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How I (didn't) conquer paperclip's puzzlehunt
 

So as some of you may know, several days ago the 5th Birthday contest started and it was a puzzle contest by xpaperclip. You can still try it here , but try not to click on the hints because he has released so many hints that some levels become meaningless. Many of us solved it without the hints so you should try it too!

This was supposed to be a triumphant blog entry celebrating my victory but unfortunately, Pox came from nowhere and SNIPEd the win in the last level. Since I had already written the blog post halfway, I decided to post what I have.

(It's only up to 4.1)

Spoiler alert! If you want to attempt the puzzles, do not read on!



5.0
After looking at all levels, I decided that 5.0 was the easiest and decided to work on it first (started on 1.0 but hit a dead end after the Pokemon name so decided to come back later)
A quick Google search of the poem turned up Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven", and I thought 'oh, that's it?'
Unfortunately, paperclip is not so kind, and 'theraven' and 'raven' didn't work.

I returned to the poem in the level and something was bugging me. I couldn't put my finger to it yet so I went to play a game of SC2 and came back. After a few more moments of staring and tabbing between the poem in Wikipedia and in the level, I realized the apostrophes were bothering me. Why does the original have no apostrophes but this one does?
I popped up Notepad and began noting down the missing letters, which eventually spelt out 'Energy Upgrade', albeit some repeated letters. Ah. Easy.

3.0
This was solved in a funny way. Now, I have no prior knowledge of codes or anything so I didn't recognize this.
I had the page open and was staring at the numbers/letters, when my roommate glanced at my screen and asked what I was doing staring at acsii.

Eureka! I quickly pulled up an acsii conversation table and decoded the code into something strangely familiar.

My roommate was more hindrance than help now, as he quickly suggested it was a Dropbox link, which distracted me from the real source. After that didn't work, I popped it in Google and.. Lo and behold, it was a YouTube link! No wonder it looked so recognizable.

I had no clue what that song was though, and google didn't turn up anything (I found out later if I had used 'sc2' instead of 'Starcraft' in my search if have found it.)
I returned to the video and looked at the comments... Oh. Right. "isn't this Flash's theme song when he wins?"

1.0
This level really bugged me. Paperclip tried to hint us in the right direction by suggesting what someone said about it being a Rock type Pokemon was important.
Rock and Starcraft rock and Starcraft whats the link?

Lemminks then unknowingly blurted out the answer in chatbox: "paperclip how come Dustin brodwer doesn't work?" I saw it and quickly keyed in the correct spelling and got it.

Apparently his nickname on the official forums was 'Rock' and people always joke about Collapsible Rocks and him.. I don't really surf those forums so I wasn't aware of this at all.

I didn't like this level much.. It was quite a stretch from Sudowooko to Dustin. Unless its a wellknown fact that he loves pokemon...

2.0
This level is so frustratingly easy that I had to pinch myself for not solving it sooner.

I began by adding up the numbers, since the title of the level was 'elementary'. It got me 255, which was hex code for white, so I thought it was Whitera.

Unfortunately, it wasnt. After pointing out that I believe the title was a clue, I inadvertently helped someone (I think Pox? Can't rem) solve it, and he returned the favor by giving us the blatant hint "ELEMENTary".

Of course -_- I smacked my forehead and googled up a periodic table, and a few steps later I got the answer.

4.0
It came down to this ridiculously difficult level. I knew I needed to open up the file in Audacity to tease apart the multiple songs but I was too lazy to do it till day 2. Plus I was missing a plugin or something which I only got from paperclip on day 2.

Then there was the second part of 'so what if I get all the song names? What do I do with them?' I was thinking long and hard about this, thinking perhaps it's the composer's name... the band... I was coming up short.
Then someone posted up a link to another puzzle done by UMelb,
http://www.ms.unimelb.edu.au/~mums/p...-_Solution.png
which we believed paperclip was inspired by. This gave us a direction to work towards.

