| What Joe's Doing |
[Jun. 14th, 2009|11:45 pm] |
I've been very busy lately doing all sorts of stuff:- W**k is a heavy load lately, but let's not burden the blog too much with it. Suffice it to say that I am not putting in more hours but I'm being called upon to do a heck of a lot during the hours I am there.
- Mystery Hunt is chugging along. Some of my puzzles will be in next year's Hunt. Probably more than in the 2008 Hunt, but we are a smaller team than Palindrome was, so this is to be expected. Of course I can't say more now.
- There is a whole bunch of interesting stuff at MathMagic this month. I have some contributions on one problem and one I need to properly write up on another.
- The US Puzzle Championship is next Saturday. There is still time to register. I do not expect much of a difference in the results from last year, but I will participate as I have done the last 10 years or so.
- It seems all my friends are throwing parties for one reason or other this month, and I am attending some of them. And the NPL con is in Baltimore in just a few weeks.
- ( Kingdom of Loathing stuff )
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| August |
[Aug. 3rd, 2008|03:36 pm] |
Time for another one of these summary posts.
- People are mostly done with their recaps of the NPL con. Read my previous entries to see mine.
- I finished 9th in Turkzeka. Another event like this is starting at Puzzleup.
- This month's Math Magic is about tiling lattices with 7-segment calculator numbers. I have played with it a little but not sent anything.
- Yesterday's KaBauble game was a truly stunning application of the new white tiles.
- My clan at Kingdom of Loathing continues to explore Hobopolis.
- Nothing at Ponder This for August yet... maybe tomorrow?
- September 1st at noon, Mark Halpin will be posting his annual Labor Day puzzle set.
- Probably sometime in October we'll have Puzzlecrack run by UIUC.
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| 2008 Mystery Hunt: Some Scares and the Brady meta. |
[Jan. 22nd, 2008|09:12 pm] |
It was in April that we decided on the theme of a murder mystery in which an actual Dr. Awkward character gets killed. By Memorial Day weekend we had at least the basic concepts for all the meta puzzles and the actual Hunt structure (which was a bit more complicated than what we ended up using). It was during attempts to test-solve these meta puzzles that weekend that we realized more cluing was needed for some of the puzzles to work, and probably also to give the witness groups, and it was suggested that we could do this through addresses and phone numbers in the Little Black Book. It was at this point that I scrapped whatever rather lame meta I had initially constructed for the Brady Bunch, and figured to use the addresses to turn answers into Sudoku givens, exactly as this puzzle ended up working. This was actually my first idea for this meta, but until we decided that there would be extra cluing information available from the addresses, I didn't know how I was going to associate letters with specific Sudoku cells.
10 teams solved the Brady Bunch meta puzzle, the first of them being Codex Bodley and Evil Midnight Bombers, both at 4:17 AM Saturday, and the last being Metaphysical Plant at 5:32 PM Sunday.
In late June we got our first scare, of sorts. A major new set of game content in the Kingdom of Loathing was released at that time, and the creators (who attended the 2007 Hunt) had seen fit to include a Dr. Awkward character -- who you got to kill. A nice tribute; Foggy Brume (who created the Kingdom of Loathing-based puzzle in that Hunt) got a custom item, but we got an NPC with a quest! But it was scary that they had decided to do the same thing we did -- to kill Dr. Awkward. It was too late to change the theme, even if we cared to do so, though I joked that Project Electric Mayhem would be especially suspect, particularly if they came each wearing a Mega Gem.
One of the things I liked about the Brady Bunch meta was that it was a set with a very obvious ordering and yet one that I had never seen used in a puzzle. Until September. Within the course of a week, I test-solved a Microsoft puzzle hunt which included a puzzle based on the Bradys and a small puzzle contest within Kingdom of Loathing that also had a Brady-ordering mechanism.
The Microsoft puzzle had nine pairs of flags in the positions for semaphore letters; the semaphore letters spelled FIRST NAME. The flags were adorned with photos of various actors and actresses, with a number of repetitions. Their first names were the same as the 8 Bradys (not including Alice), and if you re-read each pair of flags, using the directions the Bradys of those names were located in around the familiar square instead of the ways the flags were actually oriented, it spelled the answer.
The Kingdom of Loathing puzzle was a word search split into nine pieces; each participant received one of the pieces, along with a clue to a name of a celebrity with the same first name as one of the Bradys. You had to trade pieces with other participants to collect the whole set, and use the Bradys to assemble the pieces in the correct pattern. Then you had to find names of objects from the Kingdom of Loathing in the grid, and the unused letters spelled instructions to complete the contest.
