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[aninterloper]

[pancito]

I agree with Rogi on this one. Even the last clue doesn't help me because the only two things I can think of that ART might be abbreviating are 1. Since he's a scholar, article, but you don't do that, normally; and 2. since he's a geometer, arc tangent, but isn't that ARC? So I'm still at which has been my story pretty much all along.

[aninterloper]

The numbers are separate from each other. They will lead you to the answer, but an examination of the link posted earlier should intuitively narrow the answer to only a few words. You might be best served by guessing.

[aninterloper]

The numbers are a vector into the article.

[pancito]

I will guess:

Proposition 27 (vol.2 of Euclid's Elements)
"In equal circles angles standing on equal circumferences are equal to one another whether they stand at the centres or at the circumferences."

OR

Proposition 12
"If two circles touch one another externally the straight line joining their centres will pass through the point of contact."

I don't have any faith that either of these is correct.
[/img]

[aninterloper]

Nope, it's a single word. But at least you're guessing. Thank you!

[pancito]

OK

Greek, Euclid, Archimedes and just for the hell of it, Fred.

Greek because article one isn't, really, Euclid because Euclid rocks, Archimedes because that was his most significant contribution, and Fred because it's my favorite random name. In other words I don't have a clue what I'm supposed to be looking for. Did one of the Greeks come up with Cartesian coordinates and then it got lost for 2000 years? Wouldn't surprise me, even if they didn't have zero. They had Zeno instead. (Go Achilles, go!)

[aninterloper]

Well, if the numbers were 1,2,5 the answer would be "Clifton".

[pancito]

That should make it 'Palimpsest' Unless I can't count in which case it's Archimedes...

So a better read is TLHeath ART(icle), 227. I was just really confused on this the whole way.

[aninterloper]

Congratulations, that's it. You really earned this one by sticking it out. Sorry it was so confusing.

So, this was my first puzzle ever, and I've got quite a few lessons to take away, it seems. First and most important is you can never have too many clues. I was afraid if I put too many in it would be too easy, but it was too hard in the first place anyway, and also people think differently and some people need different clues than others. Second I think is to make it more incremental, instead of a couple of large leaps, it needs to be many small steps, with some confirmation at each step. Otherwise people get discouraged at trying things without making progress. And then finally I need to be sure to make my puzzles very precise so people can't get them wrong even when they're on the right track (ie. city coordinates).

[Rogi Ocnorb]

Would you mind posting the clues you provided for the overall effort? Those things that were supposed to direct us through the puzzle.

It wasn't till last night, while talking with SixSidedSquare that it sunk in for me that "danspiece" was meant to be "black belt" and refer to the line of black pixels on the picture.

I'm kinda dense, sometimes.

Do Go players get belts?
What "ART"(icle) are we referencing? Link?

In the interim... Go for it, pancito.

[aninterloper]

Well, the basic idea was that I wanted to encode city names as coordinates in a "map" image. I decided the easiest way to do that was to find a normal image, resize it, mess with the brightness/contrast, and add the coordinates as black pixels. So the major clues in the image were meant to lead you to treat the pixels as lat/long coordinates. The key words I centered around were "black" and "degrees", and that's how I happened on the Dan system.

Anyway, here were the clues and how I was hoping it would work:
There were three major clues leading you to treat the pixels as lat/long coordinates: first, the picture was resized to 1800x900, dimensions which remind one of spherical coordinates. The second and third are related, and meant to reinforce each other: the title, "danspiece" and the manipulation of the card on the side, with "grade" and a black piece. I was hoping, first, you'd notice that "grade" was the only word left in the picture, and that I had added a black piece right next to it. Comparing to the title, the "piece" was meant to match the black piece and the "dans" and grade were supposed to go together, which, if you researched the subject of the picture, you'd immediately realize was the Dan system used to grade black belts. In the wikipedia article on the Dan system, which is where I assumed you'd look, is this sentence: "The character of Dan (段, dan?) means step or grade, but is commonly equated with degree." That points directly to it, but even without it I was hoping a connection would be made between black pieces and degrees. Then it seemed a matter of course to associate the black pixels with black pieces on a go board. And through that associating the coordinates of the pixels with degrees as in the two clues. Although I didn't expect you to go through all of that consciously; if you had just noticed the black pixels, gotten their coordinates and compared them to the size of the image to note that it looked like spherical coordinates, that would have been fine, too.

Once you got the lat/long connection, I thought it would be fairly simple to match to city names, because I had tried as much as possible to be precise in my coordinates and pick cities that were relatively isolated. Unfortunately that didn't work too well with Google Maps at different zoom levels, as we found out. I had to make each coordinate both above and to the right of the previous so that you'd get them in the right order.

OK, now as for the phrase, "TLHEATHARTTVOTVOSEV", a couple of things: the original phrase was "T. L. Heath article, paragraph two, sentence two, word seven." However, that was way too long to find cities for: I had to shorten it by taking out all the unnecessary information I could. So, I took out the vector indicators, hoping that someone looking at the article would realize the numbers were a vector into the text, as is a fairly common technique (for me, anyway) when given a body of text and a set of numbers (especially in threes). There are different ways that could be set up, of course, but with only three numbers and the assumed notion you'd be looking for a word (isn't that sort of a rule in this thread?), I figured it would be pretty guess-worthy; also, the word found, "palimpsest", was striking and a good candidate for an answer among us hobbyist cryptographers (in fact, if you know much of Kryptos, that word just leaps out at you). Anyway, I also shortened the "article", figuring you'd probably go to the Wikipedia article anyway (which is what happened).

So, anyway, that's sorta the process I wanted you to go through. I think it would have definitely been easier with more people playing, since each person looks at it a bit differently and there would have been better chances that someone would get each step.

[cjr22]

Constructive (I hope) criticism

[pancito]

I don't have anything ready, so if anyone else does, be my guest. Maybe tomorrow.

I was totally standing on the shoulders of giants on this one. I don't think I got any of the solves. On the ART TWO etc. I read into it to much and failed to put the comma in (Eats, shoots, and leaves...). That led me to the second article within the article. Making good puzzles is hard... I have about two that I'm a bit proud of.

[pancito]

I now present you with this bit of silliness.