Puzzles Etc. - 2016-05-16 (page 1 of 5)

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12:53 AM

@question_asker I posted a language puzzle :)

1

Q: A Strange Correspondence

I voted to delete some questions on another SE site from two users due to them being garbled nonsense.* However when I got to the sixth I thought something looked suspicious, it looked to me like an encrypted correspondence since all the titles were fairly normal but all the posts were just stri...

story cipher language

ooh, just saw your puzzle, Jonathan

Not sure if it'll be super easy or not :)

Probably not as tough as Logically Linked Numbers or The Unfinished Puzzle Section

so far i'm stumped

OK so not super easy then :)

i've tried reading off specific languages and sort of got something? but it didn't really work out - i'm thinking that the question titles must be important

1:03 AM

Definately looks like some communication though does it not?

i see Russian, Korean, Greek, and parts of what appears to be the Mkhedruli alphabet of Georgian

plus various modified Latin letters which could be from several languages

in the fifth message, it almost looks like it ends with "russian sequence" if you don't look at it too much, but that may be coincidence

the last message is all Cyrillic too...

yeah, noticed that

(probably should've said Cyrillic, not Russian, since it could be any of several languages)

Google Translate doesn't give anything for that last one though, unless the important message they're communicating is "lyoeittniyaitimrepzh"

somehow i suspect that's not the answer

um

heh

how'd you solve it so fast? :p

posted at non-busy time, you get a big head start :)

yeah, but i'm kinda sharing my thoughts with everyone here

1:09 AM

oh true dat.

still curious why they would use SE to communicate - there are far more secure ways than posting it online where everyone can see and it's never actually deleted

:P

stories :p

maybe it's not important after all :)

I totally thought about that but just thought - doesn't matter :)

yeah, i figured that it was just part of the story

here's a puzzle - I happened upon this data that was sent using what seems to be a one-time-pad over sstp... blah blah...

...fun.

one time pads are pretty much the definition of a "too broad" puzzle

1:18 AM

LOL

oh "where is the search -crap" got starred :D

yeah, it's always fun to see your messages get starred

(Y)

I should really sort out ascii emoticons for chat @ SE

hm?

(Y) = thumb up

👍

hmm looks a bit like an apple

really? i can't see it

1:22 AM

at all?

nah i can see it

oh

:)

i mean the similarity to an apple

6 hours later…

7:01 AM

almost 1000 rep wooooo

0

Q: A puzzling image maze!

I was inspired by Rainbow Road Rabbit Hole to make a two-dimensional image maze where each image points to its neighboring rooms. Start here: Hints, clarifications, or corrections will go here.

enigmatic-puzzles visual mazes

Omg that looks exciting

4 hours later…

11:26 AM

someone check colours for sudoku in the community wiki on f'''s puzzle please :)

I don't know about colours for the sudoku but I know finding the red "image" is driving me insane

11:45 AM

I think Red = Magenta + Yellow

Just made an edit, it must be correct the three solutions overlaid yield five black numbers 1,2,3,4,5.

12:01 PM

...also the exit wall is repeated cyan, magenta, yellow pixels

12:24 PM

@Khale_Kitha How did you make that grid for your crossword puzzle?

MS paint?

@manshu for mine I just used open office and took a page preview screenshot

@JonathanAllan oh yeah..I forgot that you also made a crossword puzzle. Thanks.

np :)

When KK made that puzzle, we spent the whole day solving it. :p

there are online tools too I think

12:29 PM

I couldn't find it..

I'll use office.

do you want to draw arbitrarily or find a fit?

My crossword is too short.

It only have 5 clues. :p

for former OO works fine :)

I made it on paper.

can align top-left for the numbers and put a half-space in front

also using an apostrophe at the start formats the number as text :)

12:32 PM

yeah..thanks. I didn't knew it. :)

not in your db? :p

love that quote :)

@Khale_Kitha ^

12:54 PM

Found next image in f'''s maze

Gordon Allocman

1:25 PM

Oppograms are hard enough when they are just words, but this one is apparently people puzzling.stackexchange.com/questions/32039/…

@JonathanAllan My db needs some updates I think :p

wish I could upvote f'''s once per puzzle :p

ikr

are we gonna make a puzzle-specific chat-room for it or nah?

you know ... this room started out as a puzzle-specific chat room

that's a fun fact I didn't know

I'm convinced the red pathway has something to do with XORing something because of the X in the title

1:37 PM

Yeah we can direct anyone here, but there is the CW too

I feel like the CW post should just be for mostly done stuff, not just chit-chat and thoughts on bits of the puzzle

Looks like the mazes may need to rotate as you enter them?

yeah chat here, add useful info to CW

You guys have probably noticed but if you haven't rot13(mbbz va gbc evtug bs svefg vzntr)

what did I do wrong with my link in the comment I just posted there?

