Mystery Hunt 2012 Recast: COMPLETE!!!

[LordKinbote]

Hey all. I offered to do a recast of the Mystery Hunt from this year, and people seemed interested, so awaaaay we go.

Before I begin, some rules:

1. Honor code applies: the solutions were up literally seconds after the hunt ended (because we're awesome like that). If you want to participate, you are forbidden from looking at the solution to a puzzle. If you look at the solution to a puzzle, you are forbidden from participating on that puzzle.

2. If you participated in the Hunt itself, you may not participate on puzzles that you have already seen.

3. If you are "calling in" an answer, make it obvious for me by typing something like the following: Call in MYLITTLEPONY. I will reply as quickly as possible. If you get it incorrect, I'll let you know and the puzzle will continue. If you get it correct, I will confirm, and will add your answer to the meta answer list.

4. Meta answers can be called in at any time.

5. I'm thinking there are way too many puzzles to do one at a time, so how about we start with 5 open, and every puzzle unlocks a new one (for now, unless people want more).

6. I'm thinking about a no backsolving rule as well. I mean, if there's no competition, what's the point?

Any other things people want to add to make it more fun/accessible/etc? I've obviously never done something like this before.

I should also note that every single puzzle was forward solved, so we won't have to skip broken puzzles. We *will* have to skip some puzzles that needed to be done at MIT during the hunt, but not many.

[LordKinbote]

Intro Materials
Introduction to the Hunt
Opening Skit
Greetings from Max and Leo

Current Puzzles:
Next: Raw Bar by James Grimmelmann

Collected Answers:

Watson 2.0

Reused answers:
1. VELVET ELVIS
2. VALLEY
3. TERMINAL
4. EBOOK
5. ADOBO
6. RACED
7. MERCURY
8. COLON
9. UNION
10. CLINTON
11. CHERRY
12. DEPOT
13. BUSINESS TRAVELERS
14. SOUTHWEST AIRLINES
15. OKAPI
16. FORGET PARIS
17. BATED BREATH
18. YOKEL
19. TERRY GENE BOLLEA
20. JOHN ADAMS
21. JERRY WEXLER
22. CAPITOL HILL
23. FIRESTONE
24. SLITS

New Answers:
HARRY POTTER AND THE ORDER OF THE PHOENIX
LUXURY TAX
BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID
I DREAMED A DREAM
ARTICLES OF INCORPORATION
ESTEEMED
HAMBURGER
___________

[Suspence]

I was hoping for one at a time, so we could take a crack at each one, but I understand if the amount of puzzles and the time required would be overwhelming.

Can't wait to get started.
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[LordKinbote]

I can do one at a time if that's what people want.

[LordKinbote]

How about we start at one, and if people want me to speed up, I'll speed up.

First round: A Circus Line

Puzzles were released all at once in this round (and titles are listed in alphabetical order).

First puzzle: 1207 1370 (by C Scott Ananian)

[Suspence]

Tough start. I've got absolutely nothing on this one.

The flavortext is pretty odd, so I assume I need to do something with that as well as the numbers, but I don't have any foothold to begin yet.
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[Scurra]

Well you'll have to count me out on the first round entirely as I did actually look at all of them and I can remember the discussions. (I really wish my memory would remember useful things instead, but no...)
Although I only actually solved one - but I think the team solved all but one of them by the end. (And I solved the meta for this round too, which I am quite proud about, even though it wasn't exactly a tough one. )
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_{still Quiz Olympiad champion. Must get a life.
New definitions: COFFEE - someone who is coughed upon}

[LordKinbote]

[Gomez*]

The punctuation in the first paragraph of numbers is the same as in the flavourtext. I'm guessing each number represents a word. Or maybe not. But it's a start, I suppose. Can't get anything beyond that, I'm afraid.

[Suspence]

Other observations:

In the numbers that tie out to the flavortext, each number is used exactly once. Identical words do not correspond to identical numbers, THE is 3337, 11482, and 216.

Only fourteen of the numbers in the first paragraph appear again in the following paragraphs, so there doesn't seem to be enough to build new sentences by replacing numbers with the corresponding word.

In the numbers that follow the first paragraph, most numbers are used only once. Seven numbers are used twice, it appears all that are used twice have five digits. One number appears three times - 26611

If my count is accurate, there are exactly 200 numbers after the initial paragraph. No idea if that is important or not.

All this has got me exactly nowhere, but I figure it might spark something for someone else.
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[LordKinbote]

Oof. I picked a mean one to start with, didn't I? In general, round one was supposed to be a gentle introduction to the Hunt, and mostly it succeeded. Unfortunately, the first two puzzles alphabetically are probably the hardest of the round.

[novice]

Yeah, this seems hard, so don't take my lack of posting as lack of interest.

[Lepton*]

Some ideas:
1. Perhaps the flavortext contains a prescription for converting the numbers to words. There are many terms that could be construed as mathematical.
2. All the numbers seems to be less than 2^15 (~=32768) which means they are all single-precision integers, of the sort that would be used in a variety of ways on a computer.
3. I see some musical terms, too.
4. There are more smaller numbers than larger numbers, which suggests that the (presumed) procedure that converts between words and numbers is a calculation rather than a table look-up.

