The Mean Point

This point came in two tweets. At first glance, the first tweet doesn’t seem to be significant, but as you’ll see, it is. We did not see that initially and sort of ignored it for a while.

Apologies for being so late; I meant to post this earlier. This is for a point. #thegintercode

— Ginter Code (@TheGinterCode) November 27, 2014

61 33 53 5 7 29 -23 -23 -25 -36 -52 -31 11 -19 1 10 #thegintercode

— Ginter Code (@TheGinterCode) November 27, 2014

It was then followed by two more tweets, which are small hints:

Does that really add up to 1? Ha, didn't check that. Has nothing to do with anything. #thegintercode

— Ginter Code (@TheGinterCode) November 28, 2014

Sorry, I realize that could sound mean. Not my intent. Some help: As is often the case, find the hashtag, use it first. #thegintercode

— Ginter Code (@TheGinterCode) November 28, 2014

I think by this point, we already knew that the key to this point was the “mean” part. and it wasn’t mean as in harsh or nasty, it was a mathematical mean. That was confirmed in a subtle hint a few days later. Note that this is during the same time as the really hard anagram point, so this hint appears on the surface to be a judgement of how hard the point is:

No points since the last update. I admit the anagram is very hard. More clues coming. The second point is about average. #thegintercode

— Ginter Code (@TheGinterCode) November 29, 2014

This was one of those cases where we didn’t really want him to make any more hints about averages or means. We got that already, and we were hoping (Probably falsely) that we were the only ones who got it.

We still had no idea what to average though. Averaging the list of numbers wasn’t helpful. And on top of things, he gave a juicy hint for the anagram, so our focus was there instead of the mean point.

There was another clue on December 5:

I'm the kind of guy who always reads the introduction to a book. #thegintercode

— Ginter Code (@TheGinterCode) December 6, 2014

For some reason, this still didn’t click for us. We knew it had something to do with an earlier tweet. We were even looking back as far as the original set of 10 +1 rules. We suspected it was the “Appologies for being late” tweet, but had no idea what to do about it.

The final clue:

1415 16159142019 20154125. #thegintercode

— Ginter Code (@TheGinterCode) December 9, 2014

I ignored this at first for some reason, until a few days later, when I had this conversation with my Bosun teammate Jason over Google Chat:

Adam: Any thoughts on his latest hint?

Jason: it says no points today. direct substitution. a=1

Adam: No, I mean the number hint

Jason: which one?

Adam: oh wait, the number hint translates to No points today?

Jason: yea. where a=1

Adam: got it. So we're going to spell the hashtag somehow, using a number substitution.

Jason: it seems.looking at these averages directly substituting doesn't do much

Something clicked at that moment, and 10 minutes later, I had it. The number of words in the intro tweet were the same as the number of numbers in the second tweet. So each number corresponded to a word in the intro.

Take the intro tweet:

Apologies for being so late; I meant to post this earlier. This is for a point.

Convert it to numbers:

1 16 15 12 15 7 9 5 19 | 6 15 18 | 2 5 9 14 7 | 19 15 | 12 1 20 5 | 9 | 13 5 1 14 20 | 20 15 | 16 15 19 20 | 20 8 9 19 | 5 1 18 12 9 5 18 | 20 8 9 19 | 9 19 | 6 15 18 | 1 | 16 15 9 14 20

Then match each word up with the corresponding value from the original tweet. Take the average of each word’s letter values, including the extra number from the original tweet.

You get: 
16 18 15 13 9 19 5 4 9 4 2 5 13 5 1 14

convert that to letters where 1=A, you get:

@TheGinterCode #PromisedIdBeMean

— Bosun Knows Best (@BosunKnows) December 12, 2014