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Robot Dan, world smartest vacuum cleaner, and I took our packages and fly to trip. We had to took our big pistol, that could shot down a tank. Last time we almost started world war 3, by shooting someone called "Kanady." Lovely! Andes were our first stop. But we were disappointed by cheese food. It was just farmlands with huge cows, goats and pigs. But that was not all - because we were near north pole, Dan shot big flying leviathan. And he died immediately! In the end of the day (around 9), we flew back home. This time because of Dan. He had very bad diarrhea. There was propably something in the food. (He had chicken vindaloo.) Next stop: Modern centrum of slow access information - England!

2nd day:

"Linearity is the property of a mathematical relationship or function" Dan started to read from wikipedia "which means that it can be graphically represented as a straight line." And that is why we had to leave museum of Ancient Internet. Next stop! Country we flew last was USA. There was a nice cipher factory. They created (for example) nAES (new Advanced Encryption Standard), RSA (Rivest, Shamir, Adleman), Diffie–Hellman cipher and new MEOW. That was it. Dan knows 32 cipher languages. That was amazing!

What is not Dan's favourite number?

Hint 1:

I asked robot: "Dan, can we somehow format this text?" "Yes, you can split our 3032 words by 111. Like this!"

Hint 2:

Dan works at the moment: 'Bzzzzzz' "Dan is tired. Dan will work only with ten words today. Two per paragraph. Easy!"

Hint 3:

Because of robots these days do not know how to calculate in decimal system, they won't do any letter shifting, ouch!

Hint 4:

Solution depends highly on number of words. However first association is too hard. Start with formatting and focus on other lines!

Hint 5:

You need to find (or actually associate from words) five countries that we were in. Last one is easiest "Country ***" !

Hint 6:

Day two we were in two countries. We were not in USA, but somehow similar country. Hints has something in common!

Hint 7:

Numbers counts as one word. If I cross out every 3rd word - I would not change solution ( - "idea", only maybe hints!).

Hint 8:

After hint seven - If I cross out every 2nd word - I would not touch "solution words." Now only seventy words left!

Hint 9:

There are always some minor hints around. For first country you may want to search root of the problem. Don't think about third more than five seconds. And for fourth there is a knowledge tag.

Hint 10:

When we woke up, we bought some beer for the trip. Btw today is Wikipedia pretty ancient. It took our best scientists some time to decode its binary code.

Hint 11:

Still in the morning we also took some highly explosive semtex against leviathans. We traveled between locations in plane without single stop (so it made straight line). However at the end of 1st day we used teleport for faster travel.

Hint 12:

Country one: Robot, pistol, "Kanady", beer, semtex + number of hockey players
Country four: Linearity be, something ancient + does not directly refer to country, but two islands (and not names, but something linear)
country two+five found by @TuomasK, three found by @Gamow

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  • $\begingroup$ Are the typos intentional in the text? $\endgroup$
    – Techidiot
    Commented Mar 18, 2017 at 4:35
  • $\begingroup$ typos? If something like "at/on/by/than/then" - proly just bugs. If you mean "3032 words" or "Kanady", thats on purpose. Write what edits you want to make, easy. $\endgroup$
    – Jan Ivan
    Commented Mar 18, 2017 at 23:21
  • $\begingroup$ If you didn't go to the USA on Day 2, does that mean you also didn't go to England on Day 1? $\endgroup$
    – F1Krazy
    Commented Mar 29, 2017 at 11:13
  • $\begingroup$ Not usa, not England, not Andes. Coutries we were in are part of solution - if you find correct one you will know by hints around it if it is correct one. $\endgroup$
    – Jan Ivan
    Commented Mar 29, 2017 at 11:28
  • $\begingroup$ Doesn't this have essentially an infinite amount of answers? For example, I would guess that Robot Dan's favourite number is NOT 15. $\endgroup$
    – Rauwyn
    Commented Mar 29, 2017 at 14:41

2 Answers 2

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With the recent multitude of hints, I think I can finally start taking a swing at this. Partial answer for now.

