The Sphinx's Lair

7:28 AM

Some more thoughts on Sconibulus puzzle: the word first can be found vertically on the grid. Again vertically, but upwards we can find Grover's which could refer to Grover's algorithm.

Vertically, again upwards, we can also find the word place with the letters rte before it. Perhaps "replace"?

And, again vertically , upwards, we can read "Fibonacci"

Someone ought to solve it now, making sense out of all this

8:07 AM

@MariaDeleva Thanks, Maria.

8:20 AM

For what? @RosieF

@MariaDeleva For finding even more in Sconibulus's puzzle, and putting it into an answer.

Well, I thought I would put everything in one place. But can' t figure out what to do with all this

Other things I can find but are probably irrelevant: mum, dad, gay. Although not sure about Gay. It is a common name so it could refer to someone named Gay and their algorithm or something

There is indeed a person named Davis Gay and he wrote a paper on decimal/ binary conversions and vice versa.

David*

8:44 AM

@MariaDeleva I expect that those 3-letter words are probably just coincidence, and are not relevant.

Sid

Some of those letters might correspond to spaces.

9:17 AM

This is how the grid looks like converted first to binary and then to decimaL:

88 80 77 65 87 87 86 88 73 81 77 88 76 77 70
69 84 88 80 67 89 79 76 71 89 89 85 77 79 86
88 80 77 86 89 77 66 80 87 67 79 65 69 84 87
88 66 80 77 80 77 66 80 81 89 73 87 82 77 87
66 68 67 71 87 77 84 81 66 83 82 67 75 66 87
67 82 77 77 67 70 87 67 68 68 68 68 68 73 74
75 83 84 82 65 83 88 66 67 87 65 69 68 68 73
71 77 67 68 69 68 87 78 78 83 87 66 69 87 81
87 70 65 65 65 65 65 87 82 66 87 87 67 66 86
69 69 73 68 77 87 86 87 80 77 82 70 65 88 65
87 68 83 77 87 79 66 71 73 73 67 77 78 70 73
79 78 66 77 69 77 68 76 79 81 72 84 80 69 68

What Gareth saw in the grid AEIOU are basically all the vowels ordered alphabetically

10:29 AM

So I

oops

So, assuming we've now cracked the Sconibulus puzzle, I have to confess I'm a bit disappointed by it: it feels as if the only reason it wasn't cracked sooner is that everyone was looking for something more interesting than the actual answer :-). I don't think the sense of disappointment is really fair to the puzzle or its author, though; my guess is that Sconibulus thought he was making a nice quick easy puzzle and watched in horror as everyone bounced off it.

Beastly Gerbil

Woo 6000 rep :P

@GarethMcCaughan If there is nothing more to find, what are the top two rows and the left-hand column for? We haven't found anything in them yet.

Q: The shrink and his patient (Part 1)

10:48 AM

Hello everybody

I hope you'll like my entry for the fortnightly topic :)

0

This is an entry in the 15th Fortnightly Topic Challenge. Harold Smith, a coffee in his hand, was contemplating his sleeping wife. Once again, he was up early, way before the alarm. "Why didn't I quit already? I could stay at home, take care of the baby with Sandra and make puzzles all day!", ...

story visual steganography

And yes, the visual part was a hell to do.

11:04 AM

I'll edit a bit later as I am currently having lunch :)

Areeb

@IAmInPLS I like how you hid the message in the book

11:18 AM

@GarethMcCaughan You're too fast

yeah but I haven't got there yet

Well, almost

unless NK really does indicate North Korea :-)

I think you should read the not-puzzling-elements one more time

have been doing

11:19 AM

It's in plain sight :-)

One tag = one element

you should stop giving clues

@IAmInPLS, there are some things in the story that are a bit odd but seem like they could just be minor mistakes rather than clues. Examples: "A bit perplex" for "A bit perplexed", "had still shivers" for "still had shivers", a mysterious space before a punctuation mark. Would you like to clarify whether these are just slips that could be corrected? (I can give you a longer list if you want it.)

11:37 AM

These are typos only, I'll be happy to edit if you give me all the ones you found. Or you can do it if you wish to!

OK. I found, in order of appearance: space before colon; "had still" for "still had"; "picking his appointment book" for, I assume, "picking up ..."; "has been suffering" should probably be "had been suffering"; generally that paragraph's tenses are a bit strange (~2/3 of the way through it shifts from past to present, and then it goes back again at the end). "A bit perplex" should be "... perplexed"; perhaps near the end "ended" should be "had ended". I think that's it.

Sorry my puzzle wasn't as interesting as it looked

Although, interestingly enough, there's also something resembling a hint that wasn't found

if you happen to try to decipher the first few lines of the text with the vigenere key 'EIEIO' you get something that looks quite a bit like English, but apparently nobody tried that

@IAmInPLS, also "favorite patient" should surely be "favorite patients"

@Sconibulus, as I said I don't think the disappointment is in any way your fault.