So there was the tricky part of identifying the songs. Paperclip being mean, put a very audible metronome ticker throughout the audio clip to prevent it from being identified by music identification software, so that was out. Aequitas then wisely deduced that the songs were probably from Echoes of War (I had never even heard of this beforehand, shame on me. Their music is awesome!), seeing how the level's title was 'Echoes'.

From then on I was working together with Aequitas to solve this, as he was at school and couldn't run Audacity to tease apart the tracks. When the clip was open in Audacity, you notice there are FIVE channels running almost concurrently.
We separately deduced that the duration of the music was equal to the length of the song title, so it was a matter of trial and error before we finally identified the 5 songs from the Echoes of War song list.

Now what? What do you do with 5 song titles? I recalled the distinct beep on the 16th/17th second, so I figured it had to be a 5 letter word, and the letters that fell into place at that beep was it. I lined up the song titles according to where they started in the music clip on paper:

and I got ROD_E (I actually only had 4 songs, had not identified the last song yet), which made no sense at all. RODIE? RODAE? At this point, Aequitas realized it was an anagram of some sort, and threw the letters into an online anagram solver. It took all of 3 seconds of looking at the results that came out to identify the relevant word.

This level was crazily well done and the most challenging of the lot so far.

2.1
This took longer than it should have but I finally figured it out. Some people were thinking the Sudoku puzzle was a red herring - perhaps you don't need to solve it at all. I was misled up this path at first, and tried things like taking out the letters that corresponded with the existing numbers, lining up the letters in numerical order, counting the xth letter from that corresponding letter. (e.g. if 5 was to A, I would count 5 letters forward to F) etc

After coming back from class, I opened up the solved Sudoku puzzle board and put it next to the alphabet grid. I was certain the solved puzzle was relevant. First I tried to arrange each 3x3 box in numerical order but words were not being formed. A few moments later, I decided to try using the letter that corresponded with 1 on the first box, the letter that corresponded with 2 on the second box, etc and see what that gave me.

I came out with : CDACKLING.

At first I was disappointed, as that made no sense. My eyes shifted back to the number board, but something was nagging at me in those 9 letters. I turned back to look at it and thought 'wait a minute... 'LING'... could it be CRACKLING?'
I tried that as the solution and BAMMM! It worked!

-dances around-

I'm not sure why I got a D instead of R , maybe there are multiple solutions for the Sudoku puzzle. But the rest all fell into place so... not sure why this is so. I PMed paperclip about this to check if it was a mistake on his part.

EDIT: Yes, it was a mistake. paperclip has since corrected it.

3.1
This level was a real bitch for being so simple and how far off I was. I began by examining the unit names / hotkeys and seeing if they spelt out anything. That came out blank, and I began to explore the possibility of it being a Random player, since it was a dice after all.

After exhausting all possibilities and further prompting and pretty direct hinting from paperclip, I stumbled upon the right answer and was just frustrated at how I didn't exhaust the simplest method at the start - just try all the names of the units there first.

4.1
This level was unfair for me because I'm from Singapore and had no idea what Flinder's Station was or what the clocks were like. After receiving hints from Lemminks and some others I finally figured out how simple it actually was (i was trying other really convoluted methods like aligning the names of the stations with the hours, etc)


For the rest of the puzzle I didn't really solve it on my own or do so without the hints given the next day, so there's nothing much to say. The final level was a real bitch and props to Pox for somehow managing to figure it out.

Looking back on the puzzles, it's pretty amazing how paperclip managed to put this together, shows the genius that he is. Some of the subtle hints he dropped were .... >< Lol. But the whole meta puzzle thing was a work of art, even though none of us (besides Pox) managed to arrive at the 'structure' of it independently.

Crazy good job by xpaperclip, and was a fun 96 hours of my life gone. GG Pox, I hate you

Re: How I (didn't) conquer paperclip's puzzlehunt
 

I thought the puzzles and storyline was amazing and clearly a lot of thought and effort went into it. A truly amazing person xpaperclip is

Re: How I (didn't) conquer paperclip's puzzlehunt
 

Sorry for the snipe!

