Start Transmission

Let me say that this point blew our mind when we found the solution. I think you’ll see why below. I was also really excited that we were able to get this point without really anything in the way of clues from the CM after the initial tweets.

This point started simply enough:

Start transmission #thegintercode

— Ginter Code (@TheGinterCode) March 11, 2015

I immediately spotted that this tweet happened at exactly noon (plus 14 seconds). That was then followed by 28 more tweets over the next 5 and a half hours, all of which consisted simply of a number, like so:

15 #thegintercode

— Ginter Code (@TheGinterCode) March 11, 2015

I'll save you some scrolling and skip the rest of the tweets, but they were all similar to this one, with some positive and some negative numbers. I spent my afternoon waiting for the next tweet and entering it into a spreadsheet. I also had a hunch that the time the tweets came out would be important, so I recorded that into the spreadsheet as well.

And Finally:

End transmission #thegintercode

— Ginter Code (@TheGinterCode) March 11, 2015

We had to stare at this one for a while. The key here was that we noticed that the Start Transmission tweet happened at exactly noon. That tipped to us that the time of the tweets had something to do with the solution.

Once the tweets were all recorded into the spreadsheet, Jason and I started trying to make something work. We played around with a few different methods using the time and the text. We tried taking the number of minutes after noon. We tried summing all the tweeted numbers. We came up with several lists of numbers. We tried matching those numbers to card numbers and also set up an alphabet table with 1=A, and continuing several times through the alphabet.

The winning combination ended up being the minutes since the last tweet, plus the number in the current tweet. Add them together to get a number, which corresponds to a letter in the alphabet, where A=1:

In case it’s hard to read, that spells “Do This backwards for the hashtag.”

After a major adrenaline rush, we tried to figure out how to do it backwards. The solution was to start with the “end Transmission” and then did the same thing backwards, so minutes between the end transmission and the last tweet, plus the number in the last tweet.

Read this one from bottom to top, it spells:

@TheGinterCode #lifeisfoundinthequietmoments

— Bosun Knows Best (@BosunKnows) March 13, 2015

So you can see why this one blew our mind. the code was designed so that you could do it forwards and backwards and get a message both directions. This was a case where we realized how much time and effort the Codemaster had to put into designing some of these points. We were really impressed with this one. The excitement of finding a readable message was followed by the excitement of finding the solution. We had a lot of fun with this one.