Even though I thought of EIEIO it never occurred to me to use that as a Vigenere key!

That's really rather cute.

(As is the "A*" thing, which I would never in a million years have worked out.)

11:54 AM

no kidding

I worried when creating it that the star thing was maybe a little too cute, but I thought it might be a little more obvious after nearest neighbor was found

I know A*, I even talked about it when we found Dijkstra's >.<

I only figured the A, B and D out because of this neat page: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Search_algorithms

yeah, I tried to not use anything that wasn't on this page to help those who were less computer-inclined

@IamInPLS, oh, another one: "ran away of his office" -- away from, I guess

11:58 AM

Well, the Naive and Prim's weren't there. :) But I figured out the Naive anyway. :)

I think Prim is probably a coincidence

(but could be wrong)

Well, we can thank @Randal'Thor I guess @GarethMcCaughan :-)

oops, no, I see Sconibulus has confirmed Prim's. Sorry.

@IAmInPLS indeed

I am always reluctant to edit someone else's question when it might have steganographic stuff in it.

The 'hard' parts were supposed to be the book and the weird sentence, but you broke them in no time :-).

The book was (sorry!) super-obvious. (Clearly not only to me.) But this would not be the first time that I found the "hard" things easy and the "easy" things utterly mystifying. I am sure I will want to kick myself when I find the correct final step.

12:08 PM

@GarethMcCaughan I am so sure you will!

Why is this cipher such a pain to write... On top of the fact that I know it's a pretty weak one that can be solve quickly T.T

so CvWaes posted an answer that in effect suggests that there is no third part and the answer is that Mrs Smith is in Eliot's house. I'm guessing there is meant to be a little more to it than that.

12:25 PM

There are details in the framing story that leads to this conclusion, but CvWaes omitted them. This is the right conclusion anyway!

(please don't hit me)

(part 2 will be harder I swear!)

Sid

@IAmInPLS This is actually a very good puzzle according to me. You are just unlucky that Gareth is just too fast...

12:46 PM

Hmm, OK.

So are you going to give CvWaes the checkmark (I would be absolutely fine with that) or should I edit that conclusion into my answer?

(do psychiatrists usually know their patients' home addresses? I have no idea)

oh, no, wait, the proposal is that it's Smith's house they're in

and actually I don't see anything in the story that does much to distinguish between (1) EA is at HS's house carrying on an affair with his wife, (2) EA is at HS's house having attacked his wife, (3) EA is at EA's house having kidnapped HS's wife, and indeed (4) EA is somewhere else entirely having kidnapped HS's wife. If I had to pick one as most natural given the story I think it would be 3 rather than 1,2,4, but that isn't actually what CvWaes said.

(#1 has the advantage that it explains why EA has been arriving late.)

1:15 PM

@GarethMcCaughan I had in mind that the line " I could stay at home, take care of the baby with Sandra" would imply that his wife is staying at home with the baby (maternity leave, you know). So Harold goes to his house to check 1/if his wife is at home (EA is a patient so maybe he's not telling the truth" and 2/ check if his baby is still home too. But you'll know more about this in the second part (and I hope you're not too disappointed from this 'ending' of the first aprt)

But I see you came with many possible backstories, it's very interesting :-)

That leads me to conclude that you could be very good at building puzzles :-)

People keep telling me I should be making puzzles. But making puzzles is much harder work than solving them. And so far as I know I'm no good at it :-).

@GarethMcCaughan Agreed on the fact that making puzzles is harder than solving them! I'll see you for the second part then, I guess :-)

@GarethMcCaughan Takes practice, so get cracking :P

@Sid Thanks for the kind words! And you're right, I suspect @Gareth is some kind of artificial intelligence trained for the only purpose of speed-cracking puzzles from us.

Puzzling — BOUNTY!

2:19 PM

3

Q: I go round and round

I go round and round and rise above the ground My head’s nothing but air & lets anything fair To make some gay and others flay. Who am I?

riddle

2:30 PM

Not enough attention? It has five answers, and no comments or edits from OP. What is he expecting to get?

Who knows

maybe he just wanted to get a bounty badge

Sid

3:09 PM

@IAmInPLS Yeah.. That's why he never makes puzzles. Only solves them... AI are not programmed to make puzzles..

I dunno, if a road goes from A to B, and you're willing to ignore all traffic laws, you can traverse the road from B to A

so just perform every operation backwards and you should end up with a puzzle that's completely impossible to solve!

wait... that's not the goal at all...

For some more narrowly constrained kinds of puzzle, if you can solve them then you can make them. E.g., the sort in Simon Tatham's "portable puzzle collection". Generate random puzzle instances, run your solver, see if there's a unique solution, and (at least for puzzles where this is a thing you can do) add/remove hints to constrain the solution more or less if it's non-unique / impossible.

3:27 PM

making puzzles is kinda hard, I've ended up with quite a few false starts so far

like one idea I was working on I just realized would end up being something like a 20 page story

which is probably well more than anyone wants to solve