I'm keenly following this thread, heedless of our slow start.

[Elethiomel]

So the first paragraph of numbers corresponds to the flavor text. The following paragraphs all start with a single number followed by a period.

360.
453.
676.
5758.
13111.
6421.
9869.

There are seven such paragraphs. So maybe these numbers mean A, B, ..., G, or maybe they mean One, Two, ..., Seven, or maybe even something like Monday, Tuesday, ..., Sunday.

[Suspence]

[Lepton*]

It might be worth noting that, between the flavortext and the first paragraph, we have an interesting pairing

1 one

[Zag]

I tried making a spreadsheet with the words lined up to their corresponding numbers, so I could sort by text and by number. I didn't find it informative, but here it is:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Av_aO1LlTXULdGk3WVByeW5YaE8zdnJPelF2c2JoVWc

I was hoping that sorted by number, the text would say something interesting, but it didn't.

[Lepton*]

[edit]Delete link to cabal web site that was incidentally hosting the text I was looking for...[/edit]

Through the Looking Glass:
"One thing was certain, that the white kitten had had nothing to do with it: — it was the black kitten's fault entirely."

Okay, so translating this entire message is going to require either someone with lots of time or someone who can throw together a script to do it. I am neither of those, but I can resolve a couple mysteries:

360 is "one", 453 is "two", and 676 is "three". 676 is actually the second occurrence of the word "three", after 455: artistic license?

[Zag]

I'm sitting here wondering if you think you've explained something. You definitely didn't make anything clearer for me.

[novice]

I think he's saying that the numbers are word indices from this text: http://www.literature.org/authors/carroll-lewis/through-the-looking-glass/chapter-01.html

[Suspence]

I'm not clever enough to build anything to do the work for me.

I did pull the full text in Word, using the word count feature, I was able to confirm that the 360th word was indeed ONE.

I took the puzzle title - 1207 1370 - and tried the same, but came up with THE THE, which isn't promising. There's a lot of odd punctuation that could affect the counts though, one word off and we'll get nowhere.

Slightly more promising, for the line that begins 676, I get - Three. One (16482) than the (5863 5124) - which at least seems to be the start of a proper sentence.

Anyone got a decent idea for the best way to decrypt?
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[Suspence]

I've got a basic word list now in Excel, but there are enough wonky spaces, characters, etc to make it really frustrating.

I can report that 1207 1307 now equals "Looking-glass words", which makes sense as a title.

My sentences still don't make sense. I'm essentially manually checking each line for issues. At least is looks like I'm good through the first 1307 words. Only 28,000 to go.
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[Lepton*]

Sorry Zag and others, that was a 2 AM posting that was (to be brutally honest) more in the vein of getting recognition for figuring out the first step than for anything else. Shameful. Thanks, Suspence and Zag, for your analyses, which were the necessary first approach.

In case the subsequent posts don't make it clear, the numbers refer to the nth words in Through the Looking-Glass (which including the poem "Jabberwocky", a puzzler touchstone). So the number 360 refers to the 360th word in the story, which is "one".

Capitalization doesn't seem to be respected but, like Suspence notes, word counts are tricky. Can we be sure the puzzle creators also used the Guttenberg edition, for example, and not an edition that replaces "didn't" with "did not" early in the text and, for that matter, counts "didn't" as one word (as a text processing program does) and not two?

My conception for a tool to solve this would be a shell/sed script that reads through the text file, counting spaces, and displays the word after the (n-1)th space. If we had such a tool, we could refine it using the flavortext translation -- catching ambiguities like those mentioned above -- and then translate the rest. I imagine this was the intention of the author, in giving us such a large translation. I don't know when I'll have a chance to do this.

The flavortext's stilted style seems reasonable, since the author had a limited vocabulary from which to draw, and the content matter is more-or-less in line with Through the Looking-Glass. The title remains a mystery to me: "the the" doesn't seem like a great title for a puzzle.

[novice]

I had to make sure not to count isolated apostrophes and dashes as words, and I had to change "no one" to noone.

Decoded text based on chapter 1:

[novice]

The first chapter counts 3242 words, and according to the first paragraph, word 3243 should be "She". I'm not sure where to pick up after Chapter 1, then, since Chapter 2 begins like this:

[Elethiomel]

For calibration purposes, it looks like:
5758=four
13111=five
6421=six
9869=seven
25291=count
16482=more/less
25525=letter/character?

[Elethiomel]

Actually, 3243 should be I, just like the first word of chapter 2.

"3243 thought to 3683" should translate to "I thought to myself".

[novice]

[novice]

Chapter 3:

[Suspence]

Nice work. Given the progress here, I can abandon my method, which frankly stunk.

I can't decide if I really like this puzzle or really hate it.
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[Scurra]

[novice]

[novice]

Chapter 5.

[Lepton*]

Wow, novice, fantastic work.

