Here’s a new puzzle. Enjoy!
Last October, I posted about the San Jose Semaphore, a public art project that decorated the top of Adobe headquarters in San Jose that also happened to be a puzzle. Little did I know that, at the time, the puzzle had already been solved.
It’s recently been revealed that the puzzle was solved by Bob Mayo and Mark Snesrud. The answer: The semaphore cycles through the entire text of Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49. It takes a few months for the semaphore to cycle through the whole thing. There’s a great description of how the pair solved the puzzle in the San Jose Mercury News.
Wordplay will be showing as a part of PBS’s Independent Lens series. The movie is currently scheduled to be aired on October 16th.
Hoshi Saga is a little flash game where there is little instruction. “The game is to discover a star covered in a stage.” That’s all you get.
It’s a game of trial and discovery. Your clicks will do something different in each stage. And, yes, there is always a star to be found. The stages are all given a rating, and a general rule of thumb seems to be that the higher the rating, the more difficult the stage.
It’s been a while since my last post, and I haven’t yet written anything about the launch of Eternity II. The site is up and you can try a mini version of the puzzle there. The makers seem to have learned their lesson from last time and there’s no possibility of the puzzle being solved too early. Solution submission will only be checked beginning on Dec. 31, 2008.
In this day and age, it’s likely that we will know if someone solves the puzzle early, as the person will likely brag about it on the internet. I’ll be curious to find out how the puzzle is solved once the solution is revealed. No doubt, a final solution will be computer assisted like the last Eternity puzzle. There’s already a site set up to try to rope other players into using their spare computer cycles to solve the problem with brute force (via Passion For Puzzles.) As this guy will be keeping a full half of the prize money (with most contestants getting nothing,) I expect to see competitors in the near future.
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