zotmeister | (no subject)

Current Mood: exasperated
Current Music: "Shake the World", ForeverGirl

(no subject)

You'd think that, when testsolving for a competition where most puzzles don't have given rules, people would read the rules for those puzzles that do have them very carefully. I know I thought that. I was apparently very wrong. [facepalm] - ZM UPDATE: More importantly, you'd think that the testsolvers would be given the complete instructions to begin with. [headdesk] But even more importantly than that, you'd think that the constructor would provide an error-free puzzle so that the previous two would even make a difference! [bodyfloor]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Just curious, were you the constructor of the Seeking Scotchy puzzle? (I'd ask this in a better place, but this is the only method I know of to contact you)

Indeed I was. In fact, that's the puzzle I was referring to in this post.

My email address is on my profile page. - ZM

Nifty; that one was the highlight of my weekend.

Just curious, is there a purely logical solution to the final puzzle (where the answer is extracted)? A large group including SnapDragon and I stared at it for a good while and got a little over half of it after being very clever, but we moved on when other people guessed the answer from our progress and confirmed it. I'd take another look except our team never digitized it so I'd have to reconstruct it.

Thank you very much! You just made MY weekend :)

There is a deducible means of solving all the grids (all were composed without computer assistance), but the last three nodes on that last grid are a doozy, no doubt about it. I would need to have the puzzle in front of me, with me actively trying to solve it again, to describe it.

I've got the puzzle available here: http://members.cox.net/ztm/Scotchy-v2a.zip

- ZM

I do have all of that; it's just that I don't have the final grid filled in, and I haven't found the time to go through the mechanism again.

Ah. At the moment, I don't have a ready-to-solve version of the final grid, but I'll be putting one together tonight for the solution page. I'll post a link to that as well once I have it done. - ZM

When solving Seeking Scotchy, I guessed that it was the puzzle this post was about. As a result, when explaining to people who were joining me in solving it, I would explain how it worked, and then encourage them to read the directions and tell me what I had missed. Once I had the fact that the Spirit could be adjacent to a node, and the fact that there was a unique path to the spirit, the puzzles were great fun to solve.

Have you done any more of this puzzle type? I really enjoyed solving these (and solved 2 of the ones other people did during the hunt this morning).

If you were putting these in a puzzle book or other on-mystery-hunt setting, you might mention explicitly that each node is adjacent to exactly two other nodes, or exactly one node and the spirit or start space, and that the start and spirit are each adjacent to exactly one node. This is all a consequence of "exactly one path from start to spirit, which uses every node", and it was fun to work this out during the hunt, but it seems like it should be mentioned explicitly in a friendlier-than-the-mystery-hunt solving context.

Did you do any other puzzles for this hunt?

I'm glad you like them! I have done more Seeking Syren puzzles, right here on this blog! Puzzles 14, 16, 34, and 48 are Seeking Syren puzzles; I don't have them individually tagged yet, but I do have a "puzzles" tag to narrow down the search space. It was actually considered at first to not put the instructions in with the Hunt puzzle and instead let people find the four-year-old original rules on my blog, but we decided against that. At first, the instructions I wrote for the Hunt were a cross between my "concise" instructions and the numbered list I have with Puzzle 14; they were being misinterpreted to the point that one of the editors actually removed a rule, apparently thinking it just a grammatical touch-up, before giving the testsolvers the result - which led to this post. Of course, I had made a silly lettering error (where it now reads 'TAXI COGITO' in Treyarch's Big, it used to read 'HEYY ABBOTT', which breaks the final grid), so it was hopeless at the time anyhow, but the whole affair led to the way I presented the rules in the Hunt. The specific issue was that solvers were thinking that only routes that used all nodes had to be considered to determine uniqueness, which of course led to seven solutions for Skywalkers' Callsign (which was designed to showcase that one omitted rule...).

The sample has the spirit cell adjacent to a node. Somehow, someway, HQ still got a call from someone claiming the puzzles had no solutions until told the spirit cell could be adjacent to a node. Which justifies this post, come to think of it.

I would love to be able to put out a book of these, if anyone's offering (especially given my current state of unemployment...); if I had such an opportunity, I would likely do what Thomas Snyder did in Battleship Sudoku and present path-only puzzles and island-only puzzles for starters to make sure the rules are clear for each half, along with solving hints between difficulty levels for the main attraction. One thing I definitely would NOT do is say each node is adjacent to anything, as you suggest, especially given the rule that nodes CAN'T be adjacent to each other! I know, you were referring to nodes connected to one another by the path, but I hope you see why it is that I worded the instructions VERY carefully. Sometimes the simplest concepts are the most difficult to rigorously put into words; people go into most anything with a certain set of assumptions, and the job of a puzzlesmith (or at least a good one) is to dispel all the false ones, but at just the right pace.

I also wrote "A Letter to the Prince of Kong", and made the underlying logical element for Bowen's "Mystery Hunt Puzzle 3000". I also ended up re-scripting and hosting Mike's "The Cash Corridor", which despite the immense soreness it gave me for days afterward (and the continued numbness in my left foot) was by far my favorite part of running the Hunt. - ZM

Should I try to interest my contact at Sterling in doing a book of Seeking Syren?

Yeah, right after I hit send on my post, I realized the sloppy way I had used adjacent, and realized that writing accurate instructions for puzzles is even harder than I realized. Your style on the blog of giving two completely independent definitions is a good one; if some one reads an ambiguity into one of them, whether or not it's actually ambiguous, choosing the interpretation that's equivalent to the other set of rules will disambiguate.

