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 Forum index » Archive » Archive: General » Old News & Rumors
The Underworld Ring of Dishonor
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zerocool
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 		Interesting that now we ended up not needing the password for the online event anyway. The other puzzles are beyond me. The rings of hell one my hint is to realize that heading back towards the start isn't necessarily a bad thing. For ring toss, this site helped me for a lot of it, but then I ultimately ended up giving up on the puzzle as I've had a long day and wasting more time is not in my best interest. If it's not already completely solved by then I may take another crack at it tomorrow.

PostPosted: Wed Feb 16, 2011 11:12 pm
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Alexandra
Greenhorn

Joined: 13 Feb 2011
Posts: 3

 		The event in San Francisco was really fun. I grew up here and I had never heard of Bourbon & Branch, a speakeasy in the Tenderloin, but most of my friends who were there had heard of it. Guess I don't get out much!

We all got a free copy of the book, which was cool. I wish I had thought to have the author autograph it but I was all about the puzzles...

The event was very well run. Hosted drinks - yay! And a speakeasy, as you would expect, has some fine liquor.

We each got a little keychain dongle engraved with "Wired" on the side that looked like a small flashlight but wasn't, plus a sharpie pen attached to it. You could unscrew the dongle - it was empty except for a tiny scroll of paper. Each scroll had a unique ID number on it, plus a phone number for later in the evening.

There were five puzzles, each distributed throughout one room of the speakeasy. We had about an hour to work on them. Our team of four people (all locals) elected to work together rather than split up and solve in parallel, because we each wanted to see all the puzzles. We got to all of them, so it was all good.

I won't spoil them in case the on-line test is still up and you want to have fun with that. But they were all VERY well-designed and fun to solve.

Once the end of the game was called, we assembled in the bar area where Mike Selinker told us what we were going to do next (this is the part where we vied for the five "rings of dishonor").

Each of the solution words to the five puzzles could be mapped to a number somehow. We had to turn to that page of the book, for each number in turn (he didn't give us the number but he told us which puzzle we were on) ... and solve some sort of puzzle or riddle or challenge using a word or words on that particular page. When we had the answer, we were supposed to text our unique ID number (from the dongle) and the answer to the riddle/puzzle/challenge. First to send a text with the correct answer, got a Ring of Dishonor!

I got one! And, I have to say, we definitely had a home town advantage because the five rings went to five locals. Nobody else from my team won (at that point we were *kinda* working together, but mostly working solo) ... but in fact I have played in various puzzle hunts on the same team as all of the other four winners, over the past decade.

It was nice to meet Kinetics (I think that's what you said your handle was) who was out from Boston for the RSA convention.

I would definitely do this again. And a side bonus is I found this forum.

BTW, if you guys like on-the-ground puzzle hunts, there's one coming to a city near you on April 30th - check out www.playdash.org. It will be played simultaneously in 13 cities around the country - everyone will solve the same puzzles. That's a bare bones web site but you can look at the puzzles from DASH #1 here: http://www.playdash.org/1/puzzles/

The locales for DASH 3 are: Ann Arbor, Austin, Boston, Davis, Bay Area, Los Angeles, New York, Portland, San Diego, Santa Rosa, Seattle, Washington DC. This is not-for-profit grass roots event which is run collectively by the GC's (Game Controls) from each city. They are looking to add more cities so if you feel like GC'ing - send them an email!

PostPosted: Thu Feb 17, 2011 2:50 am
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diszaster
Unfettered

Joined: 15 May 2009
Posts: 405

 		Thanks for sharing, Alexandra. And congrats!! Smile
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PostPosted: Thu Feb 17, 2011 10:43 am
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Alexandra
Greenhorn

Joined: 13 Feb 2011
Posts: 3

 		Sharing one puzzle
There was one puzzle that is not up on the web site, so I can share that one. There was a sheet with the signal flag alphabet on it, and five large lucite (or plastic?) donut rings. Each had a single color around the edge - white, red, yellow, blue or black. The surface of each ring was divided into 13 sections, and each section was etched with a geometric design, or was left blank.

