prog | Entries tagged with puzzles

I hereby declare that the name of the puzzle-solving group that gathers together at my house sometimes, and is mostly-but-not-entirely made of members from the "Immoral, Illegal & Fattening" MIT mystery hunt team, to be Shabbas Llamas. This comes from an excellently incorrect clue answer we generated on Sunday, thanks to

hahathor.

For lack of a better name, I two months ago described ourselves as "Immoral Illegal & Fattening (and friends)" for listing purposes in the issue's leaderboard, since we placed among the previous issue's first ten solvers. I regretted this as soon as I saw it in print; it struck me as an unauthorized use of a name that I don't own, and felt yuckier given that IIF's team captain is listed in the magazine's masthead.

I like this solution much better, and hope nobody thinks ill of me for the unintentional slight!

I found this object while unpacking. I know what it is, even though I haven't had reason to use it in, oh, 16 years or so.

Do you know what it is?

(The thing on top is a plunger which presses straight down, and springs back up when released.)

Identified first by kyroraz in comments!

This was my contribution to western culture today.

( Oh it is an image! )

The MIT Mystery Hunt is only a few days away. I'm determined to get as much money-work as I can done before then; there is a backlog, with end-conditions in reach. There won't be much Volity or Gameshelf progress, despite so much I want to do in both. (Though maybe I'll squeeze more in if put the video games away for now...)

Some of my team (Immoral, Illegal, and Fattening, Attorneys at Law) gathered at MIT Saturday night to practice, breaking up into groups of four and then running through a shorter puzzle extravaganza. (It was this one, actually, by Dan Katz.) I was on fire, solving three puzzles alone, and helping to finish up a couple more. My puzzle-fu has never been stronger, and I was pleased when another group still finished well ahead of us, suggesting that our whole team is really well poised this year. (That group contained a hunt veteran who is joining our team this year, so that's exciting too.)

I hope that we at least make it into the endgame, which would be a first for IIF. I was last night reading the 2006 hosting team's description of that year's endgame, and filled with fear and desire.

In New Jersey again, hanging out with

doctor_atomic through Sunday morning. We just spent several hours burning our brains over the latest issue of Puzzles and Answers Magazine, knocking over two puzzles and shouting "This is brilliant!" at a third though we have no idea yet how to shake the meta out of it. Taking a damn break now. (I also love grumbling at test-solver

tahnan via IM while working on these.)

Starting work on the one contract next week, though I noted half an hour of billable time on the train while I absorbed spec docs and such. Not a peep from the client who owes me in excess of two large now. Since I now have barely enough liquid to make rent, this makes me sad. Yes, I will get quite aggressive about it once I'm back on home turf.

I am annoyed at Blip.tv. They changed the design of show pages in a way I really don't like, and which apparently I have no control over as show operator. If you go to http://thegameshelf.blip.tv you are treated to our first episode from 2005, and while I Stand By All My Work, boy does that shit show its age. It's not the first impression I want made on a visitor. And yet it clearly is, in many cases, since my blip.tv stats show an order of magnitude more views for that ep than any of the others... which means that it's often the last impression made, as well. Blah.

I should just set up a Movable Type thing for the show, already.

classicaljunkie and I were working through that big book of NYT crosswords tonight. At point we found ourselves looking at:

Man in the 'hood - N _ _ _ A

I was like, Oh... please tell me that isn't so.. It ended up being MISTA (we had a letter wrong at first), which seems kind of weak, but OK.

True fact: I wasn't completely aware that "ordinary" crosswords tend to have themes until I saw Word Play last February. The pleasure of watching each puzzle's theme emerge from the grid is a new one for me, and rather addicting!

I had two very good meetings, in two very different roles - in one I was like arr I am a good leader and in the other I was like arr I am worth what I'm paid.

Bought two books. One is "How to Start a Business in Massachusetts" by O'Neill and Warda. Ha ha, horse before the cart, yes, but it's a smartly written summary and I've already learned a lot. I got it mostly to learn more about how the state recognizes a proprietorship - self-employment, basically - and get advice on customizing and maybe growing it.

The other is a collection of 365 NYT crosswords. Yes, it is September and it's time to start seriously training for the mystery hunt. Crosswords and recognizably crossword-like things are only a small part of the hunt, but word puzzles in general make up the majority of its busywork, and being able to chop quickly through crossword-style clues is a crucial skill.

