The Sphinx's Lair

Okay, so "question or answer / sentence / word" is what we need to apply to each number. If they were all 3-digit, I'd take the first digit as the clue number, the second as the sentence number, and the third as the word. But that wouldn't fit with the 2-digit numbers.

Rubio

Yeah there's actually something you've overlooked (or not connected) that helps with that.

Deusovi

Probably! I'm good at overlooking things.

(also, does cryptic clue 3 being double wordplay mean anything?)

Rubio

I'll maybe hint that a little more, as the next step (as you've already guessed) is finding the cipher book and how to get the right location in it.

No, it means i was being incredibly dense that night

Deusovi

Alright, good to know :P

Rubio

1:09 AM

When I was asking about a way to make "Stroke cat or dog! (3)" a valid &lit

I was trying to do something clever with that specific WorD clue

apparently what I settled on was just idiocy, and it didn't register until you pointed it out while solving it :)

Deusovi

hey, it happens!

Rubio

Between that and the indirect anagram, I think I need to lay off cryptic clues in puzzles for a bit :) that or just run them by you before posting, hehe

The rest of the puzzle at least feels pretty decently solid

Deusovi

The numbers are supposed to hint at the puzzles somehow. I know that. I also suspect that the clue numbers are the word and sentence numbers.

Rubio

i posted another puzzle this morning too that I think may be up your alley. It's a decanting-problem but has, I think, an interesting solve path. I posed the question to myself yesterday, and then spent until this morning trying to see if it was solvable; i finally found a way :)

Deusovi

I saw it! Took a brief look at it but didn't try to solve it - I'm working on some of my own puzzles at the moment.

Volatility

1:15 AM

(re: PSE exam, I imagine this answer is used in some way?)

Deusovi

Why?

Rubio

@Volatility ... yeah. Why? : Now I'm intrigued :)

Volatility

Test# A014612

the supplement is probably hex, which gives this, although that's just a guess

(since 1358 is deleted)

Rubio

Ahh. Well, I guess my question is a bit of a giveaway that no, that answer is not used in some way.

Volatility

Your "yeah" confused me a little :)

Rubio

1:23 AM

Hehe, that was agreeing with Deus's "Why", not confirming your guess. Sorry, that was sloppy of me.

Volatility

ah, right, didn't Deus's question

Rubio

^ this reminds me so much of this v

that's better. silly obie

Volatility

lol

now I can't laughing :D

Rubio

I accidentally my cat earlier. It happens.

Volatility

1:40 AM

That's .

boboquack

2:03 AM

What has of chat?

Rubio

Don't look at me. I blame

GentlePurpleRain

3:12 AM

@Alconja Sorry for the slow response. That's correct.

Alconja

@GentlePurpleRain Sweet. (we already made the executive decision and moved on without you anyway :P)

Sphinx

5:29 AM

0

Q: Difference Triangle

The numbers 1 through 6 are arranged so that any number resting between and below two other numbers is the difference between those two numbers. A square between 2 adjacent circles means the difference is 1. Using numbers 1 through 15, fill in the circle's below to create a "difference triangl...

logical-deduction

Sphinx

8:40 AM

0

Q: baggage mishap puzzle

this is a puzzle from briangle: Savannah got distracted when her shuttle arrived at Earth Central Airport. Now she's at Lost & Found with four other travelers all waiting to retrieve one lost piece of luggage of a different color (black, blue, green, red or yellow.) While filling out their bagga...

logic-grid

Gareth McCaughan

11:47 AM

@Rubio I think the solution to your CCCC is SHOWING OFF (showing = performance; of f = of forte).

Rand al'Thor

12:16 PM

This puzzle should be undeleted. It was posted by you-know-who, but it's not a troll puzzle without an answer; it's a valid riddle with a real answer, and as such falls under this main meta post. (And yes, I'm biased. That's why I'm posting here in chat, to see if others agree.)

Techidiot

I agree. I liked the riddle and was a well received one. Not sure how the site and policies work but to be frank, I think it can stick there as it was a legitimate riddle.

If there is any action taken against that account for any sort of misconduct, anyway all the questions related will be deleted I guess.

Gareth McCaughan

I don't like it very much (too much of it doesn't make any sense grammatically, and I have grown rather bored of puzzles whose answer turns out to be "PSE" or "Puzzling" or the names of the moderators or "Stack Exchange" or etc. etc. etc.) but I agree that it's a valid riddle with a real answer. I would like to see at least one moderator's opinion before taking any sort of action, though.

Techidiot

If undeleted add a trivia tag may be :)

Sphinx

0

Q: Nodes and Bonds

1. Which letter replaces the question mark? 2. Where can #10 be placed in this diagram? 3. Not a double bond from one node to another here. But where is L?

enigmatic-puzzle

Techidiot

@GarethMcCaughan Any luck on getting any heads up with this ? I thought, the hint would have helped :-S

Rand al'Thor

12:28 PM

@Techidiot The action's already been taken; the account is destroyed. But the good posts associated with it should still be preserved.

