems for its creators, since Slik actually works for Wizards of the Coast and thereby carried a certain amount of authority on the subject matter. (Apparently, issues like this are not uncommon to the Hunt. A few years previous, trouble was stirred up when one player asked if an out-of-print game had been spelled with one word or two. Normally not a big deal, but more so because the player was also the inventor of the game in question.) Spelvin, angry at being unable to finish Stairway to Heaven, jumped on the next music puzzle, Titles. A few people grabbed the necessary equipment for Lost in a Maze and started working on that. Some other puzzles stayed on the Wall of Fear for a bit with nobody to work on them. There was a lot going on.
I managed to find a puzzle that hadn't been started on yet, but that I felt I could do some damage on, Unprecedented Discovery. Although the directions were obscure, on its surface it was pretty obviously an Odd Man Out puzzle. In each grouping of five, there would be four items that had a specific property and one that had a different (similar) property. For example, in the list "SHINTO, THUNDER, DRAFTER, NEVER, COUPON", four words become prepositions after removing the first two letters. The last word becomes an adverb if only one letter is removed. I had a lot of fun with this puzzle, the groupings were often very clever. I stuck with it for a while and ended up solving with a few different people. My favorite group (which, I'm proud to say, I solved) was "PRAIRIE KINGSTON SHERLOCK CAMILLA GUY". Although we eventually worked our way down to only three missing, we were stumped as to what might come next. One would often expect that the five answers in a row would combine to form a new list, but that wouldn't account for the last row, which had only three members. The flavor text talked about five repeats which might need to be returned to the list, but forty-three seemed just as unhelpful as thirty-eight. It was set aside.
Meanwhile, Paranoia had also stalled. There had been a complicated logic problem, but unraveling it didn't seem to have helped at all. Cans and Donations Gratefully Accepted had started to look more promising after a while. A little bit after Round Three began, Acme sent out a huge spam message to all teams. Har Har, a little bit more of corporate reality. But they kept resending the same message over and over again. Someone made the connection between Spam and asking for money and canned goods. More work got done on that puzzle. Jenn and Codex made the first step of slow progress on The Property of Others when they recognized that the second poem was a pastiche of "We Real Cool." The Price Is Right, however, was pegged as a Cambridge puzzle requiring business hours, so it stayed undone for a bit longer.
With Unprecedented Discovery starting to stall out, I moved on to take a good look at the Training Puzzles. These were the puzzles that needed to be solve in addition to the normal puzzles of the Rounds in order to get metapuzzle answers. In retrospect, I think that these were many of the best puzzles in the entire Hunt. Each puzzle led to an instruction, something that could be used to modify an answer, and many did so in very creative ways. Furthermore, the more direct references to The Matrix began here: all puzzles were framed as dialogues between Morpheus and Neo, and all puzzles began with Keanu's trademark "Whoa!"
The first one to be solved was Whoa--I Know Dialects!, which got taken down by Sax and someone else having a grand old time. I played around with this one later and understood why. It's a great little take on Cockney rhyming slang. ("Hooked on Gins"! BWAHAHAHAHA!) The next was, I think, Whoa--I Know Windows!. Cazique came into the room after it was finished and asked if there was anyone who really liked cryptic crosswords. If we did, he said, we should not look at the answer to this puzzle, since it was really solid. I played around with this one after the Hunt was over, and agreed. Whoa--I know Shoe-Buckling! also fell relatively quickly to people who enjoyed it. Many others were harder, some took some odd work, but most of them were pretty fun.
The one I did the most work on was another fun one: Whoa--I Know Doctoring! Spelvin and someone else started work on the first part of this puzzle, identifying the two celebrities whose faces had been photoshopped together. I added a few names, but moved on. Later, I saw a mostly complete set of celebrities on the sheet, now abandoned to the Wall of Shame. I picked it up and did what seemed logical, plugging the names into IMDB. Sure enough, each pair of celebrities had been in exactly one movie together, and the movie had a number in its title. After filling in the pairs that only had one answer, there were a few pairs that I still couldn't figure out. I pulled out the letters from the movie titles, but still couldn't make sense of an answer. Someone else (boy, I wish I could remember who) finished off those, mostly by going through a name database, and trying to think of celebrities with likely first names. Unscientific? Maybe. But it certainly got results. We quickly finished off the last of the movies and pulled out the rest of the letters. With the puzzle almost finished, we pulled a few people over to talk out the end of the puzzle. I mentioned that I saw, "GOLF HOLE" spelled out in a line on the page. Someone else noticed that there were two pairs highlighted in green and red. We quickly drew out a path with the message: "TIE THE SCORE AT A GOLF HOLE." Well, that was an answer, but it didn't quite seem like an instruction. I called it in. (Yeah, that's right, this is the first one I got to call in. There were one or two others, but this is the one I was most proud of.) Unfortunately, it was wrong. The operator did give a subtle hint by saying that he thought that seemed a bit long for an answer. I tried our alternate answer, "PAR". Also wrong. I hung up the phone, frustrated. Luckily, Cazique had been right next to the phone and hand overheard the exchange. He also happened to know that in match play golf, tying the score at a hole is called "halving." I quickly called back and very assuredly told him the answer was "HALVE". It was. Booyeah!
Boy these things are long. Next episode: Round Four, the Acme Fight Song, Acme starts to Hint, Climbing the Stairway to Heaven and the Round Two Metapuzzle.
no subject
Hey, do you mind if I put a link to these reports in MarNig? I'm running a Hunt report from Codex, but would like to add the URL for your reports, if you're willing.
no subject
I'll see what I can do about arranging them, though. Maybe in a note about the new
no subject