This was a lot of fun. I wasn't able to put much time in to it until the final day, so I solved most of the earlier puzzles using the sledgehammer hints; I think it would have been cool to have a scoring system similar to MUMS's, but obviously this would have taken even more work on the technical side of things. Altogether a monumental effort by xpaperclip - amazing work.

Some of my experience:

- 3.0 caused me a lot of grief - I immediately recognised hexadecimal and the first thing I tried was converting to ASCII, which yielding an all alpha-numeric string (which is too unlikely to be a coincidence). However, all I could think it looked like was base64 (which turned up gibberish) or a youtube video id (the answer). When I tried the youtube URI, however, it came back as unavailable. I can only assume that when I copied the string out of Mathematica (my go-to REPL) that it had used a non-standard encoding or non-printable characters or something... because a couple days later I tried (using the string copy-pasted from the chatbox) and it worked.

- 4.0: On the first day, I spotted the similarity to the MUMS puzzle, and googled "echoes starcraft" to find the soundtrack Echoes of War. Finally got the time to actually piece it together yesterday, and spent the longest time searching for patterns or alignments before I went back and noticed that one of the ticks was significantly louder than the others... facepalm moment. (By the way, crazerk, I'm pretty sure the ticks are just there for timing, not to confound you - good luck getting software to recognise two songs playing at once).

- 3.1: This one annoyed me... everyone came to the dice conclusion pretty quickly, and once someone mentioned supply (and the hint lamenting the lack of 5 became available) we noticed that assigning the units their supply produced a dice layout except for the stalker and marauder both being 2. Someone said that the stalker was in the position where the 5 was, so I tried about 15 different answers involving "stalker" and "five" and "fuckthispuzzle" etc... wasn't until two days later that I tried "marauder". >_<

- 4.1: I had the right idea after the "hand" hint, but misread one of the letters and so my anagram search didn't turn back anything. Thus it wasn't until the blatant hint telling me to look at the order on Flinders St Station that I got it.

- 3.a, 4.a had me stumped for a long time; took some extra hints from chatbox for me to work these out.

- 5.a was pretty easy with the first hint. Initially I wrote a script to play back the frequencies in stereo, thinking I would recognise a tune... that didn't go so well. My ears still hurt. I then just googled 1336 Hz and the DTMF page came up - it's pretty straightforward from there.

- 5.b Google worked out it was the CO pretty easily, not many SEA tournaments that have had that particular combination of international participants. I had all the winners highlighted, then all the runners-up highlighted, then everyone else highlighted... couldn't spot anything. Eventually I went back to the CO page and saw that PiG had a lot of runner-up spots and didn't appear in the table at all, so I tried pig.html and voila. I was never satisfied with this answer, though; and clearly from the sample solution this was with reason.

- meta: After the "technology" hint, it clicked that the starcraft tech tree was going to be involved somehow; and since the previous puzzles had to get involved and had a weird labelling scheme, I figured they would also form a tree. After examining the snake code to ensure I had all the meaningful information that the game would ever give out, I noticed that the colours were represented by "b" and "v", which are the first letters of blue and voilet but more interestingly the two construction hotkeys in sc2. However, I couldn't get a lot of the letters to match up to building hotkeys, so I was stumped. Eventually xpaperclip gave the hint that the double-letters correspond to addons, and that there were TWO cues in the story; so I reread it and the childhood bit spurred me to try broodwar instead. (Somehow I didn't even put together that the word "brood" was telling me to do this, heh.) From here everything fell together nicely.

Re: How I (didn't) conquer paperclip's puzzlehunt
 

When you open them up in Audacity, you can easily tease apart the 5 tracks and export them as separate audio files. Without the ticks you can then use song recognition software to identify them