Timeline for My sister has gone Puzzled again
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
26 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Feb 15, 2021 at 13:08 | vote | accept | Anonymous | ||
| Feb 13, 2021 at 22:22 | comment | added | WhatsUp | @GarethMcCaughan Your book example is actually a very nice idea in cryptology (: And I'm also kind of disappointed after seeing this answer. | |
| Feb 13, 2021 at 15:35 | history | edited | bobble | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
removed unnecessary spaces
|
| Feb 13, 2021 at 13:43 | comment | added | oAlt | ( @hexomino I'm sorry for I don't have the slightest idea about it either) | |
| Feb 13, 2021 at 13:36 | comment | added | Gareth McCaughan♦ | Oh ... and I think it's kinda unfair to have "prefix" and "suffix" mean "previous number" and "next number" but then have "infix" mean "letter in the middle of the word". | |
| Feb 13, 2021 at 13:33 | comment | added | Gareth McCaughan♦ | I don't mean that clues/hints of this sort are always bad. In most riddles, at least some of the clues are like this. But when they're all you've got, it can be difficult to make progress. Suppose I say "I'm thinking of a book" and then start giving you clues like "page 56, line 3, 17th letter is R". After I've given, say, a dozen such clues, I've almost certainly told you enough that there's only one book in the world fitting the clues. But they're no help at all in actually finding it. | |
| Feb 13, 2021 at 13:31 | comment | added | Gareth McCaughan♦ | The other thing about most of the clues and hints -- which isn't in itself necessarily a problem, but again makes them harder to make use of -- is that they almost all only make any sense once you have at least an inkling what the answer is going to be. E.g., your "big hint 2": OK, once you know the answer is literally "three" you might figure out the misdirection there. But before you know that? No! "Look again at hint 3" means look again at hint 3, it doesn't mean "the number 3 is significant". | |
| Feb 13, 2021 at 13:27 | comment | added | Gareth McCaughan♦ | This is one reason why precision is important in riddles (I don't mean that riddles can't be ambiguous, obscure, etc., but that any unintended imprecision can be a big problem). Every extra bit of vagueness adds more mental steps, or alternatively greatly increases the range of possible next steps, and therefore makes the puzzle much harder. (In a way that's less satisfying for the solver than getting past more deliberately placed steps, too.) It's why making riddles in what isn't your native language is really difficult: one or two slip-ups can make the puzzle entirely unfair. | |
| Feb 13, 2021 at 13:24 | comment | added | Gareth McCaughan♦ | When you're setting rather than solving a puzzle, one extra mental step doesn't feel like much. After all, you know what the intended path is, and surely a five-step path is only 25% more work than a four-step path. No! For the solver, who doesn't know what the intended path is, every step multiplies the amount of required exploration by a substantial factor. | |
| Feb 13, 2021 at 13:23 | comment | added | Gareth McCaughan♦ | But that amount of time grows exponentially as the number of steps you need to take from each starting point to where they meet increases. And if the number isn't quite small, the chances are you'll just hop around for ever without finding anything. | |
| Feb 13, 2021 at 13:22 | comment | added | Gareth McCaughan♦ | Imagine the process of solving this sort of puzzle as one where you start with a number of points in some kind of abstract concept-space -- "great vertical extent", "never loses anything", etc. -- and you're trying to find connections between them. So you hop from one place in concept-space to another, and if you're lucky you eventually find two paths that lead close enough to one another for you to notice. You can realistically do this if the time it takes to do the exploration isn't excessive. | |
| Feb 13, 2021 at 13:20 | comment | added | Gareth McCaughan♦ | Many of the clues and hints are difficult to make use of because in some sense they involve one layer of indirection too many. For instance, "My next-to-next suffix has a great vertical extent". To make use of this, you need to think of "high" (which is not unreasonable), then think of the "located skyward" meaning and not the "large vertical extent" meaning (because a "high five" doesn't have large vertical extent, it's just further up than e.g. a handshake), then think of "high five", then think of "five" as some sort of double-suffix of "three". | |