Gordon Allocman

@KoA do you have to do it by a factor of seven thousand, flip it upside down and apply the last three photoshop filters though?

1:41 PM

no idea @JonathanAllan, maybe no "http"?

^ doh missed http://

yeah fixed

@GordonAllocman basically (no filter :p, just zoom in heaps to the two-pixel length edge)

I tried braille but didn't seem to go anywhere

user image

@GordonAllocman yeah I noticed it - like I said in a comment I thought the line was black until I read the text :)

...it's actually 4 pixels (each dot is 2*2)

that's even better then :p

oops guess I should say 1/2 solved in CW :p

1:46 PM

GET TWO FREE is solved

by EXAMPLE ROOM isn't

I think I just did the braille wrong or something

but I honestly can't find a spot to start splitting it so that every bit is a valid letter

true

some symbols repeat a few times as well

reading from bottom to top, we have the LLLR pattern twice

then an LLRL

twice

xRLx seems to be a seperator of sorts (x is blank)

and forget that they are single pixels.

the T-shape at the top keeps throwing me off though

it's so far away from everything else

if it's braille, depending on orientation that could be an R or a W but I'm not convinced

@KoA are you talking as if it is rotated 90 degrees anti(AKA counter)-clockwise

isn't braile 3*3?

1:51 PM

3x2

or is it 2*3?

ok

well, yeah depends on orientation

yeah you know what I meant :)

but either way no matter where I try to split it into blocks of 6, I run into something that isn't braille

well the whole thing is 2*(109+x)

1:54 PM

if you split it down the middle (of the bit with the dark spots) horizontally you can kinda do a 'flip it onto itself' sort of thing and then XOR, but I haven't tried that yet

and we want 5 chr

seems too far-fetched

Gordon Allocman

So the more I try to solve this oppogram question, the more I hate it....

Like, what is the opposite of tingle?

according to the internet "stifle" or "subdue"

numb?

1:57 PM

none of those are convincing

nope

tangle?:p

untingle

heh

antitingle

massive trauma?

2:00 PM

plastic bag

heh, just took a look "unexcited" - really??

may be a PB yeah

anagrams of people are always mean

@KoA not in my case :p

true true

Gordon Allocman

"Refunds cruelty refund", really? the same word twice?? why...

2:06 PM

originality

@GordonAllocman Coz it's double refund.

Gordon Allocman

I bet I can come up with some random words that make a random name anagrammed

"Jam Anal Sealant John"

now you all know my middle name :p

Yeah...that thing is always in the middle :p

Gordon Allocman

Man, my latest puzzle really went under the radar over the weekend, only 100 views and I don't think it ever left the front page

2:10 PM

weekends are light

Both my unsolved puzzles are pretty quiet right now

I might add another hint to the environment one

mine too

Gordon Allocman

indeed they are, though that awful oppogram one got like 3x the views ¯_(ツ)_/¯

Things that look simple attract more views

Gordon Allocman

*awful in the fact that it upsets me

2:12 PM

(+ things that look freaking amazing like the new maze one)

my latest is not crazy hard IMO

just looks hard :p

9

Q: A Strange Correspondence

I voted to delete some questions on another SE site from two users due to them being garbled nonsense.* However when I got to the sixth I thought something looked suspicious, it looked to me like an encrypted correspondence since all the titles were fairly normal but all the posts were just stri...

story cipher language

Gordon Allocman

Same with mine

oh yeah I saw that and got instantly stumped

just wanted to get a language one out there for the 14C

I am working on a puzzle with a story which doesn't have anything to do with the story. :p

Gordon Allocman

yeah, I just am not very good with language stuff

shameless plug:

5

Q: Our puzzling friend 2: Electric Puzzaloo

Thank you guys for helping us figure out what activity my friend wanted to do over here! Unfortunately the puzzles didn't stop there. When we asked him to give us the location of where he wanted to go, he gave us this instead: Lorem ipsum vestibulum elementum sapien quis pulvinar Quisque...

enigmatic-puzzles

2:13 PM

yeah gotta do shameless plugs :)

if it requires anything to do with actually reading the languages, I can't do it @JonathanAllan

Gordon Allocman

I think I may have been more excited with the title than I was the puzzle lol

hi @MOehm

That's strange. I have procrastinated puzzles three times just for Monday.