I'm sure to enjoy these with

classicaljunkie, who is at least as much a crossword lover as I, and who will join our team in January. To me, this is another reason to look forward to the hunt, what with yet another awesomely smart and creative hunt-mastering team, and IIF more pumped to win than ever. Hmm. I don't like phrases like "I can't wait" because holy crap there's a lot I need to get done by January, but... next year's hunt is going to rock.

Hay, teammates: whatever became of our "Gluttony" bracelets from last time? Did they get received and distributed? I never saw one!

Oh, what else.

dangerforce called from his new pad in LA with a tech support question, and we yakked about TV stuff. He gave me a nice location lead I may use later. And I wrote a Gameshelf script! I will say nothing else about that yet.

Been descending into illness. Played a lot of RE4. These are not connected. Probably I caught a cold from one of the hands I shook at the breakfast yesterday. Blecch. Wasn't I just telling someone in person that a freelancer in the information sector doesn't necessarily need to physically network much to get job lead? There you go, then. It actually makes you sick when you even try. Hackers beware!

Puzzles and Answers magazine has become an excellent pastime of

classicaljunkie and myself. I can recommend it to anyone who enjoys puzzle hunts / extravanganzas, like MIT's mystery hunt or The Fool's Errand - a set of themed puzzles whose answers combine into a meta-puzzle, which itself yields the whole set's ultimate solution.

Each bimonthly issue serves as a standalone extravaganza and costs $5, purchasable online and then downloadable as a PDF. The latest issue, themed around reality TV, seems easier than the last one, or at least closer to my own skill level. After a few hours of leisurely solving today we knocked over two of them and got into "I've filled out the grid; now what" territory with two more. If you're going to try out a single issue, I would recommend this one.

cthulhia (half-)jokes about joining the NPL in order to gain insight on next year's hunt, but I think I'm actually gonna do it. Waddayathink?

Also the 2007 hunt officially ended for me last night with Immoral Illegal & Fattening's post-mortem and group-reminisce. This was just a great hunt. I look forward to 2008's, and I hope to participate in one or two mini-hunts before then!

I think I've been largely responsible for one new team member per year since IIF took up its current name. Cth joined us two years ago, Zarf last year, and I successfully hooked

classicaljunkie this year. She came by to visit early Saturday evening, and ended up solving until OMG-the-T-is-shutting-down-o'clock. There was a rough start, after I chose to work together on what turned out to be one of the hunt's lamest puzzles (which was too bad because it looked really cool). But then we chewed through most of a more interesting one, and then

mrmorse grabbed her to kick ass on a Sudoku-themed one and that's really all it took.

Cliff Johnson sez on his website, "The last few weeks have not gone as smoothly as I had hoped. In fact, I’m encountering memory problems that paralyze the game and me along with it. Unfortunately, this is not proving to be a trivial matter. Therefore I’ve decided to remove the countdown clock and roll up my sleeves and pull out whatever hair I have left. Positive thoughts are always appreciated."

Yipes! Good luck, man

I wonder if I should mail him and suggest that he just ship what he has, if it works 95 percent of the time, and release free patches when they're ready. Being an indie software publisher's great, but sometimes there may be value in following the big publishers' typical release patterns...

As I write this, Cliff Johnson is about to let The Fool and his Money's countdown clock, seen on his homepage, drop below seven days.

There's also a preview of the CD artwork and an animation that flips through several game screenshots. It looks like, after three years of delays, he's finally ready to ship the game! Very cool.

(He emailed all the pre-order holders recently, myself included, to confirm their shipping addresses, but since he did the same thing a year ago I didn't put much stock into it as a sign of progress.)

I still think he should have taken the damn clock down after the second or third time he rewound it.

Anyway, between this, the Wii and BattleLore, December is looking to be the most huge and varied month of awesome game acquisition in my life so far.

Francis Heaney's Snakes on a Sudoku puzzle, which I've linked to a couple of times, has been published as official movie merch. In just four months!

See, this is how I would rather be doing things: have a spark of brilliant inspiration, make something cool, and let the right people discover you. I have reaped the benefits of this same phenomenon myself, in the past.

It's so much better than starting to make something cool and then spending half of your make-time running around actively attempting to convince people how cool it is. Lame.

Puzzle people:

Is this for real? Can all Sudoku be solved - and solved relatively quickly - by this brute force method?

If so, I think that's pretty funny.

