Thursday, August 6, 2015

“9 card shuffle” solution

This is Jason. On January 13, 2015 the CM dropped a new card related point:

I saw two things right away: all the cards are baseball players, and one of 9 in each group is a landscape orientation. Bonus observation: the landscape cards are both pitchers. This led me to some ideas of what might be going on, and my general goal was produce the same number from each grid to represent the new card.

 After some unsuccessful guesses the CM reset the clock and provided a hint:
I wasn’t quite sure what this was supposed to mean. I noticed that the rectangles were the same orientations as the cards in the first row of the other grid. I thought I figured it out a few times with various additions of characteristics of the cards, but a few resets later another grid was sent out:
So now we have three grids and the new one is “special” somehow. Earlier on in the point I collected a bunch of info in a spreadsheet such as last name, first name, card number, length of last name, etc. but nothing was really working out. I switched to just focus on how the new grid was different. After staring at it for awhile I noticed something and it turned out to be the key. Check out the last names in each row of the initial grids, and then check out the last names in each row of the “special” one. Do you see it?

In the special grid the last names of the players within a row are in ascending alphabetical order. This is one of the keys and it’s where my name for the point comes from… 9 card shuffle.

I went back to the original grids and ordered each row by last name and then had a cell with the card number next to it. I’ll walk through the one with Maddux in the first row since that’s the one that the CM hinted about.

Maddux 127 | Simmons 172 | Vizquel 67
Fisk 158 | Teheran 229 | Trout 101
Cingrani 240 | Snider 261 | Strasburg 333

I realized that the hint was saying to take the 9 cards in the grid and produce 3 NEW cards and from those produce 1 NEW card. I looked at what I created and in my spreadsheet I actually had something that looked more like this:

Maddux 127
Simmons 172
Vizquel 67

 I took a leap that each card number would produce one of the digits of the card number and since the sort order was relevant I thought that it might be first card = digit one, second card = digit two, third card = digit three. Do this for each row and you get:

177 - Anthony Rizzo
121 - Freddie Freeman
263 - Alfonso Soriano

I knew I was on to something when I checked out the images of these cards. Rizzo and Freeman are portrait, while Soriano is landscape like in the hint.

Adam happened to sign on, the clock was ticking down and I told him where I was at. I had not made the next logical leap yet, and was not sure yet how to get to a single card from here. Adam suggested I just do the same thing again with these cards. Sort and then pull the digits:

Freeman - 121
Rizzo - 177
Soriano - 263

This produces card 173 - Jose Fernandez

The three cards from the other grid in order are:
Bautista - 185
Holliday - 170
Lester - 103

As you can see you get 173 again, so it’s confirmed that this is right. Point scored just before the clock reset - pretty fun one.
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Monday, August 3, 2015

Enter Properly

This is Jason again. Grant’s right.. typing the solutions up are almost as challenging as the code itself! On November 14 the CM launched this one with this tweet:
At first I didn’t see it and was focused on the “heard it in song” part which took me to the Larger than Life inserts - Paul Bunyan, Johnny Appleseed, Davy Crockett, and Pocahontas came to mind due to their respective songs. The style of the tweet also had me thinking that this was a return to the profile style point. “His” knocks out Pocahontas and “Trying to pass, his line ended here” knocked out the rest of the candidates so I started doing some research on the other cards in this set and found Casey Jones.

I learned that his full name is “Jonathan Luther Jones” - hm.. this seemed to match up well with “Enter Properly”. He died in a train accident (“line ended here”) while traveling toward Vaughan, Mississippi which seemed to solidify that this was definitely the “who” on this one. The door wasn’t obvious yet even though it had already been said. I went back to the original tweet and then read it aloud - “Heard it in song or read it…” ah-ha. Reddit!

That realization led here:
http://www.reddit.com/user/jonathanlutherjones

Like some of the other profiles nothing about it makes it obvious it’s correct. Now to figure out the password… I had already “entered properly” to get to the profile so the only unused part of the tweet seemed like it had to be the password - “his line ended here”. I wasn’t getting in, and it sounds like ParanoidAndrew was also puzzled at the same spot. Keep in mind other active points were happening at the same time, so I think that took it’s toll a bit.

It was on the 18th that this tweet came and proved to be essential:
Ok.. so we have the proper name for Mark Twain and details about his birth and death - similar to what you might see on a headstone. I processed this a bit and considered if I had to find the text on the actual Casey Jones headstone, but abandoned that pretty quickly. I went back to my idea that “his line ended here” pointed to the password and applied the formatting hinted at in the Twain tweet. With a password of “VaughanMS” the Reddit account opened, and my heart started racing.

I figured Andrew had to be really close and I was frantically trying to find the text telling me what I had to do. I’m forgetting exactly where the message was, but it said to:
Change the password on the account.
Change nothing else. Doing so forfeits the point for all.
Tweet the famous last words of Casey Jones at the CM with hashtag CaseyJones.
When prompted, provide the password.

 As someone that had never been in a Reddit account I was now frantically trying to find the option to change the password. I found it, changed it and then just sat for about 10 minutes catching my breath. After a double and triple check I posted this:
To this the CM replied “And?” and I replied “bosunknows”, the new account password. Point Bosun!
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