I still don't know how to give clues about the languages in my puzzle :(

Gordon Allocman

@manshu some possibilities are referencing someone with the language in their name or referencing an item/country associated with it

2:22 PM

@GordonAllocman That would be too obvious. And I am not good at the wordplay.

But I have got an idea.

There was a great one in the GCHQ Director's Christmas Card puzzle

@manshu do you have a puzzle?????

@question_asker Yes.

Wordsearch with all sorts of random letters and instructions that all words were one topic leaving characters that gave a final of the same topic...

I am only seeing two "language" puzzles since the beginning of the thing

2:24 PM

added another hint, this should make my puzzle pretty easy now

I wanna make a language puzzle but effort

scroll down to wordsearch:

gchq.gov.uk/features/director-gchqs-christmas-puzzle-part-5

@question_asker I had another idea for Sherlock story. But I dropped it for the fortnighty challenge

I'm looking at Jonathan's puzzle now - seeing letters from latin (and "extended"), korean, cyrillic, georgian, armenian alphabets

@question_asker quite tough to make them I think

yeah

Gordon Allocman

2:25 PM

I don't really control my puzzle inspiration, so if I ever make one that fits the fortnightly it is probably coincidental lol

that wordsearch is good though, although by saying it's a language tag makes it loads easier

@manshu you do not have any questions

you lied to me

:/

I'll post it within an hour.

I am working on it.

ohh it's not done yet, I see.

before working that out I built a solver using a Google spellcheck lookup and found small words / abbreviations / weird words in English that used the whole grid

Gordon Allocman

2:35 PM

Spotify keeps giving me repeat songs in my Discover Weekly playlist (which is supposed to be new music each week) and I recognize the songs so my brain assumes I like them. I'm not sure if I should be upset they keep giving me the same stuff or happy they give me stuff I may have missed before...

I'm still salty about iTunes radio not being a thing anymore

that's how I would get my fix of basically unheard of musical theatre songs

(also how I discovered Prodigal the musical wow <3)

Gordon Allocman

@KoA based on your latest hint, it definitely has something to do with chemicals (chemical burn) but I don't know enough chemistry to pick up on any of the clues

You really don't need to know too much chem

I feel like about 40-50% of "unclear what you're asking" votes are from people who didn't read the post they're voting to close.

2

the second paragraph doesn't use chem at all, if you wanna give that a go

2:43 PM

@question_asker And you have just won the "Power of 10" game-show. :p

Gordon Allocman

well i think liquid burning skies is liquid ozone, but thats not much to go on

Don't think too much into that line

in fact that puzzle should still be technically solvable without it

Gordon Allocman

yeah sorry I got nothing for your puzzle :/

all good :p

Someone will figure it out eventually

I'm off to the land of the sleep, g'night

@KoA good night.

2:55 PM

gn

hey! you all working on the image maze?

I am

no luck with TlXwC so far?

wassat?

the one after the sudoku

3:00 PM

the maze?

yeah

mazes in mazes

yeah not done it yet

blocked some paths off

might be easier to create a graph showing where you can go, if you haven't already done that

yeah I started doing that got too confusing :)

pretty sure we go in at in (obv!) then to bottom of yellow's left, then via "U" to left of yellow's bottom, then back out of that yellow at the right of it's bottom (by floowing through the yellow maze, the follow that path again to go back out into red at right of yellow's bottom; swing around to the "t" into bottom of yellow's right... and then I'm not sure yet...

because other routes are recursive or dead-ends

you have the graph you're using? or would it be easier to make my own?

3:06 PM

just draing lines in paint, no actual graph :)

could write a solver I guess :p

yeah, that's what I was doing too sorta

Gordon Allocman

I still can't even figure out how you guys even got that far in the puzzle

gordon, check the CW answer

@Deusovi you would use Python?

CW answer was all me :)

I was doing the lines in Paint thing, not writing a solver

3:07 PM

ah

ok

well, we dont want to go in top of yellow's left :)

Gordon Allocman

Yeah, I read through the cw, I'm not even sure where the sudoku's came from though. Guess I haven't looked at the puzzle thoroughly enough

@manshu MS Paint

@GordonAllocman there are three colours, cyan magenta and yellow - where they overlap they add (paint-wise) making red/green/blue/black

Did you see the first puzzle link? The obvious one from the example image?

@JonathanAllan Quote?

3:09 PM

7 stars

ahh

@Khale_Kitha I made it using Excel. It's easier I think

i've finished plotting out the red maze

Perhaps - took me only about a minute to do it in mspaint

user image

this is essentially what i'm doing

would it be helpful?

