The Sphinx's Lair

CCCC: Take back atrocity covered in scarlet (7)

12:28 AM

@Alconja maybe, DELIVER = Take (def) ; ( R(EVIL)ED )<

.. there.

ah, I was looking at "REVILED", but I didn't get the def. right

How is DELIVER "take"? Isn't it the opposite?

Take (to someone else)

  2: bring to a destination, make a delivery; "our local super
     market delivers"

ah right, in the sense of "bring", not the sense of "steal"

12:30 AM

because English. :)

yes, @Deusovi, "take" in the sense of "give"

... English is irreparably broken, we should just throw it all away and start from scratch

Tio ŝajnas bona ideo

I'm not sure we have enough scratch for that

@ffao this is a good idea

12:45 AM

Y know, 1984 really did have a point about English having too many confusing words

I don't really think that was the point 1984 was trying to make

Lol

i think we should all speak newspeak anyway

@EricTressler well it really is a good idea to ~~redo a language~~ make yet another alternative to English

Nobody can do that. The best you can do is make your own, like Esperanto

1. golfier, since you can use all of IPA 2. actually a sane language. I guess the biggest problem is actually getting people to use it

12:47 AM

Common English is doubleplus ungood

@ASCII-only being more terse is a terrible goal for a new language. I can just imagine you coming up with something like Jelly and trying to get people to learn it so they can talk to you.

@Rubio You got it. And yes, intentionally sneaky with "take" = deliver, and "take back" not being used together.

@Alconja You got me. I passed over "reviled", because of the tense, and was looking at "rescind" when Rubio solved it.

@EricTressler not in that sense, I meant more that you can fit more words in a certain amount of syllables since you have more phonemes available. Obviously using them all is a bad idea, but at least you will have other options than making like 17-letter words

I think i read Orwell was a supporter of Simplified English until he changed his mind

12:51 AM

@DestructibleLemon Yes because English is like PHP you should just never use it ever

@EricTressler I think simple languages can be quite elegant, if they can express complex thoughts using few unique “words”

Ooh, just got a Populist badge, for my 10th gold.

actually it was called something else

English already has too many phonemes compared to most other languages

English is also like HTML, you can’t parse it with regex :P

12:51 AM

@thecoder16 Lojban

just look at the number of words with one or two syllables

Basic English

Basic English is an English-based controlled language created by linguist and philosopher Charles Kay Ogden as an international auxiliary language, and as an aid for teaching English as a second language. Basic English is, in essence, a simplified subset of regular English. It was presented in Ogden's book Basic English: A General Introduction with Rules and Grammar (1930). Ogden's Basic, and the concept of a simplified English, gained its greatest publicity just after the Allied victory in World War II as a means for world peace. Although Basic English was not built into a program, similar...

one of the issues is that there was no way to form new words

and only limited amounts of words (as a design goal, even)

@ffao two syllables = n ^ 4 (well, up to ~4?) possible words where n is the number of phonemes though?

@ffao well at least make each character stand for one phoneme and one phoneme only

I’m currently creating BARF (Barely Actually Readable Functional) for fun as a programming language that’s eztremely simple, yet can (theoretically?) do a lot

These are all terrible ideas.

12:53 AM

oh, you mean a tarpit?

It’s also mostly a joke, so it’s a bad example, but you get the point (hopefully?)

@ASCII-only idk if lojban is terse...

@DestructibleLemon "few unique “words”"

oh. toki pona would be better

making each character stand for only one sound is not a terrible idea

12:54 AM

@ASCII-only you can form new words

@ffao No, I guess not. Korean works that way, doesn't it?

Chinese has each character stand for one word/part of a word

@DestructibleLemon yes that actually

@thecoder16 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_typewriter#/media/… <-- There's a downside

also people think lojban has no metaphors, but it does

12:55 AM

I believe Korean works that way

Portuguese is much closer than English but we still have letters like "x" that can have three different unindicated sounds

so you have to know the word to be able to say it

Well Chinese typewriters are dumb

we have calligraphy

:P

@ffao Basically

@EricTressler Korean characters are like that too

also in Chinese basically every word is a homonym :/

I thought Chinese had the tones to differentiate

the bad part is when Japanese imported Chinese words they couldn't make the tones and everything turned into homophones

@ffao yes. but 4 tones for like 20+ synonyms

@ffao japanese has tones though?

uh nah

1:10 AM

@ffao not like written tones. but they still have intonation

CCCC: Hanging around new guy in The Sphinx's Lair, for example? (7)

"The Sphinx's Lair, for example" definition for chatroom?