Gareth McCaughan

@Techidiot Haven't looked at it much more. The only bit of the hint that seems like it has any sort of new information in it is the list "the dark, the tall, the stroked and the ones which bend", and my best guess is that that just means boldface, capital, struck-through and italic -- in which case the hint just makes more explicit things that already seemed pretty clear. I guess the plural "keys" (as opposed to "key") is maybe informative.

Techidiot

Yup. The keys part is supposed to be informative.

Gareth McCaughan

so we have pyi boldface, wqpqx italic, dheh struck-through, hhsrei capitals. Two of the counts match the "gives N", two are one short. These are supposed to provide "keys", presumably for Vigenere-ing, probably reversed left to right given the "go west" thing. So we could e.g. treat each as a key and de-Vigenere with them all in turn. Or we could try to find some way to expand the first two to give 4 and 6 letters instead of 3 and 5 respectively, first. [continues]

Or maybe extracting those letters and trying to derive keys from them directly is the Wrong Thing. Who knows? Given any concrete guess, I could try to apply it to de-Vigenere the second block of gibberish. But it seems like there are lots and lots of possible concrete guesses, and trying a dozen de-Vigenerings is not usually my idea of fun unless I'm very bored at work.

I don't guarantee not to revisit this and try some things. But it's not high on my personal list of priorities :-).

Techidiot

You are on a good track with the thought of applying them as keys. :) I will see if you or anyone else can come back on it.

I think I will remove another ambiguity to make it more clearer

Rubio

1:09 PM

@GarethMcCaughan SHOWING OFF is correct.

Deusovi

1:45 PM

@GarethMcCaughan I agree with your opinion on its quality. A lot of it is nonsense, the grammar doesn't work, and puzzles with the answer "Puzzling.SE" (or similar) are overdone. However, I'm not sure we should undelete.

Sphinx

2:39 PM

3

Q: Incoming enemy! Scout, dispatch!

You are the leader in a group of 9 scouts. There are rumors of an incoming enemy army and your unit was sent to investigate where they are coming from. You are aware that there are only 4 paths to your base. You must divide your members into groups to investigate which one it will be. ...

liars

Sphinx

4:48 PM

5

Q: Three for the price of one

While browsing through your local puzzle store, you see something you can't resist: a box which promises two grid deduction puzzles for the price of one! The vendor explains that the box contains a single numbered grid depicting two uniquely solvable puzzles of different types. The types of puzz...

no-computers grid-deduction reverse-puzzling

GentlePurpleRain

5:00 PM

@Deusovi If we are judging the puzzle on its own merit, there are many similarly poor posts that have not been deleted. While I agree that it is not a stellar example of a quality puzzle, I don't think its quality standards are so low that it should be deleted on its own merit...

Rubio

My biggest regret in pointing the matter out to Deus is that I thought it was, while not an especially good or imaginative puzzle, at least a valid and passable one. I think it rises above the threshold of acceptability on its own merits - my real concern with it is that a user who is suspended from the site shouldn't be permitted to submit puzzles under a different name, regardless of how good they might be; as a policy matter, the puzzle never should have been here.

I know noteworthy puzzles can be exhumed from deletion but (and, unfortunately especially) in this case I think it would be a bad precedent

and in any case I don't think it's sufficiently noteworthy to be an issue, in my own opinion

Gareth McCaughan

CCCC: Repair isn't in danger after introducing nitrogen (11)

Deusovi

6:08 PM

@Rubio Exactly my thoughts on the matter. (My statement about the puzzle's quality was never intended to be about undeletion.)

Sphinx

7:23 PM

0

Q: Is it Pajamas? Or Shampoo? Maybe a Cheetah? Oh I know, it's

This is my first puzzle here on PSE, hope it fits the community guidlines.

enigmatic-puzzle grid-deduction

Rubio

8:24 PM

huh.

Stack Exchange
We are currently offline for maintenance

Routine maintenance usually takes less than an hour. If this turns into an extended outage, we will tweet updates from @StackStatus or post details on the status blog.

(Followed by the site being in read-only, and now ...)
We apologize for any inconvenience, but an unexpected error occurred while you were browsing our site. It’s not you, it’s us. This is our fault. Detailed information about this error has automatically been recorded and we have been notified.

boboquack

8:43 PM

@Rubio Is this the HTTP thing going through? Mods?

Rubio

I would expect not, that would be drastic

the http thing should be pretty seamless from a site perspective, and the plan they outline looks like it's intended to be a pretty soft transition

"After this is enabled, old posts that have HTTP images [....], accessible via HTTPS, will be edited accordingly. This will be an actual markdown change, attributed to the Community user, posts won't be bumped." - so in theory we shouldn't even have to edit any (e.g.) i.stack.imgur URLs, they should get done for us

Sconibulus

9:01 PM

yeah, I've only made changes to things that weren't i.stack.imgur, because they should probably have been changed regardless... although I also think I've only made 2 or 3 changes total

Beastly Gerbil

@Rubio I got that the other day, but reloaded the page and it immediately loaded the site

Rubio

@BeastlyGerbil It was borked for a handful of minutes for me, spewing random variations of brokenness as noted above

It seems to be ok now

Beastly Gerbil

it might be localised, or maybe just for some search engines...