When we arrived, the rings were stacked on top of each other, and I believe the directions told us to keep the rings stacked, and extract a 13-letter message from them.

The idea was to rotate the rings in the stack such that pairs of rings would form signal flags, based on the overlaid symbols and the colors. Orient all five rings properly and read around, you get a 13 letter message.

PostPosted: Thu Feb 17, 2011 3:24 pm
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NPL-Blanket
Kilroy

Joined: 17 Feb 2011
Posts: 2

 		Ring-a-ding-ding
Alexandra - thank goodness, a friendly "face".

You mention that one puzzle is not up on the web site (I assume you mean Wired's Decode blog entry).

This only leads me to more questions:

Are the four puzzles that are there the same as you solved last night?

If so, would it be your understanding of the blog post that all one need do is the number-mapping of the solutions and then summing them?

Is the mapping independent of other materials, like the book? When deducing the mapping, are we at much of a disadvantage not having the fifth solution?

Not that it would help me much even if I had the fifth. I've been staring at the four solutions for way too long and can't turn the lightbulb on. I'm sure of the first three, less sure of the object of the fourth's message (ROT-13: TUBFG). Assuming I've got the solutions, the commonality and mapping just escapes me; nothing suggests it's just A-to-Z/1-to-26. Letter positions on a keyboard, telephone numbers, Scrabble values - nuthin'. Time to sleep on it, I guess.

Congrats on grabbing the brass ring, or whatever it's made of.

PostPosted: Thu Feb 17, 2011 7:33 pm
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kinetics31
Greenhorn

Joined: 09 Feb 2011
Posts: 8

 		NPL-Blanket its a Cesar shift cypher where you are shifting 20 spaces. I assume you can get the rest.

Alexandra - It was great to meet you as well and the whole event was pretty awesome. I got my copy of the book signed and got an chance to chat with Kevin Poulsen after his presentation at the RSA Security Conference. I am definitely looking forward to DASH Boston!

PostPosted: Fri Feb 18, 2011 12:08 am
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Alexandra
Greenhorn

Joined: 13 Feb 2011
Posts: 3

 		Re: Ring-a-ding-ding
NPL-Blanket wrote:
Alexandra - thank goodness, a friendly "face".

You mention that one puzzle is not up on the web site (I assume you mean Wired's Decode blog entry).

This only leads me to more questions:

Are the four puzzles that are there the same as you solved last night?

If so, would it be your understanding of the blog post that all one need do is the number-mapping of the solutions and then summing them?

Is the mapping independent of other materials, like the book? When deducing the mapping, are we at much of a disadvantage not having the fifth solution?

Not that it would help me much even if I had the fifth. I've been staring at the four solutions for way too long and can't turn the lightbulb on. I'm sure of the first three, less sure of the object of the fourth's message (ROT-13: TUBFG). Assuming I've got the solutions, the commonality and mapping just escapes me; nothing suggests it's just A-to-Z/1-to-26. Letter positions on a keyboard, telephone numbers, Scrabble values - nuthin'. Time to sleep on it, I guess.

Congrats on grabbing the brass ring, or whatever it's made of.


Hi Blanket. You know me better as Serendipity, of course Smile

Your fourth answer is correct.

After a cursory scan of the four on-line puzzles, they look exactly like the ones we solved at the event. Perhaps Kinetic can confirm that? I think the only reason that the fifth puzzle was not posted is that it was a physical object and could not easily be reproduced in two dimensions.

Each solution should *suggest* a number. You know, like "the Seven Seas" and "the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse." Once the ring-off began, Mike would tell us the name of the puzzle for which he was giving the challenge (we had answer sheets with the puzzle names on them) - if we had solved that puzzle, and made the correct association with a number, we would turn to that page in the book and, using the text on that page, answer the challenge. They were pretty easy - it all boiled down to how quickly you scanned the page to find the word, string, whatever, that was the answer, and then how quickly you could text that (and your own unique identifying number) to Mike's phone.