By following Hints 7 and 8, the story text can be reduced down to

Seventy words:

Robot smartest and our fly We took pistol, shot tank. we world by called Andes first we by It farmlands cows pigs. was because near Dan flying he In of around flew This of had diarrhea. propably the had Next centrum access

Linearity property mathematical function to wikipedia that be as line is had museum Internet Country last There nice They example Advanced RSA Adleman and That Dan cipher was

The other hints suggest that

Only ten of those words are needed, six from the first paragraph and four from the second paragraph, with each pair of words corresponding to one of the countries that Robot Dan visited.

UPDATE: @TuomasK found the ten words:

If you take the first word, and then every seventh word (every 21st word of the original text), you get these pairs:

Robot pistol Andes pigs In diarrhea
Linearity be Country RSA

These correspond to:

Robot pistol: Czech Republic (found by @Gamow, see comments for explanation)
Andes pigs: Guinea (Guinea pigs; found by @TuomasK)
In diarrhea: India ("In diarrhea"; found by @Gamow)
Linearity be: Greece (Linear B script, the earliest known form of Greek language - found by @Gamow)
Country RSA: South Africa (self-explanatory; found by @TuomasK)

Finally, here is how to get a number from that...

Hint 11 says: "We traveled between locations in plane without single stop (so it made straight line). However at the end of 1st day we used teleport for faster travel."

If you connect Czech Republic to Guinea by a straight line on the map,
and then continue the line from Guinea to India,
and then teleport to Greece,
and finally draw a straight line from Greece to South Africa,
then you have drawn the segments of the digit 4.

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  • $\begingroup$ i would write if you have correct countries. Next hint tomorrow. For Russia i would write vodka, not beer. For kiribati proly something about Date or that it is on all four hemispheres, not ancient. $\endgroup$
    – Jan Ivan
    Commented Apr 5, 2017 at 8:00
  • 1
    $\begingroup$ "Linearity be" refers to the "Linear B scripts", an ancient body of scripts from the Mycenaean culture, that have been found on the Peloponnese and on Crete. Hence the country should be Greece. $\endgroup$
    – Gamow
    Commented Apr 5, 2017 at 12:44
  • $\begingroup$ Oh wow, good call! I read about those like an hour ago, and somehow didn't make the connection. $\endgroup$
    – F1Krazy
    Commented Apr 5, 2017 at 12:48
  • 1
    $\begingroup$ My guess for country #1 would be Czechoslovakia. Semtex has been developed there; Czech beer is famous all over the world; they have a strong ice hockey team; the Czech writer Karel Čapek invented the word robot; the connection to "pistol" is not clear to me. $\endgroup$
    – Gamow
    Commented Apr 5, 2017 at 12:51
  • 1
    $\begingroup$ That's another good call. "Beer" and "hockey" were what threw me off-track, I didn't know Czech beer/hockey were that famous. I'll add "Czech Republic" and then try and figure out where to get the number from. $\endgroup$
    – F1Krazy
    Commented Apr 5, 2017 at 13:04
5
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This is very partial answer too, but I got some countries!
Made with the great help of @F1Krazy's answer!

If the text reduced to seventy words, and then only 7th word is picked, we get:

Robot pistol Andes pigs In diarrhea
Linearity be Country RSA

And there we get the countries

Robot pistol: I'm not any kind of sure about this... Israeli company General Robotics have made a combat robots with a pistol attached. So, country is Israel
Andes pigs: Guinea Pigs originally lived in Andes, so next country is Guinea
In diarrhea: This might be some developing country?
Linearity be: I don't have any idea what this could be!
Country RSA: RSA means Republic of South Africa

Hint 5: Last one is easiest "Country ***" makes this seem quite correct

But I don't have any idea how any number could be made from these

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  • $\begingroup$ Correct words, 1st country not Israel - hint 4. Also it is not every "7th" or from original text every "21st", but always first word of "21 sequence" which makes it too hard :/. Next hint for part 2 in … 20 hours i guess. But if you find something more, i will wait. $\endgroup$
    – Jan Ivan
    Commented Apr 1, 2017 at 0:47
  • 3
    $\begingroup$ 1. The clue "In diarrhea" starts with the five letter word "India". 2. "Linearity be" might refer to Chile, which is the most linear country (between mountains and ocean) I know. $\endgroup$
    – Gamow
    Commented Apr 1, 2017 at 16:05
  • $\begingroup$ @Gamow not Chile -> hint 10 $\endgroup$
    – Jan Ivan
    Commented Apr 3, 2017 at 13:20

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