I recently bought an old treasure map from an antique store with the promise of being able to find the treasure, but when I finally got round to opening it a bunch of scraps fell out and the map was all torn up!!
This isn't any use! And the scraps seem useless too!
There's a treasure all right and it's hidden ...
... on the northern peninsula of Matsuura Island, a small island off the Western coast of Kyushu, Japan:
(Link opens Google maps. Yes, that's the island depicted in in the centre of the map I bought. The treasure is in cell K7.)
The map ...
... is really a black-and white bitmap where pixels on the underlying 21×21 grid from A1 to U21 are either filled or not. The scraps tell us how the pixels in the missing parts of the map look.
The "Next Gen" scrap:
This is a state in Conway's Game of Life. We need the the "next gerenation" of that state, which is shown below. (This was found by matt_rule.) The resulting 4×5 bitmap goes into the western part of the map.
The list of numbers separated by pipe symbols:
These from a nonogram: The six numbers left of the backslash describe the rows, the seven remaining numbers describe the columns. The rows must be read from right to left, or the 1 3 colum won't fit. The resulting 7×6 bitmap goes into the sotern part of the map.
The coordinate tuples:
These are just that: pairs of coodrinates (x₁, y₁) and (x₂, y₂). They repesent horizontal or vertical lines that are one pixel wide. Both starting and end points are included. The resulting 6×9 bitmap (with a protruding "nose" where x = − 1) goes into the eastern part of the map. The location of the "nose" means the the y-coordinates must be reversed.
The four numbers:
Represent these as binary numbers. (The bitmap theme suggests this, but if you squint, there's "10 → 2" written in one corner of the scrap.) The resulting 6×4 bitmap goes into the southeastern part of the map.
The letter-number-letter / letter-number-letter combos:
Stiv got this one: It's a match of battleships played on the 5×5 areas in rows 1–5 and columns I–M and V–Z (off the map) respectively. The last letter in each combo means hit, sunk or miss. The last line means "sunk and won". The hits must be black.)
The losing party on the left has already the correct coordinates for the northern part of map. The off-map area of the winning party has a hint for the overall solution, on which more later.
The map of the archipelago:
All squares that have land on them must be black.
This results in:
There are still pieces missing in the nothwest, northeast and southwest corners, but I think you can see now how these parts must be completed.
With the corners filled in:
This is, of course, a QR code. I thought that the noisy nature of the bitmap and the size and position of the last missing pieces made that obvious, but there's also a hint I missed: The hits on the winner of the Battleship match spell QR in Braille. A nice touch.
The answer:
The given QR code decodes to 松浦島 K7. That's the name of the Matsuura island in Japanese script. That island is represented in our map and K7 refers to the exact location of the treasure.
(The whole island is not very large, mabe half a kilometre in diameter and the spit where the treasure is only about 100m long. Happy digging.)
Credit:
I needed help in several situations and helpful commenters have provided it: matt_rule started the solving with a partial answer about Conway's game of life. Stiv decoded the HSM code as a game of Battleships. Finally, Vladimir Cravero decoded the QR code, which I had failed to do.
And Beastly Gerbil created a fine puzzle with excellent presentation. Thank you.
This is not a solution to the puzzle, but provides notes from its poser. This type of answer has been approved by the community.
Thought I would write a wrap up as there are some interesting points about QR codes that some may definitely find useful in the future!
Caution: This post contain spoilers.
I actually started on this idea 4 years ago. Long time coming!
Back in lockdown, I had the idea to disguise a QR code as a treasure map, and have the QR scan to give a map coordinate, but I could never find anything that really worked. So I gave up, and had completely forgotten about it.
But then a couple of months ago, I redownloaded an old app I used to draw stuff, and my old map was right there!
The old draft is very different, it was many fake islands, and although the art was cute, I didn't have any of the info to finish it off.
But I remembered the concept and knew it was time to do it properly - but this time bigger and better.
This time round, I wanted the map to show a real island, that would eventually be the answer itself. That however, was going to be very tricky.
