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[supersekretsrsly]

Read a bit about the game, here's some things I noticed:

- Text on the main site has the 'e' in 'searchers' capitalised. Alexa's twitter does not (SEarchers vs Searchers, but they're the same picture)

- Binary above the word 'oxford' spells jª© in HTML character entity code.

- Word association for Oxford, assuming it's Oxford, could throw up words like college, Cambridge, university etc.

- End to End is probably a reference to end to end encryption given the binary picture above it.

[Billy Brown]

I've tried a good few Oxford-related words and I'm starting to think that we should be leaving that behind for now, particularly as it has appeared on the progress page.

Maybe we should be trying words associated with blink?

[katbee]

I'm probably way off but when looking at the progress page maybe we're supposed to be moving on to solving a puzzle relating to the next image (the New Horizons space probe)?

According to wiki, new horizons set the record for the fastest man made object to be launched from earth, which might tie in with
Daphne's blink and you might miss it clue.

[Syke]

soo...

[stringstheory]

OK, game over guys...

Your task is now to sort ALL of the words I posted here into three categories. Email these to Daphne when you're done. Best of luck!

The words are:

factory
Much Ado About Nothing
Zero
press
Mowtown
publishing
suburb
saxophonist
largest
Handbook
Alexander Pope
clues
time
American
mistaken identity
variable
Magna Carta
Heroic
scientific
link
known
triangles
reclassified
omnipresent
ubiquitous
adaptation

edit: fixed to cross out "zero" and account for the differences in capitalization.

[Billy Brown]

Interesting. Surely the point of the game is that Alexa could have come up with any words in response to ours, so it seems doubtful that this is a pre-determined list of words. If that's the case then we need some kind of generic groupings -- maybe nouns, verbs and adjectives?

I also notice that a few words were spelled with an initial capital letter while the majority were all lower case. For most this was just correct grammar (Magna Carta, Much Ado About Nothing, etc.) but there was also Handbook and Heroic, which struck me as odd. Maybe that's nothing, though.

Also, I'm not sure if 'zero' should be part of the list -- it was a response to somebody asking about the relevance of Malcolm Gladwell (author of a book called 'Blink') to the puzzle on a scale of 1-10.

ETA: Alexa has confirmed that we're working with a list of 25 words/phrases so as suspected it's the list posted above minus the word 'zero'.

[mrshomersimpson]

[Syke]

MrsHomerSimpson,

I think Alexa was referring to the list of words that SHE said.
So i dont think Biscuits made the cut! lol

In any case, anyone gotten started on this "one of these things is not like the other" kind of game? 3 lists....

or shall i start?

[Billy Brown]

[stringstheory]

OK edited my post to cross out zero and also to account for differences in capitalization. like Billy Brown i also noticed that both Handbook and Heroic are capitalized like the other proper nouns on the list.

[Billy Brown]

I emailed a guess to Daphne a couple of days ago as a first attempt (nouns/verbs/adjectives) in the hope that her reply would feature some kind of further hint. Unfortunately I've not heard back yet.

Has anyone else heard anything from Alexa or Daphne? I'm pretty stumped at the moment.

[supersekretsrsly]

I'm going to try a few variations on categories, one I noticed is that you can sort the words into variations of nouns:

Concrete Nouns

press
factory
suburb
saxophonist
triangles
Handbook


Abstract nouns

variable
publishing
largest
clues
time
Heroic
scientific
link
known
reclassified
omnipresent
ubiquitous
adaptation

Proper nouns

Much Ado About Nothing
Alexander Pope
mistaken identity (legal term)
Magna Carta
Motown
American

I'm not sure if these are allocated correctly, I didn't study linguistics. I haven't received a response from Alexa to subscribe to the roster, but I sent the email a week ago. Anyone heard anything as of yet?

Will think of a few other variations and see how it fits.

EDIT: Another idea is that the words are categorised as part of a word association game relating to the latter three images of episode one. In that case, "End to End" is referring to espionage/cryptography, the Hubble telescope to math/science, and the Rosetta Stone to law/language.

So perhaps the categories are: Espionage/cryptography, math/science, and law/language.

[Billy Brown]

I've had a reply from Daphne to my noun/verb/adjective list:

Nice work! I would argue that press could also be a noun and reclassified could be an adjective.

You've proven that you can find a pattern among chaos (albeit a small amount of chaos), but I'd like to push you further and see if you or the other searchers can attempt to sort these by topic.

Back to the drawing board!

[Billy Brown]

I replied to say that I'd have another go and Daphne had this to say:

I want to reassure you that your first response was correct. There are three possible responses and that is one of them. The second is sorting by topic (this is subjective), and the third is for you to figure out yourself.

[fernandocarulli]

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