anyway, actual answer to Wen's is lim {(2+sqrt(3))^n}=1 which is true because (2+sqrt(3))^n + (2-sqrt(3))^n is always an integer, and the second term is small and positive
they're URL-encoding escapes for unusual characters. E.g., %7B means character 0x7B which is a left curly brace. Not sure what boboquack is doing that requires braces to be escaped in this way.
@GarethMcCaughan that's an excerpt from https://a-ta.co/mathjax/%5cleft(%5cdisplaystyle%5clim_%7bn%5e%7b%5c%7b%5csqrt%7bn%7d%5c%7d%7d%5crightarrow%5cinfty%7d1%5cright)+2=3.svg, the link to my earlier cook of Wen's anagram
Puzzles
I was wrapped up in making ripple effects back in the day so here are some:
Yellow squares are a number from 1-5.
Also, the puzzles are disjoint (e.g each grid is its own puzzle), so I guess you can post partials if you solve, say, 1 puzzle I guess.
There was going to be a...
Part of a series of similar puzzles - the answer to one will give you the type of thinking required for the others.
What's the next letter in this series? What's the relationship?
L
K
Z
R
A
O
T
E
L
A
I
D
L
N
A
S
Y
A
E
D
A
Part of a series of similar puzzles - the answer to one will give you the type of thinking required for the others.
What's the next letter in this series? What's the relationship?
G
J
T
J
J
J
A
M
W
J
J
Z
M
F
J
A
A
U
R
J
C
G
B
G
W
T
W
W
W
C
H
F
H
D
J
L
R
G
J
R
G
B
G
B
This one might be harder ...
I've written down some numbers. There are two missing places which need to be filled in. There should not be ambiguity - the missing places have a unique solution.
What are the missing numbers? And what is the meaning behind all the numbers?
5 1
7 2
2 1
3 1
5 0
3 0
6 1
3 2
7 2
4 2
7 ?
? 5
@Deusovi they gave a 9-letter "word" and we had to get a name from that. Obvious we had to anagram 9 letters to get some name which in the end isn't even a famous name.
I was solving some puzzle where I got a password to crack and found hint of it as $"IMYY4UECAPS\uparrow(111...(1)...1)"$
SOme of the things i found out there is SPACE written in opposite order
or the numbers 1's in the bracket denote the letters corresponding is there means : IMY(E)S may be.
N...
We didn't go there, because we were too busy trying to solve all the regular puzzles as fast as possible. (And we didn't know at the time it was the meta solution. There were two red herrings, too, but they were ridiculously far away - in the corners of the map, nowhere near the actual site of the hunt. The three winning teams all found the sign early and called it as soon as the meta clue was revealed.)
Which leads me to problem #2: Solving the regular puzzles quickly was pointless. The meta clue was given out to everyone at the same time. I was the first to solve all six component puzzles, then I waited around playing games on my phone for 45 minutes while several other teams caught up.
The component puzzles varied drastically in difficulty and interesting-ness.
- One used the transparency twice. There was a sheet of paper on a bench: covering it with the transparency would circle some letters, spelling out "LOOK FAMILIAR?". Doing the same, but to the poster used to advertise the hunt, would spell "THE ANSWER IS 92".
(Unfortunately, that poster was taken down from almost everywhere, and I had to ask the organizers where a copy would be.)
So already, we can see the poor planning. They took down an integral component of a puzzle from nearly everywhere before the hunt started.
- We walked up to someone who told us to hold out our hands, palm-up. He put a sticker of a sundae on them. (Subtle.) In our instruction book was... well, I'll show you.
Going to the actual pool table inside, we saw those symbols taped to the pockets. Inside the triangle pocket (the symbol by "Palm Sundae") was the 2-ball, so the answer was 2.
So far, not particularly interesting or challenging, but not offensively bad. But it got worse.
- The next puzzle was a rebus puzzle. Pretty standard small hunt fare. We walked into a classroom, and taped to the seats were pictures. There were two in each row, and always an empty seat in between. They spelled words when you added a letter in between (DISC _ EDIT --> DISCREDIT). Then the inserted letters spelled out "ONE HUNDRED"... when you randomly anagrammed them.
We didn't get that at first, because it almost spelled out words (with the ones we were missing). But nope! We were just supposed to anagram, apparently.
- There was the sudoku puzzle. We got a 4x4 sudoku grid (labelled "Top Shelf Sudoku"). It only had two clues in it, and four question marks in the centre squares.
The map also had four question marks, so we went there and had numbers clued to us using images.
(IV drip represented 4, basketball going through hoop represented 2 (points)...) Solving the Sudoku and literally just taking the top row gave us "4213". That one wasn't interesting, but I would like to note that the advertising specifically said the puzzles WEREN'T Sudoku. That was one of the examples of puzzles you supposedly WOULD…
- The next puzzle was the "Cacophony". This was the best puzzle out of the whole thing (though that's not saying much). There were three speakers playing different songs, organized with two images in between. Organized like:
(speaker) 9 To 5 (picture) clocks (speaker) 8 Days A Week (picture) chasm (speaker) Mambo #5
The clocks were "times" and the chasm was "divided", so these clued 925×8÷5, which gave us the number 1480.
- And finally, the worst f---ing puzzle out of them all (besides the meta): The Roman Race. We walked up to someone who made us participate in a race. It was pretty short, the results didn't matter, and because he wanted to "mix things up" he had us "wheelbarrow" one leg of it (only 15-20 metres, or something around that amount). We got no clues for finishing.
