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[Dionysus]

[mapmaker]

[tom_in_bristol]

I guess you could rearrange the chalkboard into a 4x10 grid to match in with the answer sheet, e.g.

A B C D
E F G H
I J K L
M N O P
Q R S T
U V W X
Y Z 0 1
2 3 4 5
6 7 8 9
! ? " -

...and somehow pick out letters? It got me nowhere when I tried, though. I (like others) am slightly sceptical about the chances of the chalkboard image being relevant to the final answer.

For the record, i've done some research that leads me to believe that the "instruction set size" is likely to be a number 100 +/- 50 . i am assuming the "size of instruction set" is a reflection of the complexity of the computer controlling the probe and looking at suitable microprocessors from the early- to mid-1970s, and how many instructions they typically would have. Any thoughts techno gurus?





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[crouchosarus]

Mapmaker is right sorry Dio, I sorta agree mapmaker but the thing is the didn't give us the chalkboard for no reason... It is set up that way on purpose or to represent school/quizzes.

Could someone say the bonus question here? My comp won't view pdf's unles i put the m on the comp itself, and I can't find a way to download it do to the pic

[Dionysus]

[crouchosarus]

Good point, but I semi-disagree with what you are saying... I understand the mediary and that the chalkboard doesn't matter. But I don't think that we need to use the answers we have to answer the bonus. I think they all work together

[Caspian]

@Crouch: The bonus question reads:

[madam o'brien]

I half-agree with Dionysus' rejection of the relevance of the chalkboard. However I decided to fully explore that approach before trying others.

My approach is similar to the one taken by Rogi Ocnorb, but I've extended it slightly and got a slightly different result. (Perhaps we were working from a slightly different set of answers.

I took the answer and encoded them as base 4, i.e. a=0, b=1... this gives

C 2
B 1
A 0
C 2
A 0
C 2
D 3
B 1
C 2
C 2

This can be transcribed as a base4 number in 2 ways - starting at the top or the bottom. For both base4 numbers I translated to base 10 then base40 (by hand/excel).

Base 4________Base 10________Base 40
2102023122___598746_________inhz
2213202012___686214_________j18n

I tried emailing these two 'names' but no reply yet. I'm too new to the game to recognise any meaning in these answers.

[Rogi Ocnorb]

Not sure how you did your base 40 conversion, Madam, but mine likely had some floating point issues. What method/tool do you use? I've been looking for something that does bases greater than 36 with defined characters for some time, now.

EDIT: This is a longshot, but maybe we have found our answer... "inhz" could mean "In Hertz" or "cycles per second". A measure of speed for processors is "instructions per second". They're really not the same thing, but we might be looking for the number of instructions per second that Bronco's robots were capable of executing.

[grumpyboy]

email from Seth:

[Caspian]

See Seth's latest email, also confirming the quiz answers.

The email suggests that we won't get the bonus answer from Seth and Igor's lack of response to my email suggests we won't get it from him. It's such an obscure factoid that we probably won't get it from anyone else so it seems pretty clear that we will indeed have to determine it from the other 10 answers.

[crouchosarus]

Well now as I run out of ideas I get another, I just actually filled in the station quiz sheet to see what that would do, didn't do much, but the lines conenctng form a design

[Rogi Ocnorb]

If Bronco used "off the shelf" components like a 1750A processor, we still need to know the specific manufacturer as each includes their own subtle, proprietary instructions.
If it is the 1750A (Which NASA does seem fond of), the MIL spec doesn't give the total number of instructions, that I could find. Only a reference to the size requirement of 65,536 words.

EDIT: I've called in some help from a buddy at Intel to "interpret" the Bonus question. No reply, yet.

[tom_in_bristol]

I was thinking more along the lines of a mid-1970s early 8-bit processor such as the intel 8000 series, only like you I think it would be... unreliable to guess a model and then have a stab at the number of instructions, although in this case the number would be likely to be in the region of 50..150 ?

I've come to the conclusion that either the answer can be deduced from in-game information we have already, or that we could determine the answer from the rest of the science quiz PDF.

Another thought is, how would we use the number when we do find it - I'd like to think the rest of the quiz answers come into play in terms of a solution as well somehow.

This solve is proving more stubborn that it looked at first! But strangely captivating....

[Caspian]