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[BrianEnigma]

[Meta] [Poll] Pietro's Maze

[Axys Denyed]

In the immortal words of Futurama, "You watched it! You can't un-watch it!"

[SteveC]

I've ceased my mapper development. About to vote move on, I do think however that the level of detail that came out of no-where suggests that it wasn't such a "mistake" that it was all released.

However, who knows, there may be more clues hidden in there somewhere that we've not noticed? But the level of detail (eg, the blanked off areas?!) is pretty huge, so who knows.

[Leeravitz]

While I appreciate that the amount of info that's been revealed in one go is (perhaps) more than the PM's would have liked us to have seen straight off, I'm not sure it actually gives us that much further information as to what's going on. It confirms a number of things, and will help fuel new lines of speculation, but that's about it for the moment, I think. There's nothing definitive and solid that's emerged from what we've found, exactly.

Equally, I remain baffled as to what the PM's hoped us to get out of the Mazes without any brute force application - on the one hand, we might have got there eventually through mapping development, but even that is the sort of work that a) has a degree of brute force behind it and b) is so specific linked to individuals capable of applying it that it reduces the fun for a large proportion of the ARGing community who can't easily get involved with the mapping process.

Moreover, we started mapping mainly because the OS needed to play the game properly was unavailable to virtually everyone. So, if we'd waited for a while, then everyone would have (presumably) have had more ready access to the mazes proper. And that, in turn, raises the hideous spectre of the community slogging through several hundred (several hundred??!) separate mazes, and being rewarded (very slowly) with pieces of a sentence, bit by bit. How would anyone have actually stuck with this - especially as no - one can get beyond level 6 manually. If there had been 10 levels, then this might have been a reasonable challenge, pitched at just the right level to make it tricky, but not impossible.

I don't think it really compares to the '333' puzzle, which was actually rather well designed - a simple clue that anyone could answer saw the stuff sent out in the mail, and then everyone pooled resources effectively to come up with a revealing new set of details from the pages they'd been sent. It wasn't the case that the code itself was an anagram, which had already been substituted into a Vignere cipher, after being expanded from a binary notation, or something ridiculous like that! And just as well - it was just challenging enough to make us feel glad that we'd solved it, not befuddled at its impenetrability! Sure, the maze work is at least a coherent puzzle - solve the mazes, get the codes...but, like I say, no - one wants to do this at the rate of a word of a day for a year (or, at least, I assume they don't)...

Well, that was a rant, rather than an answer. I think the die has been cast, too. But, frankly, I feel we've all been a bit shortchanged by the whole thing - why couldn't it have just been a solvable puzzle, for crying out loud, and then we wouldn't have to be undertaking these discussions...

[firefox]

I hope it's well and truly over. A puzzle im glad to see the archive end of.

honestly what were they thinking?

[DogsHead]

I can't help myself - I love it when the apple-cart goes arse over. Go the geeks!!

[yanka]

I just wanted to say a HUGE thanks to Brian, SteveC, and all the other guys that made the apps. You guys ROCK! Without you, there'd have been only a handful of people able to play with the maze at all. Actually, I think MC owes you all big thanks, as you have basically done the work they should have done to begin with. Feh.

Anyway, though I'm voting "glad to have it done and over with", I hope you don't feel that your efforts are now somehow unappreciated. Again - you rock, and I thank you for all the awesome work you've done!

[Scott]

mathematically speaking, it is impractical to suggest we do the entire maze. JebJoya did some math (he's good at that) and came up with it taking one person three months to do the whole maze. There appears to be a fFew dozen people right now who can play with the maze at all on their machines. now, like, i realize, i good solve should take a couple days, even a week. but what we are talking about here is on the scale of requiring everyone to run the maze on autopilot continuously fFor a week in order to get pieces of the collective solve. and the very very last message (the one you get when you fFinish the whole maze) would not be arrived at until sometime in october.

I am well and truly amazed at brian & steve's abilities. Your work was not in vain. without you doing what you have done, there would not be nearly as much data as there now is. we would have only a couple people tossing up screen shots now and then. now, i actually have a fFun maze to play with. heck, i may just setup a server system at work to let the maze play thru till october. (er, probably not, tho)

I'm gonna call this maze either a miscalculation on the part of the PMs (they didnt quite work out how complex it would be); a spot-on calculation by the PMs (they *knew* we would decompile it, eh. so make something incredibly hard, and wait fFor the wolverines to kick in); or a fFault in outsourcing (the developer didnt quite get the memo about hard the game should actually be, and didnt have time to beta-test it)

[Seej]

Of course, there's a possibility which we've not really considered yet - maybe we were expected to solve the maze by decompiling it. After all, there's plenty of people on the board with various computer skills so it wasn't unreasonable to assume that someone would be capable of decompiling the maze.

Then consider that Michiko Clark said they'd only done six or seven of the mazes in PPC - if their higher puzzle-solving skills could only get less than 1% of the way through the puzzle in a few days then maybe it was supposed to be clear to us that short of an astounding amount of grunt-work we were gonna need an alternative method to solve this. Perhaps decompiling it and interpreting what we got was the real puzzle to solve, and a solution that PPC residents were unlikely to immediatley see since they're so used to solving puzzles. Trouble is, it's kinda ambiguous when you start wondering if this was the intention - it smells like brute force, but it was so much more elegant than the alternative (elegance is surely the antithesis of the brutish approach).

Then again, maybe I'm full of it; who knows? Either way, what's done is done and personally I'm glad I don't have to leave my computer on all day with with an app slowly running through all the mazes. Good work guys.

[zaeil]

I've been wondering about whether decompiling was the intended solving method, myself.

I mean, I personally had been rolling around Maze 6 for four days when Simon posted his spoilers, and I'd covered only a 65x115 section. (I was mapping manually, just in case it might help someone else, so I took my time.) At that rate, it probably would have taken me another eight days to get to the seventh maze. And if the seventh one really does pull a maze randomly from 7-1005, I'm guessing that we wouldn't know until we'd finished and got our different sets of letters (unless the game output the random maze number somewhere). And then we'd have to spend WEEKS, maybe even MONTHS (even with bots!), rolling around that thing to get all of the letter pairs. Honestly, I can't imagine any of us wanting to spend that much time on the game, no matter what the potential reward might be for doing so. All of that, plus the limited usability of the program that pretty much required us to peek inside to devise ways to operate it...well, the decompilation might have happened a little sooner than expected, but I think it probably was expected.

Anyway, I have to add my thanks to the pile to all of you who worked on the input programs--the telnet option was absolutely ghastly once I hit maze 6, so your programs really helped save my sanity. And I also have to say, I'm glad that it's over and done with; I've looked at the spoilers and am moving on!

[tanner]

id like to say that hacking code is far more elegant than rolling bloody balls around all day - IMHO

but i wont

[WolverineFan]

I voted for "parallel work" then read all the responses. If I could figure out how, I'd change my vote to "consider it done"