I enjoyed "Letter to the Prince of Kong", mostly because it gave me a chance to tell people about the movie. I found the contrast between King of Kong and Wordplay to be very interesting.

Wes was telling me about his experiences hosting "Cash Corridor", so I guess you split the duties. Hope your foot recovers, and just be glad you didn't host "Runaround" in the Normalville hunt, which was even more strenuous.

<Groucho Marx>
I don't think he'd be interested in doing a book of them, but I hope he'd be interesting in having ME do a book of them and him publishing them.
</Groucho Marx>

But seriously, I'd be all for that, and I'd owe you big time if I walked into a Barnes and Noble and saw my book on their shelf!

I'm really glad you like my two-sets-of-rules presentation. I've found it really helps people get to the heart of matters, and when an interpretation issue between them crops up, it lets me know exactly how I can tweak one or the other to make them better match. I said it in my very first post in this journal, and I'll say it again: disambiguity is one of the noblest purposes one can pursue - it is justice for logic.

I actually didn't see The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters until it came out on DVD, and I only saw Wordplay for the first time a few months ago! There is a lot to compare between the two; perhaps the most striking is the producers' influence on the events. Wordplay gets Merle Reagle to make a crossword for the film; KoK invents an underdog story to make Michael Moore proud. (On a side note, the IMDB "STARmeter" says my popularity is up 81% this week, and my teammate Tyler Hinman's is down 5%. Somehow, though thoroughly unintentional, this pleases me.)

Wes took over for me once I was physically incapable of doing The Cash Corridor anymore (I had been awake over 24 hours and walking all over the place before I started hosting). Actually, Todd Radford, creator and host of Normalville's "Runaround", was one of my contestants! He told me about that past event, and said that his participation in "The Cash Corridor" was poetic justice. It is now an absolute given that ANY Hunt I'm on the constructing team for WILL have a gameshow-style puzzle, and I'll be hosting every episode of it if at all possible. Wes supposedly has a short video of me hosting, and if memory serves, it's of Todd's second (and successful) attempt; I'm hoping he still has it and can get it to me. - ZM

So I know nothing of the competitive Arcade-gaming world other than what I saw in King of Kong. So I'd be very interested in learning how it distorted the facts. I've been to the ACPT, and know a lot of people who are featured in the Wordplay, and I found it to be quite accurate and undistorted.

Let me say this right off the bat before I mention anything else: Steve is the real deal, and he's a great guy. My telling him that ape is very cunning wasn't the only interaction we had that weekend, and there was certainly a sense of people mistrusting him about. I didn't buy into it, and let the man play, and he proved them all wrong, and I'm glad I was there to see it. In that sense, there really was an underdog story come true.

With that said, the editors definitely took liberties. There was no faked footage in KoK, as you might imagine (and yes, I really am that much of a dork), but certain things were presented out of order or out of context to paint the picture of a conspiracy. (It's not like they needed to - there was plenty of stupidity going around without them needing to make up a villanous appearance. Suffice it to say that TG is now under new management.) Perhaps the greatest fact-bending is that Steve Wiebe was depicted as wresting a 20-year-old record from Billy Mitchell; he didn't. The editors of the film practically bent over backwards to erase Tim Sczerby from existence, the man that in 2000 did beat Billy's score from 1982. Steve beat Tim's score in 2003, and held the record until January 2006; when his million-plus score was rejected, his earlier score was still the record, and Billy's old score was still third place. The Twin Galaxies forum has a section devoted to the film's inaccuracies.

My personal experience is... well, what I put in the letter. Nothing I wrote in "A Letter to the Prince of Kong" is fictional. There really is a great sense of camaraderie - at least, among most of the players. - ZM

Seeking Scotchy was among my very favorites of the weekend. Friends from two other teams agreed; one of them liked it so much he spent Monday morning at work finishing up the grids he hadn't done during the hunt proper.

I'd actually stumbled across your Seeking Syren puzzles on this blog last year sometime, but almost all of my teammates working on the puzzle hadn't. As you discovered, nobody wanted to read the instructions (TLDR?), which posed a major obstacle to actually solving the puzzles until finally everybody gave in and read them.

A large subset of us went directly from there into Prince of Kong, never knowing they were by the same author. Kudos for some great puzzles!

Thank you very much for the kind words. That's quite the coincidence to go straight from one of my puzzles to the other!

I come from a gaming background, where rules are everything; my puzzle preferences tend toward the logical, where instructions are everything. For that matter, my degree is in computer science, where processes are everything. The thought of people being unwilling to read instructions in order to learn what they're supposed to be doing is so foreign to me that it frankly frightens me! Actually, if you even did so much as looked at the sample puzzle before diving in, then you apparently did better than average. Given the reviews I've gotten, I've decided that making people read rules is a good thing, as the end result is something they enjoy more. I hope your experiences set an example for others to follow.

...Ugh. Mentally edit that previous paragraph so that it sounds like it was written by a human being and not a robot, and THAT is what I mean to say. :)

- ZM

Heh, actually a lot of us were CS people, too, but at Mystery Hunt it seems like people are always in a hurry. I try not to, but sometimes I find myself jumping in and hoping that it will take less time to guess the rules than to read them. (Reading is hard! >_>)

That ... usually doesn't work out.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

(no subject)

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

Loved this puzzle

Re: Loved this puzzle

Re: Loved this puzzle