unforum

[BrianEnigma]

[PUZZLE?] Maze

[Leeravitz]

How bizarre...
A desperate man, his very brain tissues disintegrating moment by moment, frantically spends his final moments constructing...a small puzzle involving a simulated ball bearing sliding across some coloured blocks. Those darn Perplexians, eh?

Still, it's clear that Salk was trying to encode some final clue or testimony into this set - up in order to implicate his killers (or something of the sort)...but how?

Is there meant to be a clue in the design? It seems more likely that he invented an actual game, and were we to 'win' at it, we might be rewarded with something. Of course, that presupposes that we know what the rules of the game are, and what we're aiming to achieve. Any further ideas on this one?

Given the current lack of technology preventing the majority of us from playing the damn thing as well, I guess we'll all have to wait a couple of days till they've come up with the arrow - key friendly version, or whatever other thing they're coming up with.

[invfish]

I am willing to bet that the entire maze itself when looked from above (or some other angle) is a symbol or spells a word. From the games creator website it looks as though the maze has disappearing platforms and teleportals so that could make it more difficult to distinguish.

[Seej]

Just for the sake of completeness, there's more on this over in the General forum.

[Leeravitz]

Agreed. Of course, the discussion over in that thread hasn't really starting touching on what the puzzle's for, either. I imagine that while we're focussing on what Salk's been doing, we'll discuss things in the 'General' thread, but once we can start getting our teeth stuck into the actual maze, I figures it rather deserves to be discussed in the 'Puzzle' thread...wouldn't you say?

[Although how much discussion one can have of an interactive puzzle is an open question]

[BrianEnigma]

So after doing a little homework I was able to successfully map out mazes 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. There is a 6th maze that I have not had time to investigate.

After each maze is complete, the window is cleared and some plain white text appears.

[Seej]

Leeravitz - absolutely; this forum is for solving puzzles (like this maze) and the other one is for discussing what's going on with the people behind the puzzles and that sort of thing. Just thought a cross-reference was appropriate to ensure no-one missed any information.

BriEnigma - keep on digging cos there's still a little more info there

[SteveC]

If anyone's on a PC and wants to at least give it a go, here's a simple method how (I've gotten to maze 6 doing this, but gotta sleep rather than mapping it, Motorcycle CBT in the morning!)

run the app in your favourite java environment (sun's works great), you'll get a window up with the ball in the invisible maze

now, open a dos box and telnet localhost 5399

you'll get a blank box that you can type into. Make it so you can see that box and the maze screen at the same time, and in the telnet session type [0,15]. The ball will move down. the first number is the x axis (tilt the computer left/right), the second number is the y axis. -x for left, x for right, -y for up, y for down. The numbers are all multiples of 5, and 15 is the lowest it will react to.

There's also a port 5398, I've telnetted and tried a few commands, including KJIC, but no luck

[SteveC]

More speculation, info...

Telnet to port 5398 while playing and it outputs data.. For instance, four moves provided:

¶¶▲▲▲▲
¶((((
¶▲▲▲▲
¶((((

they were similar moves... I wonder if this could be input for another program? Someone want to capture it properly (eg, in binary rather than text like I have), and see if it's making any more sense?

Umm,

[BrianEnigma]

No motion sensor? I think I have something that might work. Looking at the Perl program that launches the app, it basically runs a command-line program that gathers motion sensor data from the laptop. It then launches the Java app (which will run on ANY operating system). The Java app sits there, waiting for input--which isn't through the keyboard, but through a socket that it listens on for motion data. The Perl then opens up a connection to that socket and keeps handing off motion data to the Java app. Yes, it is a very convoluted and roundabout way to do that kind of thing.

What I've effectively done (and SteveC did manually) is to bypass the hardware-dependent motion program and feed fake motion data into the Java program. It opens up an extra window that takes your keyboard input to create that fake data.

The archive containing the application as well as the C source file is here:
http://perplexcitycardcatalog.com/notes/maze/maze_keyboard.tgz
Be sure to read the readme for how to start it. Movement is done by the arrow keys, with the spacebar stopping motion. The numbers 1-5 adjust how much "force" you are using.

It remains largely untested on anything but my own machine, which has several development libraries installed, so there is a chance I am missing a library in the archive.

It *should* run fine under Linux with a recompile since the only dependencies are ncurses and Berkeley sockets. An enterprising Windows programmer may be able to get it to compile and run in the Cygwin environment using Cygwin's GCC and curses.

Edited to add: The "ncurses" library is required. If you have OS X Tiger, it's already in there. If not, you may get an error message about "/usr/lib/ncurses," depending on whether you selected it when the OS was installed. If you do get the error, locate your install CD, search for "BSD.pkg" or "BSD Subsystem.pkg" and launch that. It will install the necessary files.

[BrianEnigma]

Well, all, I'm off to bed. If there is someone...anyone...out there with a machine that can run the maze program, I can spoil a bit of Maze 6, which will save you an hour or two of work: http://perplexcitycardcatalog.com/notes/maze/maze6-partial.png

Someone please, please, pretty please solve this before I wake up in the morning. I can't possibly believe I am the only person on earth with the right hardware.

[b]Edit[b]: I forgot to add the cheezy "you are here" arrow. You start in the upper-left corner.

[fabs_uk]

i've just started mapping out the maze and, uh, it's different to Brian's


not quite sure what to make of this so far......so if you're doing this make sure your map is the same!

[Bongadoo]

Decompiles .class

[AnotherUselessPwn]

Hey, just wanted to let you guys know that I am out of school now for the summer. I have been in computer programming for 2 years now so this was up and running on my computer in no time, I'll start working my way up to level 6 then continue off of what you have discovered so far.

[zaeil]