The hunt is over...

logged on this morning to the Codex Maya chat only to find out the hunt's already finished... did some hunting last night ;p so much fun!!! but this morning, disappointed to find out we didn't win, haha... a team called "physical plant" found the hunt object at 6.35pm sunday (whatever timezone mit is)...

oh well, i guess that means i should start study again... ;p

to let those of u know what kinda puzzles they are - they're really difficult, with many logic steps involved... commonly, a combination of things like ciphers, anagrams, translation, odd-one-out, general knowledge, are required to solve each puzzle... there are over 100 puzzles for the whole hunt i think - and some of them are meta-puzzles, requiring the answers to a large set of other puzzles...

i only really worked on 2 of them, which were quite interesting... one of them involved a crossword puzzle with all words 7-letters long, without any numbers to mark where words would fit... and clues all yielded 8-letter answers!!! it turned out that all of them could have one letter dropped from them to still yield credible words, and that those letters dropped were "u", "d", "l", and "r"... naturally, this makes one think of "up", "down", "left", "right"... so began the painstaking task of fitting these into the only way they'd fit into the grid, in the direction indicated by the dropped letter, and it worked!!! ;p

the other one involved blogs... ;p funny that... there was a mysterious grid of letters, and i noticed early on that the words "xanga", "blog", "journal" and "diary" could all be found in it... but we ditched that after a while and set about trying some cryptography and summing the numbers in base 26 and translating back... things like that take time... we shouldn't have wasted it!!! turns out that the original track was correct... "blog" was part of "modblog", "journal" was part of "deadjournal" and "diary" was part of "diaryland", all other online blog sites... another blogsite that could be found was "blurty"... i hadn't heard of any of these except xanga!!! but when you look at the remaining letters, u get "usermhofive" -> logged into each of those blogsites in turn with username "mhofive", and fair enough, we're presented with a code!!! the code was rapidly unwrapped, and it sent us to yet another blog site... where the clue to the final answer was found... phew!!! ;p what a chase!!!

hehe... anywayz, i didn't get any sleep until 3.30am, this morning, thanx to the hunt... unfortunately there's no consolation prize, or else i think we were 2nd running or something... ;p oh well... it's fun anyhow, i encourage anyone to join next year's one, or do the melbourne uni one when it comes around later this year!!!

;p

ciao,
dave