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.

Passion for Puzzles has an entry about the CISRA Puzzle Competition.  CISRA is a company in Australia that does R&D for Canon and they use the competition to recruit college students.  Anyone can play, but only Australian college students are eligible for the prizes.  The contest officially starts in April, but registration is open and there are a few advance puzzles available on the site.

Writer, blogger, and puzzle enthusiast Debra Hamel has created a puzzle contest to celebrate the first anniversary of Buy A Friend A Book, a website aimed at promoting quarterly Buy A Friend A Book Weeks when readers are encouraged to buy books for people for no reason (other than the fact that it’s Buy A Friend A Book Week.)

The contest consists of seven puzzles of a variety of types that will appear on seven different sites over the seven days of the next BAFAB Week (July 1-7.) The list of sites where the puzzles will appear can be found on the BAFAB site. To win the competition, you will have to submit a correct answer to all seven puzzles by 10:00 AM PDT on July 8th. The winners will be chosen randomly from all correct submissions. And yes, there are prizes for the winners.

It should be fun. I’ll certainly be playing.

My Da Vinci Code cryptex arrived today and it’s much nicer than I was expecting.  I knew they said that it had a retail value of $30, but somehow I was still envisioning something made entirely out of plastic.  Quite a bit of it is metal and it’s fairly heavy.  Here’s a picture:

The code for opening it was on on the bottom of the box.  Now, we’re all set for the final round.

And the final puzzle of the quest could be solved in minutes.  The final “observation” challenge was particularly easy if you had read the book, which would have given you the answer to the final question.  It also wasn’t hard to figure out which video on Google videos would be used today and watch it before the challenge was released.

Now, if you’re done, it’s time to sit back and wait to see if you’re in the top 10,000.

The penultimate puzzle is a “geography” challenge meaning that is the final round, the puzzles are played in order from top to bottom. I already had a strong feeling about which city would be featured today, and the four cities featured formed the set that I was expecting.

The final challenge was, however, not as difficult as the last two. The final question was a mathematical one and not a geographical one, which made it easier for me. They also manage to tie all of the geography puzzles together which is pretty nice.

Tomorrow, the final puzzle.

For the last of the “curator” challenges, the puzzle does become slightly more difficult because there are no paintings placed for you, but this still remains the easiest of the puzzles.  Now, we move on to the question based puzzles to finish up our quest.

The key to answering the trivia questions this round seems to be Google book search.  We’ll see what kinds of questions we get for the “chess” and “observation” challenges.

The final “symbol” challenge is the 6X6 sudoku as predicted.  I had thought that the chalice would be the sixth symbol, but instead a key, which we’ve never seen before, was used.

The question today required intimate knowledge of a very specific passage from a book.  And provided a link to Google book search which was, in fact, very helpful.

It seems that the degree of difficulty for the jigsaw portion of the “geography” challenges will not be increasing. However, the map manipulations and questions that follow are getting more complex. Today’s challenge was the most difficult of the quest so far. the final question in particular took me a good amount of time and many wrong guesses. Ultimately, it was Google Maps that helped me to find the answer. In retrospect, I maybe should have tried to use knowledge from The Da Vinci Code a little bit more as well.

Warning: Comments contain answers to today’s challenge.

I definitely found it easier today to pay more attention to the chess board than the trivia questions.  I believe that all of the answers to the trivia questions may actually be found in The Da Vinci Code, but you would have to have read it very closely.  You’d be much better off if you were a history buff.  I’m still having difficulty seeing the solutions from the beginning of the challenge.  I think because they usually require black to make a really bad move, and I just have trouble thinking that way.

Again more hooks for the “curator” challenge, but the puzzles here aren’t getting any harder.  There are very few spots where the large paintings fit.  I don’t even notice the hooks when I try to hang the paintings.

The question today asked for a translation from English into another language, which is a more difficult question for native English speakers.  Still, web resources abound for this sort of thing.

For the second “geography” challenge, the jigsaw puzzle isn’t particularly more difficult but the follow-up questions are. After assembling the pieces, we’re given an anagram to solve that reveals the location of a museum in that city. Honestly, the anagram is difficult and I didn’t solve it. I was able to guess the city because I have a pretty good idea which four cities will be featured and the available letters for the anagram really only lends itself to one of them.

After guessing the city, the anagram is unscrambled and I’m told to locate the location on the map which is marked by a hidden Greek Cross. It’s actually hidden quite well and I had to look on a tourist map of the city to get a general idea of where to look before I could find it.

The “chess” puzzles appear to be getting more challenging by adding more pieces.  If you’re playing by answering the questions, it’s probably no more difficult.  But if you’re playing according to the way suggested by the puzzle’s designer, Wei-Hwa Huang, (thanks to Derrick for mentioning this in the comments) more peices means more possible moves to consider adding considerable complexity to the puzzle.

The puzzle for day 10 is the second “observation” puzzle. This time around, the video is the “Meet Silas” video. Oddly enough, all of the questions can actually be answered by watching the video and, more or less, actually require you to watch the video. In the last “observation” challenge, two of the questions could be answered without watching the video, if you had seen the movie.

These “observation” challenges may be the least interesting of the challenges in the quest. It’ll be interesting to see if, in future weeks, we’re asked to look for things that are more truly hidden.

Warning: The comment section of this post contains answers to today’s challenge.

The second time through the “restoration” puzzle was significantly more difficult. There was more debris on the painting requiring you to think ahead a little more. It’s probably best at this point to start thinking about strategies for solving this puzzle and practicing the puzzle a couple more times after solving because these are only going to get harder.

The trivia question today requires you to find a book by ISBN. (Wow! I bet Google Books would be perfect for that.) Hmm… I wonder if more trivia questions this week will be so well suited to a specific Google service.