Turns out the path we took was all that was important. It was an XI (with the I sort of "joined" to the X), so the answer was 11.
That is, unless you looked at it from any other angle. In which case it was either an IX,x̅, or x̲. (Or even 4.)
That's right, there was ambiguity in the actual solution to one of the puzzles.
The only thing disambiguating was the "answer bank" used for the metapuzzle. It had a ton of random phrases listed next to numbers, and there was no number 9 on it. (There were a lot of other numbers skipped, too - after all, it did go up to 4213.) So, it was a useless race that made my hands hurt like hell, leading to an ambiguous final clue.
And finally, the metapuzzle. Back in that area where we found the sudoku pictures, there was a letter Q taped to a tree. The meta clue was to go to that area and look for a letter. (I had already found it.) Going to Q4 (since it was in a square with …
So any team who had stumbled across it could win instantly after the meta clue was released. (Unless they had poor vision and couldn't see the coordinates on the tag, in which case they had literally no way to solve the puzzle.) Also, the entire "metapuzzle" was just a race to random points on the map - no actual puzzles, just following instructions.
And of course, the fact that I was first to finish the six component puzzles meant nothing. I didn't win anything from that hunt. Other teams had called the number first.
(Also, for the race, the sidewalk was one of those that had rocks "fused" into it, and I had to walk on my hands while my teammate carried my legs - any only because the organizer running that puzzle was bored.)
About a month ago, they held applications for helping create the hunt. I was rejected, even though I'm pretty sure I'm the only one with actual puzzle-creating experience on campus (besides them, if you count those as "actual puzzles"). (Or the only one who applied, at least.)
Anyway, that's the story of the puzzle hunt where the speed of your running (rather than solving) is what mattered for the prizes - the only puzzle hunt that has caused me physical pain to solve (which I later found out was entirely unnecessary).
reminds me of an episode of the last season of The Amazing Race where they did all of the usual challenges to end having to take a train a couple of hours later to the pit stop
and all of the positions were decided by who ran out of the train faster
bunching is a common problem, but usually they have the contestants take trains/planes/etc at the very start so that it doesn't influence that much, or at least you'd think they would have learned to do that in the 28th season
luckily it was redeemed because the immediately following episode was a really good leg (if only because of location, since they were doing challenges atop the Alps), so it got much better from there
the story of the ARGH is at least already funny just because of the name
even though I don't know what actually happened in it
(An ARG is an "alternate reality game", a puzzle hunt-ish thing meant to be solved by a large community as a whole. The puzzles are typically all based around a story - for instance, one puzzle might give you the username and password to "hack into" a website, where you can read emails between some of the main characters relevant to the plot.)
Anyway, when I submitted the answers CANDLE and SECRET to the guy, he said:
"Both right! Here are the clues: Gi, De"
And looking at the website showed "Clue #3: RRI", implying there were two other clues.
But I scoured the website, and couldn't find a thing.
So after a while, the organizer said "Oh right, you might have to look in other places related to the site." So I checked the external links on the site's homepage, nothing.
It took ages before I thought of checking the site's unused forums before I found "Clue #1: DAS"
(Apologies, Clue #3 was actually RRI.)
As for Clue #2? It was on the Steam Group for that site. Which again, nobody ever uses.
OK, so I got all five parts of the answer in chunks, clearly this is a chunked anagram. So I'll throw "<(de)(gi)(rri)(das)(pai)>" into Nutrimatic and-- Oh, nothing?
Maybe it's a full-on anagram then (though that seems unlikely given the letters being all chunked up like this). I'll throw "degirridaspai" into Anagram-Solver.Net and-- Nothing again?!
The guy revealed that it was the name of a song.
To which I replied:
"For all I know, the song could be called "Rigid Paradise" or "Gadi Disrepair" or "Irid Aga Spider"."
And to which *he* replied:
". . . wow you litterally just said the answer."
So there you have it. That one time I solved an anagram by sheer luck.
The last puzzle is the medieval riddle "No-legs lay on one-leg,two legs sat near on three legs,four legs got some.", and at that point I know that this guy can't tell a good puzzle from a bad one.
Note that that image was taken straight from DeviantArt and, as far as I'm aware, was not modified.
And then when I complain about the low quality of the puzzles to the rest of the server, he has this smug holier-than-thou attitude of "I'm a beginner, therefore any shit I create should be good!".
He said: "You do realize I was pretty much on my own on this right? No help, no prior experience with this? I could only make something that seems intuitive to me, because that's all I've got."
Well, I had a discussion about this with a different group I'm in, and we settled on the conclusion that the one digit we should extract is this one: 🖕
+2=3.svg)
+2=3%7d.svg)
+2=3%7d.svg)
Puzzles
I was wrapped up in making ripple effects back in the day so here are some:
Yellow squares are a number from 1-5.
Also, the puzzles are disjoint (e.g each grid is its own puzzle), so I guess you can post partials if you solve, say, 1 puzzle I guess.
There was going to be a...
If a hen and a half lays an egg and a half in day and a half, how many eggs will six hens lay in nine days?
I was solving some puzzle where I got a password to crack and found hint of it as $"IMYY4UECAPS\uparrow(111...(1)...1)"$
SOme of the things i found out there is SPACE written in opposite order
or the numbers 1's in the bracket denote the letters corresponding is there means : IMY(E)S may be.
N...
