Monday, July 13, 2015

"3x3 Grids Point" Solution

This was the second point we solved. It was solved by Brian Duginske, on 10/8/14. This point was a doozy ... simple, but well-designed and well-hidden. There are a ton of tweets on this one, so you'll have to take your time moving through it.









A week later, the CM tweeted the answer to the example:



And then after a few more days of chewing, the so-called "giveaway" clue:



So, how exactly does that grid "skip like a broken record"? Well at this point it is fairly clear that the rows of the grids are card numbers. When working on points like this one, you ask yourself some fairly logical questions, like -- If the rows are card numbers, why are the digits also separated into columns? After the "broken record" tweet, our assumption was that some manipulation would cause each row to display the same card number three times over. Brian finally figured out the meaning of the original clue, "Some down time in the beginning will really add up in the end". Stressing the words "up and down", and "add", he recognized that if you were to add each COLUMN to its respective ROW, then the three rows would each display the same card number.

1 2 0 --> sum of first column is 3 --> 120 + 3 = 123
1 1 9 --> sum of second column is 4 --> 119 + 4 = 123
1 1 2 --> sum of third column is 11 --> 112 + 11 = 123

So now we had to figure out how the card numbers came into play. Deciphering how the four 'example' grids together generated "got the method" was the obvious next step, and clearly looking to the cards was likely involved. We went back to those four grids and started with the method on the first grid, then did a lookup of the names on those cards, to get:

1 5 5 --> 159 George Brett
2 2 0 --> 232 Ozzie Smith
1 5 3 --> 161 Tommy Lasorda

We didn't need to go any further to see what was happening. First initials of the resulting 12 cards would spell GOT THE METHOD. We were also able to discern without moving ahead that the actual point grids would direct us to the last name initials ("I cannot stress enough that you should do the example first and the points last"). We applied the method to the point grids, pulled the first letters of the last names, and found:

TWEET WITH HASHTAG OLDSCHOOLCODEBREAKER



- Grant
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1 comment:

  1. SharpeJuly 13, 2015 at 9:13 PM

    I feel like if this point was later in the contest one of the teams would have gotten this much sooner, and without the need of the giveaway hint.

    Prior to Brian solving it we had poured a bunch of time into the sums. Grant was focused on the distribution of the sums and I think I eventually started multiplying things (wowser).

    It wasn't until Brian started trying to pull a G out of whoevers card would have produced the G in GOT THE METHOD, where there was no G to be found that I threw down the gauntlet and said "STOP TRYING TO GET A G FROM ________" there's no way to get a G using the sum or the letters in his name.

    This pushed Brian to stay up late messing around and he finally got it. Thank goodness.

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