It couldn't be a famous island as that would be pointless, so I needed to find some islands that were small, and 'spiky' - such that you would be able to draw them with squares.
To do so, my first instinct was to go on google maps and have a look around the cposts of some of the countries in Asia, such as Indonesia and Japan, as I felt like they would have the highest likelihood of having what I was looking for.
In my search I also stumbled across this website - containing a list of islands in a region off Japan. The one that immediately caught my eye was number 7 - "Matsuura Island"
It was exactly what I was looking for, but now I needed to encode a QR code to give the name of this island, plus a cell coordinate which would overlap one of the island cells, and also look like the island. Oof.
However, I had a few candidates of island names, the cells could be in the region H8-N14 ish, and I also had the option of using the Japanese names of the island.
I also knew from previous puzzles I'd made, that for the middle of QR codes in particular you can actually change quite a few cells without affecting the text when it is scanned. So the QR code I was looking for didn't have to be perfect, just close enough.
[Turns out, thanks to @Bobson in the comments, that every QR code has one of four levels of error correction, which allows from 7% to 30% of the QR to be changed and still have it recoverable.
This puzzle ended up using the "L" level (apparently typical for smaller QR codes) which means I could change about 7% of the QR - or about 8 pixels before it became unreadable]
So, using this QR generator as it was quick to update, I started generating hundreds of QRs. I would type for instance "Matsuura H8" and then H9, H10... up to H17 before checking I8, I9...
After a few hundred QRs, I hadn't found anything close enough. So I moved onto the Japanese names of the islands and checked those.
And after maybe 200 more, bingo!* Behold: "松浦島 K7"
Ok it wasn't perfect, but it was damn close. And 'K7' was a valid cell containing the top of the island. Yesssss.
To edit the QR code as close as possible to the island, I simply rebuilt it in excel.
I created a bitmap of Matsuura island, as the 'perfect' situation:
However, changing the QR code to this didn't give me a valid QR.
So instead, I changed a cell of the QR code at a time - checking every time that the QR still worked, until finally I reached this for the island:
And the QR still worked!!
For the rest of the puzzle, I cut up the remaining sections that weren't part of the puzzle (making sure each had different dimensions), and devised a shortlist of how I could clue them.
The nonogram, coordinates and binary were all very simple to make. Game of life took a bit of trial and error, and the battleships I added the extra hint of 'QR' in braille for the other game.
I then designed the puzzles artwork (which took far too long) in Krita - highly recommend, it is powerful and free. I used google earth to try and make the island look as real as possible.
And just like that, the hard work had paid off!!
Other than the fact you can manipulate QR codes quite a bit without losing the message, there is a good lesson from making this:
This took a lot of perseverance. I knew it was a nice puzzle idea, but first time round I gave up, and second time round it took months, with wayyyyyy too many QRs generated (so many in fact, that the QR site blocked me and I had to come back the next day!) But in the end, I knew it was achievable, and without enough effort it was done...
And I think that can be applied to a lot of the puzzles here - and to life itself!
Hope you all enjoyed and this was helpful/insightful to some! Thanks all for the positive feedback :)
:( I like the presentation ‒ both the graphics and that the story is to the point and lets those enigmatic graphics take centre stage.
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Possibly a tiny part of the answer below (spoilers):
This is not an answer, but if you take the lower right figure and insert it into a Conway's Game of Life sim, then advance it by one generation, it produces this, which fits inside the 4x5 outline shown in the question. This was inspired by the text saying "Next Gen":
Some more observations: At the top appear to be H and N in a heavy gothic font, it would make sense if this is simply a 21x21 grid with coordinates ranging from A1 in the top left to U21, and K11 in the middle. That leaves a 4x5 space on the left where this Game of Life shape could fit, though that could be coincidental. The top left scrap has what appear to be pairs of coordinates where either X or Y match, so they could be straight lines, though if you plot them all, some overlap. The top right scrap uses [I...M][1..5] / [V..Z][1..5] which all have a range of 5, and H, M, S.