I have been working on this mystery hunt on and off for the last couple of evenings. It's great. I have solved a bunch of the basic puzzles and I ( like pie. )

Does Games Magazine need younger talent? I just solved (part of) a puzzle in this month's issue that involves building words that have something in common semantically, though you aren't told what ahead of time. One of the answers was ( tum te tum ). But they're really old examples, and I'd argue the pop-culture validity of at least one of them. I feel fairly certain that I'm on the young end of the age group that could solve this with offhand knowledge.

( O I could talk about this all day. )

Surely they could have worked in ( cough ) or something? Or is that actually less famous than I think it is?

Regardless, it reminds me of hearing someone's description of trying to play the original mid-80s edition of Trivial Pursuit. Back then, he was a little kid, and couldn't play against adults because they'd mop the floor with him, as you'd expect. Today, however, he finds that vindication is denied him, because half of the questions assume you are a baby boomer and ask you things like "Who played Mr. Peepers?" Erm. (Well, I actually know what "Mr. Peepers" is thanks to lileks.com, but that's beside the point. And anyway I don't know who played him.)

Would it be worth my while to join the NPL?

cramerica, IIRC, suggested the idea some time ago, after I gleefully announced that I had solved my first cryptic crossword. However, everyone I know who is a member seems to have been a member since forever. I'm a little hesitant to take up something that most people seem to do as adults only coz they started when they were kids, like role-playing games, or smoking. Eh heh heh.

Hunt wrap-up was last night. Many of the teams won special awards consisting of leftover props. jmac's Birthday Party got a portable radio (used during the final runaround, which we never made it to) for having the most amusing call-ins (this was largely

tahnan's doing). I received the prize for the team, and my teammates cheered me on by name, thus making to clear to everyone who hadn't yet caught on that, yes, jmac was actually a real person. "Happy Birthday!" shouted someone. Very nice.

So the whole structure of the hunt was revealed to us via PowerPoint, and it didn't do much to change my overall impression of how the hunt went: the product of many brilliant young minds, too young to have any real grasp of elegance. Before experience tells you otherwise, intuition informs you that more is always better, and any work of art you build should include every single good idea you have about it, because what can it hurt? And so we had a hunt with well over 100 puzzles, and though most were very clever, they were also too difficult or time-consuming for any team to reasonably solve in a single weekend; by Sunday night we didn't really have the manpower or willpower to watch a dozen movies or go geocaching, as some of the puzzles required. And the puzzles that didn't require hours and hours of work tended to be broken in other ways, usually because they were clearly based on one good, clever idea, and then the designer (or the designer's friends) had other clever ideas about it, which got soldered on, resulting in a barely solvable muddle.

Learned about the endgame puzzles last night. They were completely insane, I say in a half-admiring tone. Everyone's favorite (to hear about, anyway) seemed to be the one where you encountered a half-constructed circuit board, and had to figure out that you were expected to dismantle and then attach a bicycle blinky-light (handed to you earlier) to it; this would cause its LED to flash an MIT room number at you. That said, it's no surprise that the hosting team ended up giving the in-endgame teams the answer to each puzzle therein if they couldn't solve it in seven minutes. (At this point the hunt was half a day over schedule.)

Someone really does need to write a hunt HOWTO, as one member of jPB suggested.

Oh well. The winners were a group of veteran puzzlers, so I'm definitely looking forward to next year!

Friday: Took the day off. It was my birthday! And the first day of my first MIT mystery hunt. Very exciting. I may have spent most of the day hacking on one particular puzzle about celebrity ages, but I worked on other stuff too. Didn't actually solve anything myself, but like to think I helped people along with their own puzzles.

Everyone seemed to enjoy the birthday theme. Strangers were delighted to meet the jmac of Team jmac's Birthday Party (which was otherwise as much a non-sequitur as all the other teams' names, to them), and so I received many well-wishes. (Including from visiting professional puzzlers like Trip Payne, whom

tahnan introduced me to. Stars in my eyes!) Was presented with a birthday cake! Cakes. Various hunt-mates had all taken turns with the lettering on both, it was explained to me, and

colorwheel was especially proud of her lowercase "d"! I wish I had taken a picture of all this. I did take a photo of the last slice (on Saturday evening), and thought I blogged it, but my photoblog script seems to have eaten it soon before

rikchik did, alas.

Still can't drive (have collected the right forms but haven't had a chance to visit the RMV in all this time, darnit) and so went home to sleep before the subway gourdimorphosed. (Many people slept right there, curled into the sleeping bags and comforters they brought along. This was not for me, I decided.)

On birthday: All communication from family (of which there has been a lot, in phone calls and cards) has concentrated very heavily on the decincrementation involved. This is a tough soup to swallow, for them! That li'l Jason is suddenly so old, and with the wife and kids and all, now.

