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Hanna Fry announced today that she hid a puzzle in the cover of her book—via twitter

The initial clue seems to be a binary encoding of some ASCII. I was hoping to start a thread towards finding a solution.

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2 Answers 2

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Next step after Dorrulf's observation:

Typing commands into the console mostly returns random gibberish, but every once in a while the message will result in returning words that you've previously typed, plus another word. As it turns out, the permutation order of the words that you've previously typed is fixed.

Furthermore, it turns out that this extra word has the same length as the number of words you typed previously, allowing us to reorder this word. For example, you might recieve deans (the 5th word you typed) (the 2nd word you typed) (the 4th word you typed) (the 1st word you typed) (the 3rd word you typed). We can then rearrange the added word, deans, to get the string SEND A.

Continuing in this fashion (where any number is replaced by the n-th word you typed):
- 8 7 6 10 9 menial 11 yields N EMAIL
- 12 14 sat 13 yields STA
- 22 20 21 15 19 16 whetting 17 18 yields TING THE W
- 24 23 rod 25 yields ORD
- 28 26 ufo 27 yields FOU
- nod 29 31 30 yields ND O
- 33 pang 34 32 35 yields N PAG
- 38 36 wet 37 yields E TW
- 41 40 39 tao yields O AT
- 45 43 shatter 47 42 46 44 48 yields THE STAR
- 52 loft 50 51 49 yields T OF L
- 56 57 53 54 55 twine yields INE TW
- 60 ten 58 59 yields ENT
- 68 64 62 70 63 66 69 65 67 noteworthy 61 yields Y TWO TO HNRE
- 82 81 80 73 78 79 77 71 76 75 annehathaway 72 74 yields HAEYW AT HANNA
- 89 thyford 83 86 84 88 85 87 yields HFRY DOT
- 91 95 94 92 93 90 96 outdock yields CO DOT UK

Or, parsed better, Send an email stating the word found on page 2 at the start of line 22 to [email protected].
Unfortunately, actually performing this step appears to probably require the book.

(One last observation, HNREAEYW is an anagram of ANYWHERE, so that might be either be a) the first location desired by the puzzle (as the author had stated that they had rescrambled the puzzle contents once already), or b) the actual location. Who knows.)

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  • $\begingroup$ very nice, I was struggling on what to do with the extra returned word. $\endgroup$
    – B. Bischof
    Dec 19, 2018 at 17:53
  • $\begingroup$ I've accepted this answer because this was the final round of the puzzle, and several people won a prize after this step. In that way, it's a solution. $\endgroup$
    – B. Bischof
    Jan 3, 2019 at 20:04
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cool. Thanks for letting us know!

Partial:

Binary from book cover:
0101001001100101011000010110110001101100011110010011111100100000
0100111101101000001000000110000101101100011100100110100101100111
0110100001110100001000000111010001101000011001010110111000111010
0010000001101000011001010110110001101100011011110111000001110101
0111101001111010011011000110010101110111011011110111001001101100
0110010000101110011000110110111101101101
Translates to:
Really? Oh alright then: hellopuzzleworld.com

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  • $\begingroup$ I have no idea on what to do once there... $\endgroup$
    – Dorrulf
    Dec 18, 2018 at 22:47

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