Rand al'Thor

9:33 PM

@Rubio But the puzzle is already totally anonymised - the user who posted it has been destroyed and only shows up as "user34770". It's not as if the suspended user's name is linked to it in any way. And if it's good content, or at least reasonable (whether or not you like that kind of puzzle, we can all agree it's a valid puzzle), then it shouldn't be deleted. This sort of comes under "vote for the post, not for the user".

I'm willing to take this to meta if we can't agree, but I'd rather not make it too big an issue, given that a certain person seems to thrive on attention.

Rubio

@Randal'Thor We told ...?BeastlyGerbil?... not to post puzzles he had received from our friend in email, because that would be providing (indirect) posting access to him here. That's expressly "voting" against the user, not the post. And I firmly agree it was the correct thing to do. At the risk of repeating myself, by policy the post shouldn't even be here; that it is does not impose on us a requirement to preserve it and thus give an ongoing voice here to someone who's been suspended.

Rand al'Thor

@Rubio By policy the person shouldn't be able to post here. That doesn't mean the post shouldn't be here, if it's a reasonable post.

Again, there's main meta policy on this:

14

Q: How do you deal with legitimate questions from a troll?

What do you do about legitimate questions from the Python Newbie guy (for those who don't know)? Should I flag them as spam and downvote them, or should I leave them alone?

discussion questions trolling

Sphinx

0

Q: Forced checkmate in n

I assume most people on PSE know a bit of chess With white to move, this is checkmate (1. Qb7#): That's boring. Let's try something more interesting. With black to move, black can FORCE white to checkmate (1... Qxb7+ 2. Qxb7#): We can go another step. In this position, white can force ...

chess open-ended

Rubio

I don't think we need to look beyond "the post shouldn't be here" to consider its merits. The post you link doesn't appear (to me) to establish policy, the top two answers are by non-moderators who are sharing their opinions and, at least this case, how they deal with such cases. That particular answer notes that accounts for troublemaker users can be merely "deleted" vs. "destroyed", which from what I could tell preserves posts rather than deleting.

Our moderator chose not to go that route. I don't know enough about the ins and outs of how the tools work or how the policy works to even begin to second-guess that choice, but the choice was made by a duly appointed moderator, and its impact on the post(s) by said user is, well, what it is. And I for one am perfectly fine with it :)

Rand al'Thor

9:49 PM

@Rubio The #2 answer is from an SO moderator, and the #1 answer has a supporting comment from a CM. Besides, meta policy is set by votes and consensus, not (usually) moderator decree.

Rubio

Well - those people aren't known to me, I'm still a noob. :)

Rand al'Thor

If they have a diamond on main meta, they must be either a CM or a dev (or some other category of SE employee).

sigh Looks like I might have to post on meta about this after all. I'll keep it general, of course, without naming names.

But not right now. I've gtg again - just dropping in here briefly.

Rubio

(the only diamond I saw was Tim Post... the #2 answer, I don't see any mod indicator on. I may be missing something)

Rand al'Thor

@Rubio Brad is an SO moderator, not a CM - so he doesn't have a diamond on main meta.

If you check his network profile, you'll see the diamond by his SO account.

Rubio

A meta post may be the right thing to do in any case, to get some consensus. Personally I commented right after pointing the relevant post out to Deus that the poster frustrates me, specifically because I want to vote the post not the poster, but .... honestly, I just feel like our friend does What He Does just for the attention, and the less given the better.

If you do meta-post, feel free to copypasta none, any, or all of my commentary here as you see fit.

gotta run a bit

(oh. also relevant: meta.stackexchange.com/questions/193867/…)

ok NOW i go :)

Rand al'Thor

9:58 PM

@Rubio Not relevant, because the user is deleted and so can't gain any privileges whatsoever. (Unless you meant to link to a different comment.)

Seeya :-)

Sphinx

11:12 PM

0

Q: Lights out game on a chessboard

Alice and Bob play a game with an 8×8 grid of lights, all initially on. They take turns choosing a light which is on and turning it off, with Alice going first. However, the grid is rigged such that choosing a light toggles the entire 3×3 square to its bottom and left. Therefore, nine lights are ...

game checkerboard lights-out

0

Q: What is the link between Lewis Hamilton , Real Madrid and a diver

I need to find the phrase /word /thing that links LEWIS Hamilton holding a cup , Real Madrid logo and a diver underwater .

puzzle-identification

Alconja

@Randal'Thor So what's the point of having a user suspension, if they can just keep creating new accounts to post anyway? A "good" post from a bad user is one thing, but a ban evasion is another thing, surely(?)

Rubio

11:26 PM

@Randal'Thor Nah, I meant to reference the bit about for this type of user, leaving "legitimate questions" like this will only cause more problems down the line. I am very wary of setting a precedent that says a good question from a suspended user is, somehow, ok because the merit of the question justifies the suspension evasion. That is not at all a good message to send, nor a good precedent to set.

(Or as I said earlier: I don't think we need to look beyond "the post shouldn't be here" to consider its merits.)

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