Welcome To The Machine
July 25th 2011 -
The CiSRA Puzzle Competition opened today, and two of my puzzles are in the opening four. I designed one (“Big Question”) to be easy, and one (“Welcome to the Machine”) to be medium difficulty. Big Question has been solved by 11 teams in the four and a half hours since the competition opened, but nobody has even had an attempt at Welcome to the Machine! It’s the one unsolved puzzle of the competition so far.
Mark Says:
July 28th, 2011 at 11:23 am
Hi, Andrew. Just wanted to drop a note to say I enjoyed your “Welcome to the Machine” puzzle very much; it’s my favorite of the competition so far. It stumped my team for a couple of days, but I had an Iron-Brain moment and it all clicked for me within an hour. Have to stay vague to avoid spoiler-age, but I think it’s an amazing and elegant piece of puzzle-crafting to have come up with the components. Kudos!
admin Says:
August 12th, 2011 at 11:41 am
Thanks Mark! Sorry, my spam filter got a big aggressive. I have no idea why it filed your comment as spam.
I go into a bit of detail about puzzle construction in the worked solution. There were python scripts involved, and what may be a rather surprising inspiration for the puzzle.