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Try to solve this puzzle below. The answer consists of two words with 15 letters in total.


enter image description here

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2 Answers 2

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Our two word phrase is SPECIAL INTEGERS.

Solution logic:
Let's start with the top right as it's easiest. There are 9 square pictures with red borders that work to generate

a 3 x 3 square, when their position is adjusted:
hash sign

This is a

hash or number/pound sign. It seems likely we are looking for a 2 word phrase: ____ number or _____ pound, etc.

Moving to the top left:
I struggled with this one for a while, but kept coming back to the title. It's all about position. After trying many different things, I came back to one of my earlier thoughts. What if the right/left hands simply mean

to shift the corresponding black dot to the right or left? I'd done this mentally in my head trying to get morse code, alphabet numbers, ascii, etc, but decided to physically try it just in case inspiration struck. And it did:

P

Now it seems we have quite simply:

P NUMBER

For this last step, we can use "PRIME NUMBER" as a likely candidate for what "P NUMBER" is hinting at. I am not 100% certain that this is the correct explanation as 'P' is a bit vague for prime. However, maybe it was deemed sufficient as it is pretty obvious as a) we already know username prim3numbah must love primes, and b) it leads to the final answer. But if this is the wrong logic, all else are free to post a correctly explained solution, no worries.

Moving to the bottom, we have a grid of numbers. It's all about position, so let's look at the

position of letters at prime indexes using the directions given for left to right, top to bottom:
Position 2 has an "S".
Position 3 has a "P".
Continuing, we get SPECIAL INTEGERS! Primes are certainly special!

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    $\begingroup$ Oh my god! What a brilliant solve! Edit: (and great puzzle, of course :P) $\endgroup$
    – Avi
    Commented Oct 4, 2021 at 2:18
  • $\begingroup$ @Amoz Everything looks good, well done! $\endgroup$ Commented Oct 4, 2021 at 7:07
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Partial Answer: At this point, I've spent more time on this than I care to admit, so I leave it to the community to complete the solve. 🙃


I overlaid the images together to reveal:

Screenshot of the overlaid images.

This provides us with 15 letters:

sifliroieukyzfe

However, I've been unable to proceed further. Some of the things I've looked into so far (perhaps incorrectly):

Caesar cipher: 10, 13, 15 and 25 (the number of hands, standard in the community, number of letters, and number of hands and letters added); none revealed the secrets of this puzzle.

Anagrams: For the plain text and all four of the aforementioned Caesar ciphers.

Overlay Positions: I've moved the black and white grid around on the letter grid and pursued the same information. This resulted in:
Row 1: sphyildmnroietu | poystdinjonetuk | oesiaiejrnstukr
Row 2: yscfdjrtitugyzf | sifliroieukyzfe | itldeonetkrzfen
Row 3: flmnretqgzfoqgs | ldnjotugyfeqgsi | dijrnukyzengsit

I ran this result through a Caesar cipher (1 through 25 letter shifts), and nothing stood out.

Resources

I'm also including the individual images I used to produce these results. The decision to include them as hyperlinks instead of embedded images for was made for the sake of reducing real estate:

Rearranged Grid with Red Border
Scaled Black and White Grid
Scaled Letter Grid

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    $\begingroup$ Nice attempt, but this is not the right approach to this puzzle. I'll add a hint later! $\endgroup$ Commented Oct 3, 2021 at 7:29
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    $\begingroup$ A hint? But I have hardly had time to look at this due to the weekend! So far I see the two seven letter words. Looking forward to trying later this week if it's still unsolved. Never mind I can't count. It's 7 and 8. $\endgroup$
    – Amoz
    Commented Oct 3, 2021 at 12:53
  • $\begingroup$ @Amoz You're correct. I'll wait with the hint then :D $\endgroup$ Commented Oct 3, 2021 at 14:28
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    $\begingroup$ Just need to figure out why the top left equals (redacted).... Getting close... $\endgroup$
    – Amoz
    Commented Oct 3, 2021 at 14:31

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