This is Jason again.
As the title suggests this one started with a simple question, and an image of a bunch of cards and question marks:
A few more things were said about this one at the beginning:
Just like the other card points I spent awhile at the beginning bulding a spreadsheet with all of the card numbers, names and other information. Part of this process involved looking at the backs and scouring for anything interesting. That reminded me that “games played” was a stat, and I figured that would be key, but I wasn’t sure how quite yet.
So I stared and stared at my spreadsheet with no revelations, and then a tweet arrived shortly after midnight (for me). I think this is the infamous one AM tweet :)
The next morning I woke up and somehow my brain figured out the biggest leap in my sleep as I sat up and exclaimed to myself, “It’s a sudoku!”. At that moment I had not really mapped out how solving it worked, but I knew that’s what was happening - I think it was all of the talk of nine.
Back to the hints:
Top three? The whole nine yards.
Bottom six? Two out of three ain’t bad.
In a sudoku there are three criteria to fulfill:
Let’s look at a bit of what was going on, with each number representing the games played on the back of the pictured cards.
first cards of the first three rows:
918
257
463
middle cards of the first three rows:
356
???
278
third cards of first three rows:
274
368
159
putting it all together you get:
918 356 274
257 ??? 368
463 278 159
Using the three criteria we determine that the missing ??? are 194, and that then fulfills the “whole nine yards” for the top three.
We'll skip the process of solving the sudoku, but the gist is that each question mark represents 1 digit in the sudoku grid. Cracking it required finding the missing digit that goes with each question mark.
After cracking the sudoku we have these numbers:
194
5
734
38
26
78
582
At this point Adam and I had a chat debate about whether these were card numbers or if these were “games played” on the back of cards. The main selling point of the card number argument is that it would be easy. After a bit we decided it was definitely the “games played” statistic, and then started to look through every card in the set to find them all… ugh. This was a bit of a painful process, but we were able to identify a card that worked for all of them (almost). There is no card that matches 582, and after some more debate we decided that the intention must be to use 5 (again) and then 82. The fact that Schoop showed up twice in the original image was interpreted by us as a bit of a hint that this was the right decision, so we went with it.
We assembled an image, tweeted it:
As the title suggests this one started with a simple question, and an image of a bunch of cards and question marks:
Would you like to play a game? #thegintercode pic.twitter.com/GsuLujuXxF
— Ginter Code (@TheGinterCode) February 26, 2015
All the cards that can be seen are players. Where a card is missing it’s replaced with one, two, or three question marks. Seemed plausible that this was telling me the number of digits in the card that was missing. Interestingly the number of cards per row appeared to be four for most rows, three for the first three rows and five for one row, so.. inconsistent and so far not helpful.A few more things were said about this one at the beginning:
The box score only exists for the top three of this one. #thegintercode
— Ginter Code (@TheGinterCode) February 26, 2015
No restrictions on the number of entries this time, as obviously multiple cards are needed. They must be in the right order. #thegintercode
— Ginter Code (@TheGinterCode) February 26, 2015
They must be in one tweet. Order them as if you're reading the cards in the grid like sentences on a page. #thegintercode
— Ginter Code (@TheGinterCode) February 26, 2015
The CM saying “box score” really sent me the wrong direction for the first couple of days on this one. Especially when I saw that there were nine rows, and at least three cards per row. I thought maybe this somehow represented nine innings for a team in a particular game in history… which of course was not even close.Just like the other card points I spent awhile at the beginning bulding a spreadsheet with all of the card numbers, names and other information. Part of this process involved looking at the backs and scouring for anything interesting. That reminded me that “games played” was a stat, and I figured that would be key, but I wasn’t sure how quite yet.
So I stared and stared at my spreadsheet with no revelations, and then a tweet arrived shortly after midnight (for me). I think this is the infamous one AM tweet :)
Top three? The whole nine yards. Bottom six? Two out of three ain't bad. #thegintercode
— Ginter Code (@TheGinterCode) March 6, 2015
I was about to fall asleep when my phone buzzed telling me that tweet was posted. I read it, and nothing clicked immediately. I got out of bed, opened my spreadsheet and stared some more particularly at the first three rows, but after a few minutes I chose sleeping over insanity.The next morning I woke up and somehow my brain figured out the biggest leap in my sleep as I sat up and exclaimed to myself, “It’s a sudoku!”. At that moment I had not really mapped out how solving it worked, but I knew that’s what was happening - I think it was all of the talk of nine.
Back to the hints:
Top three? The whole nine yards.
Bottom six? Two out of three ain’t bad.
In a sudoku there are three criteria to fulfill:
- Each row has 1-9
- Each column has 1-9
- Within each box of the sudoku you then have 1-9 as well
Let’s look at a bit of what was going on, with each number representing the games played on the back of the pictured cards.
first cards of the first three rows:
918
257
463
middle cards of the first three rows:
356
???
278
third cards of first three rows:
274
368
159
putting it all together you get:
918 356 274
257 ??? 368
463 278 159
Using the three criteria we determine that the missing ??? are 194, and that then fulfills the “whole nine yards” for the top three.
We'll skip the process of solving the sudoku, but the gist is that each question mark represents 1 digit in the sudoku grid. Cracking it required finding the missing digit that goes with each question mark.
After cracking the sudoku we have these numbers:
194
5
734
38
26
78
582
At this point Adam and I had a chat debate about whether these were card numbers or if these were “games played” on the back of cards. The main selling point of the card number argument is that it would be easy. After a bit we decided it was definitely the “games played” statistic, and then started to look through every card in the set to find them all… ugh. This was a bit of a painful process, but we were able to identify a card that worked for all of them (almost). There is no card that matches 582, and after some more debate we decided that the intention must be to use 5 (again) and then 82. The fact that Schoop showed up twice in the original image was interpreted by us as a bit of a hint that this was the right decision, so we went with it.
We assembled an image, tweeted it:
— Bosun Knows Best (@BosunKnows) March 6, 2015
And then Adam made this amazing post to celebrate and as a bit of a shout out to Steve who really wanted the answer to be #stanleycupfinals:
Schoopy Cup Finals
#TheGinterCode pic.twitter.com/RSEKXYiwtr
— Bosun Knows Best (@BosunKnows) March 6, 2015
:)
Woooooooow. I did NOT see that coming.
ReplyDeleteAlways. Look. At. The. Backs. Of. The. Cards.
Nice job Jason.
And never be literal except when you have to. Cool point. Easy in hindsight, but this was one point where we took the clues and ran the wrong direction 100mph.
ReplyDelete