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[Molnar]

No, I am just passing through. I learned my lesson last time around; hence the reason I didn't present any work, and only hinted to the setter that his puzzle was solved.

[la!uep]

[Rogi Ocnorb]

Nice, clean puzzle.
Kudos on working out the equations.

I totally should have approached it the other way around.

And yes. I did originally post Sauron for the 6-letter part and then, rethought the bolding, causing a change.

ETA: I've got one ready if nobody else wants to go.

[sixsidedsquare]

Shoot.

[Rogi Ocnorb]

What Am I?

[pancito]

A baseball diamond is diamond shaped. Don't let anyone tell you it's a square. The focus it at the vertices. Sure, you could call it a square, and you'd be right, but you'd be soooooo wrong. I don't care if rule 1.04 does say "The infield shall be a 90-foot square." The rules don't use the word diamond at all, so what do they know.

In the same vein, radio requirement must be the whole "may not be rebroadcast or retransmitted without the express written consent of the Commissioner of Baseball" bit, and the ditty has to be "Take Me Out to the Ballgame." Or not. I don't have a clue what this puzzle is doing.

While I'm rambling and ranting may I say how much I hate the singing of 'God Bless America' during the seventh inning stretch? Isn't the National Anthem enough (or two national anthems at Blue Jays games)? No, I don't much care for the DH rule either. And if one of those big companies (Like AT&T) really wanted to make an impression on me they'd hand over some money and say, "No, name it after the greatest Giant that ever played, even if he is still alive. Call it Mays Field." (I love Barry, but he's just the greatest player that was ever a Giant.)


Has this turned into the weird math thread?

[Rogi Ocnorb]

Jeez, man.

It's not like I was asking for the configuration of a PRR T1 or a B&O N-1.

[sixsidedsquare]

I got no answers, so how about some observations.

The 'base' in baseball is italics, leading to thoughts of number bases. Seeing as there are only 4 symbols this makes me think base 4 (and give me thoughts of one of my older puzzles ). Now none of the numbers would likely have a preceding zero, so that would count out Δ or + as being zero. I would take a random guess at ordering by corners so that would be Ο=0, +=1, Δ=2, □=3. Next step here would be to convert all the numbers using this to base 10 and see if anything is noticeable, but it's late here, so tomorrow if no one else has by then.

I've got no idea for the second hint, but the third seems to be in the format of Series Episode, being series 2, episode 1. I got no idea what the P01-36 means though, page?

[pancito]

I'm just in a baseball frame of mind and can't think of anything else. Sorry.

And those are easy... 4-4-4-4. So base 4. (=HOME!)

[Rogi Ocnorb]

Okay then...

MLB 1950 or NL 2009

[doublecross]

Don't know much about baseball, but the cipher consists of:

29 sets (17 different variations) of four symbols, between three and six long.

If a circle is 1, a plus is 2, a triangle is 3 and a square is 4, which they tend to suggest, translating the lowest value to 'a' and so on gives pmfiliqiaqjkghjlaebiqofgnqqcd - could be a substitution cipher. No 'baseball' in there, though.

Adding each together and taking the corresponding letter gives: NMJNPNRNERIJJKIPEKHNROJJMRRJI. Not much there, plus the 17 variations boils down to only 10 different letters. Probably not a cipher.

Could be base four, but then why no zeros? Could be base three (with each digit one less than above), which gives a range between 18 and 426.

[sixsidedsquare]

Ha, so me and daniel were kicking ideas around in chat and stumbled upon the almost solve. I'll spoil it bit by bit of anyone doesn't want to see it all at once:

[la!uep]

Ahh here we go, Six, even your "S02E01" hunch was right!

[Rogi Ocnorb]

Good job, guys.
Not sure where that plus sign got dropped. It was probably during the constant re-pasting I had to do to get the [i] tag to fire without the board converting all the symbols to their decimal HTML entities. It stores characters such as the Delta symbol just as you see them on screen, but if you make any change to the post, at all, it'll convert certain of the Unicode characters to decimal codes on "Preview" or "Submit". (Does anyone know why it does that?).

Sorry for all the baseball and train diversions. Six had done everything perfect in his last post but mentioned decimal as his next step. So I wanted to give more "sixteen" hints. (Since the whole "squaring bases" hint didn't really work). Isn't it more common to refer to Unicode characters in their hex format such as "006E' instead of "110" for the one where I dropped the MSD?

The 2nd hint was of the kind I really seem to not do very well at.
"Radio Requirement" was supposed to be "Aerial" and "Distinct tribute ditty" was supposed to be "Unique ode". Arial Unicode is the best common Windows font for seeing stuff like "ɯnısɐpısdn".

Batter up!

[sixsidedsquare]

All right, I've got one fresh from the oven here. Heavy influence from the styling of puzzles in a current game and actually based around one way I thought one might be solved (so Rogi might have to hold back on this one for a bit, because I think he heard the speculating). It actually turned out a bit more sparse than I would have liked, but oh well. Have at it.