3:10 PM

@Deusovi the final path WILL come out of mazes you are in back up the stack (look at the only ways to get out)

yeah, I know that

(Disappears - my eyes are hurting like hell, today - reading on white is too painful)

aw, hope you feel better soon KK

...So have you got the loops that don't go further down?

I just started on this puzzle

3:11 PM

oh I see one :)

only one though - top of left -> right of top

would diagrams like the one above be helpful for the other mazes?

hmm that path is not there :(

from top of red's left I only see paths into red again (right of bottom or bottom of right)

so I dont quite know what your graph is

hm, what do you mean?

like you have a line from top of left into red's top of left, which is def impossible

no, it's clearly there

this graph is of the red maze

Gordon Allocman

3:15 PM

@Khale_Kitha If you feel like putting the effort in, you can style the chat to colors that work better for your eyes, changing the color of any chat message will affect all of them (just tested it) and it will persist until refresh

the top left maze - the "pink" maze, yeah?

yeah

oh God I'm an "idiod"

ugh ... mac screen shots turn out twice the size when you take them

wrong maze

3:16 PM

heh, no worries

sorry am really colour blind

was looking at yellow

then said "top left" then scrolled up ^^

Gordon Allocman

@Matt windows screenshots capture all 3 screens I have so I pretty much have to use the snipping tool

yeah, I'm colorblind too but apparently not as bad as you

@GordonAllocman or you can Alt-print-Screen to capture just the active window :)

yeah pretty bad

had a monochromatic neighbour ocne though - 0 colour

Gordon Allocman

user image

3:18 PM

:)

"all 3 screens" ... your life must be so hard

:p

finished green

user image

Gordon Allocman

Well they are all different sizes/dimensions, at different heights, and spread across like 150° so i'm not fully convinced its very useful

0

Q: A Letter: When Sherlock meets Moriarty

After the flight, I returned to my flat, 221, Baker Street. I knew that Moriarty is at my place. There were some muddy footprints outside my room. Not just of single person but of 2 or 3 people. I opened the door and said "Hello Moriarty!". The reply came from Moriarty who was sitting on the c...

visual story language crosswords

Please correct the grammatical mistakes.

3:24 PM

@Deusovi I bet that top right edge is traversed and then we end with "8" (in red and leave)

..on the green maze diagram

it could also be 6 though

@manshu Corrected his address :p

@manshu unsurprisingly, I like this puzzle

@JonathanAllan @question_asker thanks :)

@Deusovi yes it could but but if it's a stack I think the 8 is more likely due to routes I've seen

3:27 PM

it's definitely a stack - i've done these before

just not one with four mazes

there is a route through the 6 though

it has to be due to the only two ways out (8 or 6)

at least, from what i've seen so far

yes

but there is no way out by popping through red :)

cant go in in in in... out

i'm gonna try to completely eliminate some paths

going into top of YELLOW's left is no good I think, try a double check

3:31 PM

yep

user image

here's my yellow diagram

ahha

hm?

Gordon Allocman

@manshu I'm confused about your story, Sherlock talked to Moriarty inside his flat but his flat is locked?

is he locked inside his own flat?

@GordonAllocman The flat can be unlocked easily from outside.

that sounds like the opposite of how a lock works

Gordon Allocman

3:34 PM

So is Sherlock trying to leave or get in? I doubt it's important I am just very curious

He wants to leave his flat.

Gordon Allocman

ah okay, it makes sense now

@Deusovi Why would Moriarty help Sherlock for his flat security?

Gordon Allocman

Some Sherlock, didn't notice the machine on his door. What a goober

@GordonAllocman Maybe he was too concentrated on Moriarty.

3:38 PM

gonna go eat breakfast, back in a bit

Gordon Allocman

@manshu my hunch is that each element is translated to a language that starts with the same letter the word starts with, so far I have Space -> espacio, Fire -> Feu, but im probably wrong

weeee solve MAZES IN MAZES

now to write it up :p

@GordonAllocman I'll post the hints before sleeping if it remain unsolved.

And wow..no grammatical mistakes.

back!

oh, you solved it? nice

what's the link?

user image

Gordon Allocman

3:52 PM

@manshu I think doesn't in the last quoted part should be don't but I wasn't sure if that was on purpose

@GordonAllocman There is no wordplay in the whole puzzle. Feel free to edit it.

Gordon Allocman

@manshu alright I edited some grammar stuff in your answer to the best of my abilities, hopefully I didn't mess anything up

@GordonAllocman Looks great now. Thanks.

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May '1616

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