Received a lengthy email from a friend I haven't communicated with in years. Haven't read it yet, due to the hectic circumstances; will do so upon finishing this entry. (Also had to send regrets to various people calling in their wishes, so busy was my immediate environment. Promised Aunt Jan I'd call her back Monday evening. Don't let me forget!)

Saturday: After checking in at the hunt, proceeded across the river and had the most efficient Arisia experience one could ask for.

12:30-1:00 Ran into local but not-seen-much-lately pal R immediately upon registration (which involved nothing more than saying my name to the elfin chap behind the desk, since I got a freebie for all my game demoing last year). Together we killed time in the art show, which was highlighting the delightful kinetic sculptures of Arthur Ganson. Probably the best art I've ever seen in the context of a sci-fi con. Also said hi to queue and treacle_well.
1:00-2:00 Followed R to the ballroom, to hear Tim Powers' speech. Said hi to R's husband G and listened to tail end of a talk by -- ESR?! That was random. Hooked up with cthulhia and Zarf, who wandered in when ESR finished talking about how stupid journalists are, and then listened to Powers' most excellent and entertaining talk (it was practically a monologue-comedy routine, once he got into it).
2:00-3:00 Played a game of Giant Mega Volcano with C & Z, and attracted a crowd in so doing. The giant Icehouse pieces are pretty winning for this purpose. Caught up with Zarf about our various respective game-(deisgn/programming) projects. (He had emailed me about Volity earlier in the week... exciting stuff. If you're me.)
3:00-4:00 Down to the Terrace with C & Z to hear Ganson in person talk about his strange and wonderful machine-sculptures, and narrate through several previews of his upcoming DVD. Enormously happymaking. Dropped a twenty on pre-ordering the disc before I left.
4:00-4:30 More game chat with Z at the Urban Pain, while eating a tasty sandwich.

Total time: Four hours. Managed to meet all my favorite con objectives: seeing friends local and remote, playing games, trading ideas, meeting famous and interesting people & buying their stuff, eating tasty food. I could do this every year.

Then, back to the hunt! Where things proceeded, for me, much as they did on Friday evening.

Sunday: Mystery hunt spent much of its time in not so much territory, for me. I think my desire to continually work on puzzles went away when I returned home on Saturday night, and I found it hard to summon the enthusiasm needed to begin a third day of (personally fruitless) puzzle-slogging. After a couple of hours I became burned out, but not unhappy, and passed the time doing non-huntish things on my computer for a bit, at one point stepping outside to call parents for a nicely unhurried conversation, to make up for juggling their call away on Friday. After eating something hot & reasonable, picked up a puzzle and hacked at it some more, again coming to no particular outcome with it, but getting to write entertaining Perl scripts nonetheless. Will return to jmac's Birthday Party tomorrow for the the last time, in order to witness the hunt wrap-up.

Because the hunt's still going on (core members of my team are working hard, even as I write this, in the wee hours of Monday) I won't say much in particular about it, except that I'm keenly interested in hearing the unofficial debriefing that I hope will happen at HoRGN on Tuesday (depending upon various people having recovered enough energy to show up for it).

As for me: I had loads of fun, and really couldn't have hoped for a nicer (or more appropriate?) birthday party. Much thanks and love to all who set up this thing: no kidding!

On the practical end of things, I don't feel I participated much with the solving, and hope I didn't disappoint anyone with my approximately 50 percent attendance rate. It might have gone differently had I a car, and therefore could come and go (and haul cargo) at my own pleasure, rather than restrict my schedule to the T's running times. Well... we'll see how things are aligned next year, I suppose.

First puzzle work!

Various games at a friend's house, far too late.

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lolanagrams
I have a busy week ahead of me.
"Unless you're cool, like us."
Wincing moments in NYT crosswords
A day
Puzzles and Answers magazine
NPL
At least he finally took the clock down
Fool and his Money - Holy Crap
I've had it with these
Brainless Sudoku
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A Simple Way To Go Faster Than Light That Does Not Work

That's awful high, Jason. That's awful high.

Entries tagged with puzzles

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Namechange

What is it

lolanagrams

I have a busy week ahead of me.

"Unless you're cool, like us."

Wincing moments in NYT crosswords

A day

Puzzles and Answers magazine

NPL

At least he finally took the clock down

Fool and his Money - Holy Crap

I've had it with these

Brainless Sudoku

(no subject)