I HATE texting and almost never do it, and am all thumbs, and only recently was forced by a friend visiting from Italy to text her back a few times (using a keyboard I didn't even know my phone had) - so it's a freaking miracle that I actually was able to send a text - let alone to send it before anyone else did Smile

On that particular challenge, I made the momentous decision to start at the bottom of the page instead of the top, and lucked out.

So anyway, enough about me Smile To answer your question, the five challenges were independent of each other. IOW there was no "meta" puzzle and I think you have basically wrung as much out of the on-line challenge as you can.

However, I don't know for sure whether there was anything meta about the on-line challenge, or whether it was just - solve these four puzzles and send us the solutions - first person to do so, wins. Perhaps someone on the forum can tell us?

The challenges were really easy. Here are four of them, going from memory, and not giving the pages of the book (too much work to figure out which was which at this point). I don't remember the fifth one.

- find a word that contains part of an instrument (three-dimensional contain REED)

- find a word with the same letter pattern as GRINDINGS (SPEAKEASY)

- reading down one column of letters on the page, find the name of a gun (COLT)

- [this one's complicated, not sure I remember it right] find a word on the page where if you turn the first and fourth letter upside down, and change the last vowel to a consonant, you get the name of a major company (can't remember the answer to this one)

Kinetic, so glad you're going to do DASH Boston! Do you have a team?

BTW Boston is a hotbed for NPL members - are you a member yet?

PostPosted: Sat Feb 19, 2011 2:26 am
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Sir Itic - Demon
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 		i think i have everything,
i'm going to send the email now.
wish me luck!

PostPosted: Sun Feb 20, 2011 4:49 am
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Akadriel
Greenhorn

Joined: 12 Feb 2011
Posts: 3

 		Got rings of hell solved. I think the other ones might be above my head.

PostPosted: Mon Feb 21, 2011 12:09 pm
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NPL-Blanket
Kilroy

Joined: 17 Feb 2011
Posts: 2

 		Hey, 'dip' (I wasn't going to presume to address you by your nom in this forum until you did so first),

Thanks to you and Kinetic, I managed to find what was right under my nose. I submitted (words, suggested numeration, and summation) Friday evening and learned soon thereafter that I had it solved, but hadn't been first. I didn't really expect to be; by that time, for all I knew, someone who had been at the event Wednesday was more likely to ring in before me. I imagine we'll learn the name of your cohort in the next TURD post at Wired.

If I don't find out beforehand, I'll see if I can suss out who Kinetic is at DASH.

Cheers,
Blanket

PostPosted: Mon Feb 21, 2011 1:02 pm
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kinetics31
Greenhorn

Joined: 09 Feb 2011
Posts: 8

 		Hope everyone is doing well. With this challenge now over, those anyone have suggestions of where to go next? Also how do you get involved with NPL?

PostPosted: Thu Feb 24, 2011 1:49 pm
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catherwood-offline
Guest


 		NPL
kinetics31 wrote:
Hope everyone is doing well. With this challenge now over, those anyone have suggestions of where to go next? Also how do you get involved with NPL?

Take a look at the website of The National Puzzlers' League:
http://www.puzzlers.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=join

You could also contact a member and hang out with them, online or in real life, to see if you like it first.

PostPosted: Thu Feb 24, 2011 2:04 pm
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catherwood
I Have 100 Cats and Smell of Wee

Joined: 25 Sep 2002
Posts: 4109
Location: Silicon Valley, CA

 		fyi, some write-ups are now out there in the wild...

http://www.tylerhinman.com/blog/posts/235 mentions Wired's Decode Blog and links directly to the earlier article
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/02/the-underworld-issue-exposed/
and the newer entry here:
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/03/the-underworld-exposed-part-2-the-ring-of-dishonor-gathers/

PostPosted: Wed Mar 09, 2011 11:51 pm
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