[Zag]

Awesome sauce!

I have to say, novice, now that you've been hanging around here for almost a month, your puzzle-solving skill and your puzzle-making contributions have been terrific. I assume you found us through Google, and it makes me glad that we opened our site up to Google, once again. Even though it is bringing us more spammers (sigh) it has also brought us some really great new members. I hope you and El plan to stay around for a long time.

[Suspence]

[LordKinbote]

"Novice" is a misnomer, apparently.

Solve it quickly, because Puzzle #2 is one of mine, bwahahaha.

[Suspence]

I've got everything parsed correctly now:

ONE . WHAT WORD NUMBER IS THE FOURTH IT FIND THAT MANY OF OF . THAT LAST OF HAS AN EVEN NUMBER WITH A REPEATED FIVE . DOUBLE THAT NUMBER , TWICE . WHAT IS ONE MORE THAN THAT
The fourth IT is word 54. The 54th OF is word 3558. 3558 doubled is 7116. 7116 doubled is 14232. One more is 14233, and word 14233 is TANGLED.

TWO . SUM THE WORDS OF JABBERWOCKY . ( AFTER THE FIRST EIGHT , THE SUM SHOULD BE ONE LESS THAN THE LAST HELMET . ) TAKE FROM THIS SUM THE EIGHTH TAKE , THEN DIVIDE BY TWENTY
The sum of the words in Jabberwocky is 488621. The eighth TAKE is word number 12801. 488621 - 12801 = 475820. 475820 / 20 = 23791. Word 23791 is TALE.

THREE . ONE LESS THAN THE SIXTH SQUARE
The sixth SQUARE is word 5908. Word 5907 is SEVENTH

FOUR . START AT WORD ONE , COUNTING ALL THE LETTERS . AFTER THE FIRST WHITE THERE SHOULD BE THIRTY . AFTER THE FIRST KNIGHT THERE SHOULD BE THIRTY NINE HUNDRED EIGHTYSEVEN . HOW MANY AFTER THE FIRST THOUGHT
Letter count after the first THOUGHT (word #1657) is 6653. Word 6653 is WORD

FIVE . COUNT HOW MANY PEOPLE . COUNT HOW MANY OYSTERS . COUNT HOW MANY IDEAS . ( SUM IS TWENTY FIVE . ) PEOPLE TIMES PEOPLE TIMES OYSTERS TIMES IDEAS IS
There are 13 PEOPLE, 10 OYSTERS, and 2 IDEAS. 13 x 13 x 10 x 2 = 3380. Word 3380 is BEFORE

SIX . FIRST PRETTY IS A NUMBER WHICH NOTHING DIVIDES BUT ITSELF AND ONE . FIRST SAID IS ANOTHER SUCH NUMBER . FIRST PRETTY TIMES FIRST SAID IS
First PRETTY is 47, first SAID is 109. 47 times 109 is 5123. Word 5123 is SECOND

SEVEN . BEGIN BEFORE FIRST WORD AND MARK EACH A , E , I , O , AND THE LETTER THAT SOUNDS LIKE YOU . MOVE PAST ALICE SEVEN TIMES . YOU HAVE MARKED ONE THREE THREE SIX LETTERS . MOVE PAST ALICE NINETY MORE TIMES . HOW MANY LETTERS HAVE YOU MARKED
I get 11501 vowels after the 97th ALICE. Word 11501 is GOOD


TANGLED
TALE
SEVENTH
WORD
BEFORE
SECOND
GOOD

Not sure what to make of TANGLED TALE. The second GOOD is word 1220. Seven before that, word 1213 is SULKY. Doesn't seem satisfying, so there is probably either more to do, or one of my calcs was off, making one of the bold words above incorrect. If so, it's most likely the last one, as one wonky vowel would ruin the whole thing.

In case anyone else cares, here's an Excel file with each word numbered.

http://www.glpics.com/suspence13/LookingGlassParsed.xls
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[Scurra]

The last step of this one was my sole contribution to solving this puzzle.

But that clue doesn't look quite right to me (it's not the word I remember looking up, anyway.) So yes, the last word "good" may well be wrong.

<looks up word 11501 on amazing spreadsheet. Finds word I do remember looking up very close by.>

The only real issue I have with this puzzle is that very last word. Whereas the clues provide a little bit of self-correction, the last clue can't do that nearly as well since there is no real way to know if it correct except by getting the wrong answer.
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New definitions: COFFEE - someone who is coughed upon}

[Suspence]

Comparing one of my first shots at this to the spreadsheet above, I found that I had replaced FAVOURITE with FAVORITE. If you use my sheet for anything, you'll need to make that correction. This ups the vowel count on the 97th ALICE to 11502.

Word 11502 is OPPORTUNITY, giving:

TANGLED
TALE
SEVENTH
WORD
BEFORE
SECOND
OPPORTUNITY

The second OPPORTUNITY is 25148. Word 25141 is INVITE. Not sure what I'm looking for, but this doesn't really get me anywhere either. Perhaps I've got a few more vowels missing.
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