@Deusovi I'm burning with curiosity now :)

I think I've almost solved it.

Did you have the same birdcage containment btw?

Yep!

Good, then I'm not making too much of the sticky-outie black areas, which technically collide

They're for the next step.

I assume we're doing a maze and collecting letters as we traverse it

but I don't see how the maze works

@Mithrandir Darn, you tricked me into forgetting what the proper adjective from Andor is :-P

unless the coordinate bits are portals?

Remember what Mortin said about 2/8...

I've got the messages.

And I think I know what to do next.

I got one of the messages :)

Yayyy!! :)

I really should've cut out these tiles.

and it makes me worry I won't notice the other when I see it

Nah, you'll notice it.

Haha sorry it's a bit hard to fit information into 9 characters :P so some text-speak was used.

It was perfectly understandable to me!

Ok, cool :D

I just meant that the message I found implies (to my naive reading) that the other important message is not plain english

And that further rotation is required?

No, it is plain English.

they're both in plain English, no rotation of the birdcage required?

Although one message isn't all letters, I'll give you that

No, that's not what I meant hehe

Aha! Finally figured out the messages.

Nice! I assume that means you are about to start/have solved the maze section?

Working on it now!

Solved the maze. Are indices (row,col)?

yup

The maze is fairly easy, but hey, it's kind of hard to even make 2 uses of letter shaped pieces xD

Oh wait @Deusovi

Yeah?

indices are not (row,col)

sorry!@

Ah, alright. That's what confused me.

I used (col, row) which is more standard in maths (I'm a mather, so it seemed more intuitive to me ahaha).

Yeah, it's intuitive to me too. But in linear algebra, matrices are indexed (row,col), and it's annoying D:

Ahah well matrices are kind of annoying in general...

True. :P

Solved! Now for the writeup.

Nice job! Hope you liked it :)

I loved it.

Was I on the right track, or meh?

Aw thanks a lot!!

the rot13 isn't really to do with encryption

Deusovi's answer will be up soon so I guess spoilers doesn't matter too much?

not really, no :)

The red letters are rot13 pairs

The message was 'join rot13'

So you need to put the pieces together in such a way that the rot 13 pairs are right next to each other

Yeah I noticed that, I was looking at them rot13ed and they reordered but didn't change

just didn't figure out what to do. ahh!

Posted!

Great puzzle. :D

Thanks!!! I'm really quite proud of this one.

I really love trying to put in a lot of layers into a single thing

At first I had tried using the rot13ed letters as "portals" to go around the original grid. That almost worked, but missed the (6,6) in the tail of the R.

Then I tried overlapping the rot13ed letters, but that led to too much of a mess.

The portals in original grid can be ruled out due to the 6,6 in the corner, yeah.

I knew I was going to have to traverse a path with the "walls" blocking me, but didn't know how to arrange the pieces. I eventually did figure it out though - overall, very fun puzzle!

Good god.

Hm?

That's amazing. Both of you.

@TheGreatEscaper Really really cool!

Thanks so much!!!!! :D

@Deusovi And you, you're just silly good at these. You don't even need a compliment from me on that ;)

I love those kinds of puzzles. Reminds me of puzzle hunts.

@TheGreatEscaper, do you happen to do any puzzle hunts?

Unfortunately not, never been to one

I'd love to some day, or even make one myself :P

You should try them! A lot of them are doable online.

Oh really? Cool, I didn't know that!

Yeah! For instance, the MIT Mystery Hunt is mostly online - only a few puzzles need you to actually be there in person.

And then there's the Mezzacotta Puzzle Hunt from a few months ago, which was all online.

mezzacotta.net/puzzle

Wow! I'll check these out

btw @Deusovi I did cut the letters out. It helped. Not that it mattered ;)

Seems awesome, I'll definitely be doing that next year.

The MIT Mystery Hunt is actually coming up soon - just over a month.

Yeah, just signed up for it!

Unattached hunter, here I go :P

You should join Test Solution, Please Ignore! We're always happy to have new members, and we're a mostly-online team anyway.

(shameless plug)

docs.google.com/forms/d/e/…

Just filled it out!

@Deusovi suspends Deusovi for promotional content :-P

Great! I think you'll get an email fairly soon inviting you to the Google group.

@Randal'Thor Actually... now that I think about it, could that go in the Community Ads?

I'm still not entirely sure how those work.

@Deusovi Yeah, I'm sure it could. They don't have to be ads for things like other SE sites - as I understand it, you can advertise pretty much anything there, even if it's something you're involved with.

Huh, neat. Wish I was a graphic designer so I could make something that didn't look terrible.

If it's irrelevant or spammy, community votes will ensure it doesn't go on the front page anyway.

True! But I feel like this community would be pretty interested in puzzle hunts. :P

Yep!

There was another cool puzzle site I remember @Emrakul talking about a while back ... run by Simon somebody, I think?

chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzzles

That?

Simon Tatham?

@Deusovi Yes, that!

Huh, cool!

Ahhhh I love those kinds of logic puzzles.

I've come across the site before

And there we go, exploring that site has just inspired me to post one of those very rare PSE questions which is actually a question rather than a challenge.

@Nullarbor Hi! Welcome to the Sphinx's Lair :-)

It might depend what kind of maths problems.

Maths is very deeply about both logic and intuition, but different areas of maths use them in differing proportions.