| Feb 13, 2021 at 13:15 | comment | added | Gareth McCaughan♦ | The "next-to-next" business is particularly vexing, though I can't claim it stopped me solving the puzzle since I never thought of the possibility of interpreting it in terms of elements of a sequence. "Next-to-next" isn't an idiom in English, so we had to rely on your explanations in the hints to know what it means; and those explanations are fundamentally different from what it turns out you actually meant. | |
| Feb 13, 2021 at 13:13 | comment | added | Gareth McCaughan♦ | For the third letter, I agree with hexomino's comments. Also, while the idea of making a Riley-type puzzle that's not referring to decomposing words is a clever one, I don't think this is quite fair, because "prefix" and "suffix" don't mean "thing that comes before" and "thing that comes after"; 4 simply isn't a suffix of 3. | |
| Feb 13, 2021 at 13:11 | comment | added | Gareth McCaughan♦ | I also thought the "up" in "Time is running up" might be significant, since the usual idiom is "running down". (Some of your hints were about spotting the 2021 in the first place; that was immediately obvious to me.) | |
| Feb 13, 2021 at 13:11 | comment | added | Gareth McCaughan♦ | And of course it never occurred to me to interpret the verse the way you intended; aside from my own lack of creativity, I think one issue is that the metaphors here don't make sense. These stars are meant to be ... resting on top of the "2021"? But why would they do that if we "ignore gravity"? And didn't you just describe the digits of 2021 as "constellations"? What sense would it mean for stars to rest on top of other stars? How can you say "not very high" when one of them is literally on the top row of the nonogram? | |
| Feb 13, 2021 at 13:11 | comment | added | Gareth McCaughan♦ | For the second letter, it never occurred to me that "count them" might be literally the last step leading to the answer, so I was looking for combinations of "stars" with, so to speak, more information in them. (This one's my fault; I should have considered taking "count them" as meaning exactly what it said and no more.) | |
| Feb 13, 2021 at 13:10 | comment | added | Gareth McCaughan♦ | OK, here are some comments as requested (and as promised in my answer to OP's meta question). | |
| Feb 13, 2021 at 13:03 | comment | added | Lukas Rotter | Next time please just use a i.stack.imgur URL, I see no reason to not use it in this case, I'd argue everyone is familiar with the URL format and we consider i.stack.imgur urls self-contained, while we do not necessarily do that for normal imgur links. | |
| Feb 13, 2021 at 12:45 | comment | added | hexomino | @oAlt Ah, thank you, this may be my lack of familiarity with imgur. What is the "/a" directory and how do we know to append this? | |
| Feb 13, 2021 at 12:39 | comment | added | oAlt | @hexomino seems to work fine for me: imgur.com/a/nJtpuMR | |
| Feb 13, 2021 at 11:55 | comment | added | hexomino | "to" isn't a verb either. I disagree with your second sentence, it's not obvious at all, that's why I asked - the obvious thing would be that the words and numbers are analogous. Can you put it the specific link, please, because I keep getting a 404 on imgur with this address? | |
| Feb 13, 2021 at 11:54 | history | edited | Anonymous | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
edited body
|
| Feb 13, 2021 at 11:51 | comment | added | Anonymous | @hexomino "too" is not a verb but "to" is . For the words sequence it is actually reasonable to consider next-to-next prefix the suffix of the prefix, for this numbers sequence I think it is obvious what next-to-next prefix will be. Also "nJtpuMR" is the letters of the link going to the imgur page. | |
| Feb 13, 2021 at 9:33 | comment | added | hexomino | A few things that jump out - "too" is not a verb. Also the way you defined next-to-next prefix in the hint is inconsistent, you defined it as the suffix of the prefix. Also what is "nJtpuMR"? | |
| Feb 13, 2021 at 9:01 | history | answered | Anonymous | CC BY-SA 4.0 |