unforum

[Ziola]

Well, this was posted on the IG forum.

[la!uep]

Well, we had that a few days ago:

[sixsidedsquare]

The Melbourne Uni Puzzle Hunt is a competitive team based thing, so posting about puzzles on an open forums probably isn't the best idea. What could work for anyone wanting to play along though, is to jump into IRC and chat with a few others of us who are playing.

If you haven't got an IRC client the mibbit browser based one is pretty good. To get on:

• head over to http://www.mibbit.com/chat/
  
• click the server button at the topish and type irc.chat-solutions.org
  
• type a nick to use into the 'Nick box' (some characters not allowed) and #puzzletome into the 'Channel' box
  
• hit the 'Go' button

Anyone is welcome to jump in, but expect that people in there might not be active when you first go in. I'll try to catch people coming in and say hi at least.

As for a new puzzle, I'll add to this post in about an hour, I got an idea that I just need to chisel out.

----
[edit]

Wow, that was a long hour. The chiseling took longer than I expected and I couldn't quite make it how I wanted, so it turned out a bit rough around the edges. Anyway, hope there were no mistakes:

NSTHFOSTINTHDISMYFIRT
NOTISECONTNOTIHRIDICE
ANDALSNSION-BUTFOUNDW
IWANINGATTHISNOTPUTIT
ISPALASTCOMENGANDITAS
INTHESETUPBUEEXECUTIO
N-MYINTHEPUZZLEBUESOL
UTION-MYTUNDWITHPATIE
NOWITHCOMPREHETMYFOUR
THISNOTHLAZINESSNORTE
NTION-MYFIFARTOFPOSTI
NGBRTOFASTALL-MYSWITH
THESOLVILSOENDSITALL-

ANWH-OMY-ELSA
N-H-TO-=IT-ON
S-AWT-WIL-COM
EOLE-TRAVUT-L
IKE-SWER-PATB
E-FOUNDFTEN-T
URAY-BUT-IL-A
LWAYS-AROUND=

[la!uep]

Ok first thing this one made me think of is those amazing Fibonacci disappearing squares, like here, since we have 21x13 and 13x8 rectangles made of what seem like cut up words.

The two styles are used to separate the letters into a series of increasing squared Fibonacci numbers: {1,1,4,9,25,64,169} are the squares of {1,1,2,3,5,8,13}. This is visually expressing one of the many properties of the Fibonacci series, which is that the sum of the squares of the first n Fibonacci numbers is the product of the nth and (n + 1)th Fibonacci numbers.

So many words can be made up though! And I can even read some words vertically on the right edge? Hmmm...

[edit1]
So it seems that after putting all the letters together a sort of riddle should come out, one of those "my first is in ___ but not in ____, my second is in ____" and so on. I think this includes words like laziness, patience, and comprehend. But there's also some sort of "meta" explanation about the puzzle, the solution, and the art of posting?

[edit2]
Spoilered for your puzzling protection!

[Rogi Ocnorb]

I think I'm getting to the last step in rearranging okay. But I can't find a number that (at that point) is a multiple of none of it's digits.
The closest I can find is 573 ("ECG" or "ElectroCardioGram"), which can't be the answer as it is a multiple of it's last digit.

Maybe I've approached it in the wrong way.
Removing any numbers that have 2 or 3 of the same digit.
Removing any numbers that include a zero.
Removing any numbers that include a one.
Etc.

Doing it the other way around, I can see some likely "words" that satisfy the last bit:
BEG
FBI
FIG
GED
GIF
HID
But; they can't be reordered in any way to satisfy the "multiple of each of its 3 digits" part.

[retsbob999]

The number also cannot have a 3 because if the three-digits of the number add up to a multiple of three, then the whole number is divisible by 3. Therefore, no matter how you rearrange the numbers, it will still be divisble by 3. The same is also true of 9.

[la!uep]

It does say "translate" after converting the numbers to letters (from which language should be obvious once you have the word).

The digit elimination approach should leave you with just a few cases to test. Only one satisfies all conditions.

[retsbob999]

There can also be no 5 because with a 5, the original number would not be able to have 2, 4, 6, or 8...leaving only 7. Then there wouldn't be three different numbers.

EDIT:

[la!uep]

And thus, this time at least, Bob's it!

Good job. The clincher was discarding that 5.

[retsbob999]

Yea, once I got rid of the 5 and determined that the 7 had to be the last digit of the final number, there were only six posibilities for the final number.

I'm not one for making puzzles, more of a puzzler. So, someone can take my turn if they have a good one.

[Rogi Ocnorb]

I fear I never would have gotten there as I totally blew off the "0=a, 1=b..." part. My 827 was "HBG".

[sixsidedsquare]

Well, since my other got eaten up so quickly, I think I'll throw out another quickly by reaching back into the Vault for another Puzzle Time Forgot. Now this one might take a bit longer, as it's another one of my terrible old ones. I looked a little into it and I think it's still solvable (one of the others laying amongst the dust back there in the Vault that I tried was an even worse one than this, and had a glaring spelling mistake to boot). I don't remember the answer, but I'm sure it'll come back to me when someone get's it.

[cjr22]

Is that picture attached properly? I can only get a low resolution version of it. Could be that I just suck at forums, though...

[sixsidedsquare]

Nope, that picture is actually that small. The dude I made it for wanted it small in file size I think, and back then I thought small file size = small image dimensions. You might want to zoom some on it, but all the important details can be made out, sorta.

[la!uep]

This is what I could make out: