Holiday Hunt Summary
As promised, here is a wrap-up of the Holiday Hunt. You can find the puzzles for each part, and the solutions, at these links:
Part 1: Puzzle and Solution
Part 2: Puzzle and Solution
Part 3: Puzzle and Solution
Part 4: Puzzle and Solution
Results:
19 solvers finished, the first before any hints were added and the last with just hours to spare, but I was rather pleased with the total number. Here are my official "#N fans" for the coming year:
#1 Jonathan Rivet
#2 Tyler Hinman
#3 Zotmeister
#4 cyrebjr
#5 Mike Sylvia
#6 Tablesaw
#7 RJH0723
#8 Martin Kollar
#9 figonometry
#10 Minfang Lin
#11 alan smithee & JJ
#12 Giovanni P.
#13 Blaine from blainesville.com
#14 Eric Prestemon
#15 Matej Uher (muhorka)
#16 Aerion
#17 Chris Worrell
#18 Nick Baxter
#19 Mark Halpin
This meant there were 190 entries into the drawing (19 for first place, down to just 1 entry for last place) and I made a quick script to randomly assign numbers to each participant with the sorted entries at 69 and 47, Fleming Hovse's scoreboard numbers, winning the prizes. What would I have done if I didn't have at least 12 finishers? Something else odd but original, certainly.
Congratulations to Tablesaw and RJH0723 who sit in the prize spots as shown here. I'll be in touch about the details of their prizes, as both the concept of "custom puzzle" and "next two books" are loose. The "custom puzzle" should take me just 2-5 hours to make, and can be a private or public thing depending on the goal. The "next two books" are unclear as I may, as a self-publisher, beat Sterling to the punch with my own next books, but actually any two of my books known or unknown that they want are theirs sometime during this calendar year.
Comments:
I had had in mind, for a long time, doing a Hunt going back through my old lj entries and some other puzzles. The most puzzle-hunty thing I had ever posted was Friday Puzzle #25, which was to announce my TomTom Puzzles book title. And I had in mind a similar thing for the first mini-hunt I'd run from the Friday Puzzle, which would point to my self-publication site, Grandmaster Puzzles. But the timing and planning never exactly worked out as I had too much going on. I've been hosting things on that web-domain (either grandmasterpuzzles.com or gmpuzzles.com) for several months since I left Stanford, so careful observers would already know about the name even if there was nothing to see there. As of the new year, I've got a better placeholder page and logo, but still I haven't built a whole website and blog/forum as I want to exist there as I start to put out a lot of puzzle books. I might contract outside help as opposed to doing everything myself, at least on the web side, but I'm rather far along in having all the puzzles, puzzle-checking code, and art-generating code, I need to really do the publishing end of things "professionally." I expect to have a sudoku book out well before either of my next two titles with Sterling, even though I completed writing both of those last year.
Anyway, while I wanted to do a hunt, I never had sufficient motivation to work on that as opposed to a dozen other things until the idea presented itself as a piece of the sudoku proposal. I'm glad that big challenge came my way as it actually put a lot of momentum in the right places. And I do hope to do this kind of hunt again, having learned a whole lot about the process. My biggest worry was that the breadth of my audience would make it impossible to run such a thing, but several finishers actually have English as a second (or third, ...) language so I'm glad my audience achieved beyond my expectations.
My biggest discovery was that GCing an anonymous hunt is very hard, particularly if you care about solvers getting through your puzzles. By this I mean that while I could see IP 12.34.56.78 was trying lots and lots of wrong interpretations of messages by looking at site logs, I couldn't tell them what to do. I had made some "hint" pages that you could accidentally run into that would redirect back on line (easyaspie.html or just pi.html for example, for things close to the intended answer), but it was obvious this kind of hunt could use more and I added several during the course of it, and also added announced hints when needed to get over particular hurdles. I learned that I need to adapt my puzzle hunt design style even more than I thought when writing for this, particularly as players were mostly individuals and not teams. While particular phrases or images may be "fool-proof" with a group of three or four good solvers working together, as they brainstorm interpretations, the same presentation is nowhere near as "fool-proof" with individuals. So improvements in intermediate pages, and "easier" intermediate steps if they must exist, are certainly in my mind. I will also probably never again be so "open internet" at a key step of the hunt. I write VERY LONG blog entries, and as great as they are for hunt fodder, they can lead to lots of bad rabbit-holes. Many solvers falsely believed, as I probably would have, that livejournal locks down times on entries more absolutely. Actually, an lj feature/bug let's me re-date and re-time any post whenever I want, although I've been hiding random things in my times for awhile just not the specific code used here. Still, to the phrase "FRIDAY SQR. NOS.", Friday Puzzle #16, on 09/25/09 was a real hot spot of interest. That that puzzle had its own marked path, to the phrase "MUTANT SUDOKU, FIVE WEEKS" is just one consequence of having so many particular paths to go when there are at least 132 entries if not more that could be the targets. Friday Puzzle #25, also on the path, looked a lot like a metapuzzle to one solver, who hadn't run into it before and came up with the clever idea that some of the foods I was showing there were "root vegetables" and he needed a way to "get rid of the root" on a page with 11 things where the message was coming from 11 entries. The fun stories of these hunts come from the unintended consequences of letting solvers loose in a sandbox, and I thank you for sharing them with me and not losing patience when I had to break the news they were very wrong.
I hope those who played along this year got enjoyment out of this unusual process, and will come back when I try this again in the future. I certainly enjoyed the challenge of everything that went into this hunt (and the connected sudoku proposal) even if having so many goals meant not everything was as clean as it could be. One of my favorite parts of the hunt was hiding extra pages with fun titles. I missed one of these opportunities (I expected someone might google and go to "chipmunks" instead of "chestnuts" for the first part, but didn't make a chipmunks page), but I did enjoy several others. If you never went to these, the jokes are mostly captured in the titles:
Two were both of a particular style, but followed logically from what was on the page:
youranswer.html - "CTRL+C for the win!"
ABCDEF.html or abcdef.html - "Not Literally"
nobooknoproblem.html (sent to those without Sudoku Masterpieces) - "You really should invest in my first editions..."
and the hint added to that one:
bighint.html - "This puzzle was flagged for unnecessary roughness"
which I like for a lot of different reasons.
Have I put all the chestnuts to bed? I dunno. I still like my smiles and my pi puzzles and my bad puns. I was surprised, in finding the roughly 37 titles I've repeated, that "Ring Around the Foursie" was there. So retiring that one at least seems necessary. At least now we all are armed with a list to check against.
Part 1: Puzzle and Solution
Part 2: Puzzle and Solution
Part 3: Puzzle and Solution
Part 4: Puzzle and Solution
Results:
19 solvers finished, the first before any hints were added and the last with just hours to spare, but I was rather pleased with the total number. Here are my official "#N fans" for the coming year:
#1 Jonathan Rivet
#2 Tyler Hinman
#3 Zotmeister
#4 cyrebjr
#5 Mike Sylvia
#6 Tablesaw
#7 RJH0723
#8 Martin Kollar
#9 figonometry
#10 Minfang Lin
#11 alan smithee & JJ
#12 Giovanni P.
#13 Blaine from blainesville.com
#14 Eric Prestemon
#15 Matej Uher (muhorka)
#16 Aerion
#17 Chris Worrell
#18 Nick Baxter
#19 Mark Halpin
This meant there were 190 entries into the drawing (19 for first place, down to just 1 entry for last place) and I made a quick script to randomly assign numbers to each participant with the sorted entries at 69 and 47, Fleming Hovse's scoreboard numbers, winning the prizes. What would I have done if I didn't have at least 12 finishers? Something else odd but original, certainly.
Congratulations to Tablesaw and RJH0723 who sit in the prize spots as shown here. I'll be in touch about the details of their prizes, as both the concept of "custom puzzle" and "next two books" are loose. The "custom puzzle" should take me just 2-5 hours to make, and can be a private or public thing depending on the goal. The "next two books" are unclear as I may, as a self-publisher, beat Sterling to the punch with my own next books, but actually any two of my books known or unknown that they want are theirs sometime during this calendar year.
Comments:
I had had in mind, for a long time, doing a Hunt going back through my old lj entries and some other puzzles. The most puzzle-hunty thing I had ever posted was Friday Puzzle #25, which was to announce my TomTom Puzzles book title. And I had in mind a similar thing for the first mini-hunt I'd run from the Friday Puzzle, which would point to my self-publication site, Grandmaster Puzzles. But the timing and planning never exactly worked out as I had too much going on. I've been hosting things on that web-domain (either grandmasterpuzzles.com or gmpuzzles.com) for several months since I left Stanford, so careful observers would already know about the name even if there was nothing to see there. As of the new year, I've got a better placeholder page and logo, but still I haven't built a whole website and blog/forum as I want to exist there as I start to put out a lot of puzzle books. I might contract outside help as opposed to doing everything myself, at least on the web side, but I'm rather far along in having all the puzzles, puzzle-checking code, and art-generating code, I need to really do the publishing end of things "professionally." I expect to have a sudoku book out well before either of my next two titles with Sterling, even though I completed writing both of those last year.
Anyway, while I wanted to do a hunt, I never had sufficient motivation to work on that as opposed to a dozen other things until the idea presented itself as a piece of the sudoku proposal. I'm glad that big challenge came my way as it actually put a lot of momentum in the right places. And I do hope to do this kind of hunt again, having learned a whole lot about the process. My biggest worry was that the breadth of my audience would make it impossible to run such a thing, but several finishers actually have English as a second (or third, ...) language so I'm glad my audience achieved beyond my expectations.
My biggest discovery was that GCing an anonymous hunt is very hard, particularly if you care about solvers getting through your puzzles. By this I mean that while I could see IP 12.34.56.78 was trying lots and lots of wrong interpretations of messages by looking at site logs, I couldn't tell them what to do. I had made some "hint" pages that you could accidentally run into that would redirect back on line (easyaspie.html or just pi.html for example, for things close to the intended answer), but it was obvious this kind of hunt could use more and I added several during the course of it, and also added announced hints when needed to get over particular hurdles. I learned that I need to adapt my puzzle hunt design style even more than I thought when writing for this, particularly as players were mostly individuals and not teams. While particular phrases or images may be "fool-proof" with a group of three or four good solvers working together, as they brainstorm interpretations, the same presentation is nowhere near as "fool-proof" with individuals. So improvements in intermediate pages, and "easier" intermediate steps if they must exist, are certainly in my mind. I will also probably never again be so "open internet" at a key step of the hunt. I write VERY LONG blog entries, and as great as they are for hunt fodder, they can lead to lots of bad rabbit-holes. Many solvers falsely believed, as I probably would have, that livejournal locks down times on entries more absolutely. Actually, an lj feature/bug let's me re-date and re-time any post whenever I want, although I've been hiding random things in my times for awhile just not the specific code used here. Still, to the phrase "FRIDAY SQR. NOS.", Friday Puzzle #16, on 09/25/09 was a real hot spot of interest. That that puzzle had its own marked path, to the phrase "MUTANT SUDOKU, FIVE WEEKS" is just one consequence of having so many particular paths to go when there are at least 132 entries if not more that could be the targets. Friday Puzzle #25, also on the path, looked a lot like a metapuzzle to one solver, who hadn't run into it before and came up with the clever idea that some of the foods I was showing there were "root vegetables" and he needed a way to "get rid of the root" on a page with 11 things where the message was coming from 11 entries. The fun stories of these hunts come from the unintended consequences of letting solvers loose in a sandbox, and I thank you for sharing them with me and not losing patience when I had to break the news they were very wrong.
I hope those who played along this year got enjoyment out of this unusual process, and will come back when I try this again in the future. I certainly enjoyed the challenge of everything that went into this hunt (and the connected sudoku proposal) even if having so many goals meant not everything was as clean as it could be. One of my favorite parts of the hunt was hiding extra pages with fun titles. I missed one of these opportunities (I expected someone might google and go to "chipmunks" instead of "chestnuts" for the first part, but didn't make a chipmunks page), but I did enjoy several others. If you never went to these, the jokes are mostly captured in the titles:
Two were both of a particular style, but followed logically from what was on the page:
youranswer.html - "CTRL+C for the win!"
ABCDEF.html or abcdef.html - "Not Literally"
nobooknoproblem.html (sent to those without Sudoku Masterpieces) - "You really should invest in my first editions..."
and the hint added to that one:
bighint.html - "This puzzle was flagged for unnecessary roughness"
which I like for a lot of different reasons.
Have I put all the chestnuts to bed? I dunno. I still like my smiles and my pi puzzles and my bad puns. I was surprised, in finding the roughly 37 titles I've repeated, that "Ring Around the Foursie" was there. So retiring that one at least seems necessary. At least now we all are armed with a list to check against.