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[sixsidedsquare]

Yeah cather, the braille can be seen as the white dots (where each circle is moved to) in the image linked in the spoiler tag. Great work on the solve daniel, and great breaking down of the process.

Now for a bit of a self postmortem. I think for this thread the initial jump was too big, too much trying of ideas with no return. A better structure could have been to have a simpler first step and put the larger leap a ways into the puzzle, so that you would have already had some positive result to encourage continuing. I considered putting a visual hint to doing the spinning and locking in place in there, but thought with this being obvious the whole thing wouldn't have stood for more than the first look really.
The other thing I wasn't too sure about, that I was glad daniel clicked on, was the long marks indicating the morse splits. I had also considered instead putting a list of numbers somewhere corresponding to the size of each morse character (i.e. 3 3 4 2 1 3), but had thought it would distract too much during the first step and could get too fixated on before it was needed.

So any comments or shrieks of hatred?

[GreenWindmill]

[catherwood]

I'm blind (pun intended) to many hyperlinks on this forum, due to low contrast, so i missed the 2nd hidden link to this intermediate step image.
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3557/3481907677_18c42bea9c_o.jpg
of course I do see the white circles in ^that^ image. However, I would not have seen it as Braille (and even now still don't), because the spacing is too uniform. I would recommend spreading out the sets, giving the break between Braille letters. I agree that there was too much trial-and-error to get to the first step, without any flavor text or visual hints to prod us, but only because the required image manipulation is harder than pure data manipulation puzzles. I'm happy to do trial and error with ciphers, because I can run them thru Excel or other tools quickly, but I wasn't ready to commit to transferring this one to paper to play with. It's good to get us out of that rut sometimes, so I have no complaints about the methodology here. Now I wonder if this could have been written as an animated/interactive Flash puzzle...

[la!uep]

Six, I enjoyed it a lot just as it is. I don't think the initial exploring was that bad. With a larger playerbase, I think it's just right. The only thing that kept sending me on a goose chase was the placement of the marks inside the circles, which to me it indicated this was the point where the compass made it's mark, and thus I kept using it as the referential point for each circle. This of course didn't help when all my arcs where drawn from these points, neither when I tried swinging the circumference points. What would have helped, maybe would be having those marks at the centers, and thus the arcs passing through the centers would cut the three horizontal lines at regularly spaced intervals. Another possibility is to include some tickmarks on the horizontal lines at the points where the Braille grid would potentially have a dot centered on it.

The thing about the spacing of the Morse is that, with these few characters (or less), a dedicated puzzler should be able to generate (manually or automatically through some scripting) all the valid Morse code configurations, discard those that seem like gibberish, and study the candidate list to pick the right answer. I'm 99% sure if someone showed me a candidate list for these ones I would have picked the right answer from the context. Then, those slightly different marks can be made even more subtle, and could act as confirmation for this final Morse search.

I still don't have anything ready. Like Windmill, I'm playing with a few ideas and trying things and coming up with some silly or too complicated results. Maybe next week. But in the meantime, I'd like to share three videos from a year and a half ago in which I collaborated with a few little puzzle-ish elements. The puzzling component and player participation in these is of a very different kind, a particularly free but also difficult approach which, when done right, sometimes results in a very satisfying experience. Much more passive in the active "solving" of anything, but somewhat intense in researching the potential meanings and intentions of things, and much more involved with story development, theorizing, and speculating. All the video/art/sound/music selection/editing/production/writing etc, etc, etc is the work of one of the most amazing artists/PMs I've had the pleasure of playing with. Just want to make sure all credit goes to him, as my contribution is just with the few puzzling concepts there. Feel free to ask me here or in PMs about it. Watch the 3 short installments in order but leisurely, leaving some time in between for as much reflection as possible, as if they were events on three different nights a few days or a week apart.

Inner World
Tupelo Sky
Requiem

I hope this is not seen as spamming, and I apologize if anyone sees it as such and will edit these out of here if asked. I really think most people playing here would enjoy them, and I'm very interested in any discussion of this strange type of lite/symbolic puzzling.

[Rogi Ocnorb]

Sorry for being out of pocket on this thread for a while. Lots of projects coming to fruition/completion all at once.

Wanted to say that that was a well done puzzle with nice twists and progression.