@ffao :| i'm sure people have talked about this in Maid Cafe or something

sounds like it, but that is 8 letters

Slight tweak. :)

1:14 AM

"new guy" may either refer to actual new person or "puzzler" maybe? and "around" is probably one of those indicator word things

@ffao relevant

@ASCII-only en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitch_accent#Tone I don't know how to not onebox

@ffao just use a markdown link (also oh, right)

1:37 AM

Well, "new" is not an anagrind for "guy", unless the word's not in my dictionary.

"Think of words that anagram to GUY. There are only three words in the English language. What are they?"

*kicks Rubio from chat*

lol

1:55 AM

Cryptic clues always make my head hurt. Someday I will get good at solving them, but.. I fear that that day will not be today.

2:08 AM

Fwiw, just watching people solve c4s helps.

I hadn't really done any cryptics before we started the C4s, but over that ~18mo period, I've learned lots

(to the point of being confident enough to write an actual cryptic crossword)

Reading over the Cryptic Clue Guide helped me a lot; that article is very helpful. At least I know what I'm looking at, now!

Q: What's this code? I need help solving

2:32 AM

0

VTFOQ00ySXlOV3RhV0VsbllWZFpaMlZYT1RGSlIwNW9ZbWxDYTFwWFRuWmFSMVZuWkVkb2NHTjNQVDA9 Someone sent me this, and I can't solve it. I need help.

cipher

:| Why do Hexcells levels have to be so large

wordplay lateral-thinking

3:07 AM

0

Q: When is a door not a door?

May I ask any of you? A door is almost always a door, but some doors are not doors. When is a door not a door?

0

Q: Master Bomb Defusers

Day 115 of your investigation and you and your ever-faithful-if-only-a-bit-slow partner have finally caught the trail of your arch-nemesis, a serial bomber known only as "Mr. 5". Doing your best to hold back snide remarks about terrible cliches, you step into the abandoned warehouse located near...

mathematics cipher story humor

3:24 AM

@TrevorPowell Glad it was useful! Cryptics are hard to get into, but I think they can be really interesting.

3:34 AM

finally finished hexcells infinite

Congrats

@Deusovi I've had friends try to explain them to me before, but this is the first explanation that seems like maybe it took. I'm still not having much luck at figuring them out, but at least I can feel like I'm following the conversation. :)

hexcells infinite has an "infinite" mode, which isn't anywhere nearly as satisfying or challenging as its hand-created puzzles. This is probably unsurprising.

@EricTressler Now I just need to do 60 generator levels :/

@TrevorPowell Well of course, considering the puzzles are generated in like 1 second >_>

I wouldn't do it if I were you. I'm with @TrevorPowell, they're trash

@EricTressler yes but i need that one achievement

so i can then uninstall it once and for all

3:43 AM

The meaningless steam points are very very important. :D

did that one randomly generated level just take me 10 minutes :|

So ~10 hours to do 60 of them? They're not hard, but they are kind of big (if I remember). I played 2 or 3 at most

hmm, I got a small one this time (side-8 hexagon)

In the original design of XBox Live, GamerScore (points earned by doing achievements) and Microsoft Points (paid for with cash) were the same thing. If you accomplished lots of achievements in a game, those could then finance buying new games. I often wonder about how the modern video game industry would be different if they'd actually gone through with that original design back then.

(That story may not be factual; I have it third-hand. But I'm intrigued anyhow, about how the market would be different if gamers had it as fully understood and expected that investing time/effort/skill in a platform was equivalent to investing money.)

Exploits in games (or hacks) would have immediate economic consequences, though.

3:56 AM

Huh, interesting! There would have to be some way to control for games with ridiculous amounts of achievements, though.

Yeah, they'd have to be regulated by Sony/Microsoft, etc. (or devalued to the point of being meaningless, like arcade tickets)

Those were absolutely regulated, even for the system they eventually went with. And the numbers are what makes the story especially believable.

A new smallish game on XBL would typically sell for 800-ish "Microsoft Points" (400 for an especially indie-looking, or up to 1200 for something high quality). And your game was required to provide a certain number of GameScore points via achievements. The number of points was based upon your sale price. I seem to recall that for a 400 point game, you would give out 100 points of achievements. That sort of thing.

@Deusovi Yeah, I have two of those really terrible mobile-quality games with 300+ achievements

Bass

7:19 AM

..now if only I could make "arrin" out of "new guy in The Sphinx's Lair"..

Sp3000

7:36 AM

I suspect it might be PE(N)DANT

Sid

7:51 AM

Ha! I like that

Q: What is the correct solution to 16/4(4)?