Once again, it was too late (now FAR too late) to change the meta puzzle.
Finally, the last scare came on the morning the Hunt began, when we discovered that the coin was supposed to be hidden in one of the teams' headquarters. A few of our team members took some time to partially rewrite the runaround so that it led to a location that was not in or close to any team's headquarters, by placing it a few floors above our own headquarters. |
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| Even more puzzles |
[Oct. 15th, 2006|04:12 pm] |
- I won a small puzzle contest (just one puzzle) on KoL recently. Although the list of items on the scrap of paper is KoL-related, no knowledge of KoL is required to solve it.
- Math puzzle madness: A few months ago somebody pointed me to Mathcamp, a summer math program for junior-high and high-school students, but somehow I got sidetracked onto the qualifying test for Mathpath, a similar thing targeted specifically for junior-high students. Recently I found the actual qualifying test for Mathcamp, as well as a puzzle hunt run during this year's Mathcamp. (Note that Mathcamp is over, as is summer, for that matter.)
- Puzzlecrack is an annual event at UIUC. This year's event starts tomorrow and they say they have prizes both for onsite and online solvers anywhere in the world.
- The World Puzzle Championship 2006 was last week in Bulgaria. Team USA won, by a good margin but not the complete runaway some predicted after the team's performance on the USPC this summer. Germany still had a chance until near the end of the competition. Germany's Ulrich Voigt won the individual championship.
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| A Blast from the Past |
[Sep. 22nd, 2006|08:04 pm] |
First, a recap of recent events. ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) dalryaug and I, along with various other people we met through the Sekkrets game, together with some Harvardites and at least one person from MIT, did do the Harvard Hunt last Friday. We solved everything but the final meta puzzle, getting hung up on one part we were interpreting very wrongly, taking a break for dinner and to think about it some more, and coming back to find we'd lost, but being invited to go on the runaround anyway.
And we ended up placing 2nd in Agent Lex's 11-week-long KoL puzzle hunt, earning the Badde Manors clan an iceberglet, losing to the Garden of Earthly Delights, which has won quite a number of contests lately.
We won Soulsproximity and Darkhalf's riddle hunt, and won at least one part of Clan Otori's week of daily contests which involved searching for KoL player names with various properties. My share of the prize for the Otori names one, which I helped with, apparently came out to 2.6 million meat.
I also completed the Mike's Room riddle trail to win a 1 million meat prize offered by Draghkar, and due to features of the game I happen to know I did it first. But Draghkar seems to have disappeared before the contest could be completed, so I have no acknowledgement of my completion nor (at the moment) any real hope of receiving the prize.
Today, dalryaug pointed out this KoL contest to me. A rather trivial puzzle, as these things go, which the creator probably thought was much harder when he posted it. And this reminds me of the treasure hunt subgame from Ackanomic from years ago.
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| KoL contests and pinball |
[Aug. 20th, 2006|04:42 pm] |
I've been in a series of contests over at Kingdom of Loathing (and took a break today for pinball).
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| The puzzle's dead, long live the puzzle |
[Jun. 21st, 2006|09:30 am] |
As a followup to one of my other recent posts, the riddle contest that has been running at Kingdom of Loathing for the last month is finally over; a team claimed the third place prize last night. My team made it all the way to the final puzzle where we spent the last few days stumped. Considering we spent a week stumped twice during the competition, the way it ended isn't surprising except in that we managed to reach the final puzzle at all.
In other news, there is a big puzzle set planned for release July 7, Sekkrets, with front-page coverage at Grey Labyrinth. When you follow the link through to the actual puzzle site, that blob you see is made of a bunch of little squares. The grid reminds me of the MIT Mystery Hunt in Normalville in 2005, and to a lesser extent the "facility" puzzles from the Matrix hunt a couple years before that. In both cases you had a grid or maze of puzzles where each puzzle was at an intersection of sorts and solving a puzzle allowed you to cross through the intersection to reach sites (and thus puzzles) beyond it.
I have pointed this out to the KoL group I have been working with the last month, so I will probably join them for Sekkrets. |
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| Puzzle and Riddle Hunts |
[Jun. 11th, 2006|08:21 pm] |
This will be a big combo-post discussing something I have been doing, and something I plan to do soon. Well, a little less soon than the US Puzzle Championship I have covered recently, but I should start in chronological order. And this is way way waaaay long, and I can't possibly summarize it all here, so read the tags and whenever you are ready you can read the whole thing behind this cut.
( Read more... ) |
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