I gotta give props to daniel, again, as I'm pretty sure (for the reasons he already enumerated) that I wouldn't ever have figured it out. Using the spoilers up to the Morse part, I was also stuck trying to turn what I was seeing into Morse. On this one, I consistently missed trying the things that it turned out to be. Or maybe it's just the curse of the EI ² background image. I've only been able to get 3 out of all of those puzzles.

The suggestions for improvement by both Six and daniel seem appropriate, for this venue and I'm sure it'd be just right for a larger audience.

[sixsidedsquare]

[la!uep]

Six, that 4D thing looks like it wants me to find where to make a winning move, but as you already know I suck at this initial search with these puzzles. And the 4D is exploding in my brain, especially when trying to see all the possible "diagonal" plays.

I've also found myself avoiding most if not all the mindless code and cipher geeking. Sure at first it's cool for someone to learn how to use some tool where they paste a bunch of random letters or numbers into a field and push a button and out it comes in perfect English (or Urdu) text, clean as a whistle. But after a while, it gets old. People just plug things into the black-box decoders without giving it any thought, and it's gone to a point where the puzzling is gone missing.

In this light, back in the day I made a puzzle in which my decoder had been pwnd and a bunch of ASCII-text encodings had gone all wrong. The point was to get the puzzler to stop and pay attention to what they were doing with the black-box decoders like this popular one. The concept was interesting, but I'm not convinced it's worthy of a puzzle. As an example I've simplified it a bit for a quickie here:

[sixsidedsquare]

I agree on the dislike of the use the black box decoders with no idea of what's going on. I prefer when people are made to think a little and have to understand what is going on (which I am totally not doing below really, I've already reached my thought quota for this week).

So I've gotten a ways though your numbers, but not all the way:

[cjr22]

So, iterating six's method we ...

[Rogi Ocnorb]

You got me on that one.

While I did resort to trying a decimal decode at the site daniel listed, I took his statement to mean that using said tool in any way would be a waste of time and didn't even investigate the base64 window. So, I spent all my time trying various substitution methods and funky word math.

[danteIL]

I don't know if you guys have been following the Electron-innovations game (UF thread), which has been a veritable puzzle-a-palooza, but we are currently stumped on 4 remaining puzzles (out of 36). For a couple of these last 4, we probably just have yet to make the right random associations, but for at least one -- the one attached below, affectionally called "Bubbles" -- we have had no success on even knowing how to start. (Also remaining: "ClockDial," "Face/Orbits," "UrsaMajor" - the IG E.I. forum has threads on each)

So, I thought that perhaps some of the followers of this thread might enjoy tackling this. Obviously, there is the big caveat that I have no idea what the correct solution is -- most of the other solutions have been historical or cultural in nature (e.g., people, artworks). If a possible solution(s) is found, it can be tried in the game -- ask how. I'm doing this because we have made literally no headway on how to approach this one and I'm kinda desperate

[sixsidedsquare]

A few things from looking at it before I got to bed. I've played a little with what seems the obvious thing, connecting letters to numbers as written in the text. Tried counting the total number of circles intersected for each row of lines, but gave up after getting 10, 8 5, 5, 6, 9, 9. What was interesting though was just how many of the lines between pairs didn't intersect any circles (I'll have to mark all of these out tomorrow, unless someone else does before then).

A few other facts; the pairs not used are as follows:

[sixsidedsquare]

I'm not normally one to double post, but some stuff from this post by QtheC on the EI forums may be useful:

[la!uep]

To follow up on Six's observation, when joining a letter to a number with a line, out of all the possible letter-number pairs (64 possible lines), 16 of the lines pass through without touching any bubble, which seems too many or too lucky if the bubbles were placed randomly. That's a 25% chance of not touching a bubble for a random pair.



However, among the given pairs, 53 out of 98 (54%) pass through without touching a bubble. I'm pretty sure this would not happen by chance and is significant. Perhaps it just means one or 2 of the most common letters in english (e, t, a, etc) are represented by one of these "no touch" pairs.

Here I've marked with a "t:" those pairs that do touch a bubble:

[Rogi Ocnorb]

Sorry I've been away for a while.
Once again, daniel comes through with the twist that goes somewhere.

Formatting your list of "touch" vs. "non-touch"s as 7-bit ASCII, where touching a bubble equals a "1" (and plopping a "1" on the front for each line). Gives the binary:

Spoiler (Rollover to View):

1000010 1010010 1001111 1010111 1001001 1001001 1000001 1001110 1101101 1001111 1010100 1001001 1001111 1001110

Which converts to:

Spoiler (Rollover to View):

"BROWIIANmOTION"