8:02 AM

0

This has been circulated recently. We all know the order of the calculation: BEDMAS. B rackets and Parentheses: First Priority E xponents: Second Priority D ivision: Third Priority M ultiplication: Third Priority A ddition: Fourth Priority S ubtraction: Fourth Priority The problem is how if i...

mathematics explanation

8:27 AM

@Sp3000 That's it

TrojanByAccident

8:56 AM

elaborate pls

Hanging is the def.; N is a common abbreviation for new (at least in crosswords, and on maps, perhaps?) and the rest describes a pedat by example. The clue uses a rather Ruiboesque postfix word ordering, so you should read it as around N, PEDANT.

9:12 AM

TIL postfix indicators are valid

Or maybe it's a prefix notation, because the operator "around" comes first.

Sticklers might insist on the comma in AROUND N, PEDANT actually being in the puzzle, but I feel like this type of construction is used often enough to be okay

I used to ask for Rubio to include commas when he did stuff like around B, C

I don't bother anymore

rumor has it that the usage of such type of construction has grown 200% since the advent of cryptic clues by Rubio

There ... may be truth to this rumor.

Just to clear up prefix/postfix confusion, we could call it Reverse Polish Notation

9:20 AM

Rubio Pe[n]dantic Notation

Rubio's P...?fix Notation

PEDANT N insert

Next thing we do is explain clues with fancy C4 syntax trees.

+1

Bass

I've got half a mind to invite this guy here, and answer "earring", if for no other reason, then so that we could get the next clue up and running.

would help with the comma-copulative pendantry too :-)

9:36 AM

That's not the intended solution

Q: Which Lightbulb belongs to the switch

10:05 AM

1

Q: Old Norse Riddle!

An old Norse riddle, quite an easy one when you think of it. A dragon with one wing and 24 legs, sheds its scales on the sand. What is it?

riddle

0

There is an old house with an upstairs room and a downstairs room. the upstairs room contains 3 light bulbs and the downstairs room contains 3 switches. Each switch is connected to one light bulb. A man is in the downstairs room and needs to know which switch belongs to which light bulb, however...

lights-out

1:23 PM

1

Q: A Fountain of Colors

A Fountain of Colors A rock overlooks as my garden unfurls. His pebble admires at the nice sky, it swirls. The odd-looking pink one is chipper today. The Lily exposes when Chopin I play. There's one that is orange (or copper) in hue. The yellow one listens intently to you. The Kraspedia...

riddle wordplay

Q: Hacking an electronic keypad

1:40 PM

2

You are a spy trying to break into an enemy facility. The back door is protected by an electronic keypad lock. You know that this particular lock is opened by a four digit code. Any stream of button presses which contains the correct code consecutively will open the lock. For example, if the code...

combinatorics algorithm graph-theory

enigmatic-puzzle not-a-cipher

2:00 PM

0

Q: Where did my sister go?

One day my sister disappeared. She didn't vanish out of existence, no, she just wasn't seen or heard of for about three weeks. Until finally, just yesterday, I received a postcard from her. What a relief! But all she wrote was the following line, and I need your help: NBBLCSNLFPZBKWIOBCCEHGXC...

Sp3000

CCCC: A dog's treat kept cold internally from the very beginning (2, 7)

mathematics computer-puzzle

2:34 PM

0

Q: Simple maths, or is it?

Just a quick, easy sum to pass the time for those at work. This was used as an exercise when I did a programming course to outline the importance of thinking outside the box. It was also used to demonstrate that just because an answer is right, does not mean other answers are wrong. 1 + 1 = ...

3:27 PM

0

Q: Decipher the message

Message: 2519977! 61 1315079 799! clues: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_alphabet https://translate.google.com/

cipher

TrojanByAccident

3:50 PM

@Sp3000 confirm correct enumeration?

Q: Is one set of distances bigger than another?

4:04 PM

0

Imagine you have x blue points and y red points in two or more dimensions. Is it true that the sum of all the distances between points of the same color is never more than the sum of all the distances between points of different colors?

mathematics

4:21 PM

0

Q: Run... From... It

You are a secret agent named Alastair Morgan. To your coworkers, you are known as Agent 23. You are trained in absolute stealth and secrecy. Your mother country, The United States, has hired you to take down multiple other nations world-wide. One day, you get an order to move to another country i...

story

Sid

6:13 PM

Heh, I love that "no-a-cipher" tag.

If you're quick you can be the first (and only one) to use the [nothing-to-see-here] tag for your steganography puzzle.

And a transposition cipher is a cipher, so that tag was misleading. I think enigmatic would have been enough here.

Q: I need help with my shopping

7:53 PM

0

This is my shopping list: A chocolate bar, some meat that's raw, something cheap, and an apple core. Will you help me?

enigmatic-puzzle wordplay

Sp3000

8:57 PM

@TrojanByAccident (2, 7) is correct