I haven't figured out the first puzzle yet... triangle on an eye, I've tried all sorts of variations on triangles, the all-seeing eye, and so forth. I just mentioned it on mathpuzzle.com
Doesn't work in Linux (needs Flash 8). Not your fault I guess but by the time Flash-8 is released for Linux the quest will be well over. I hate being discriminated against.
Heh. I was wondering whether you'd have something to do with this. The sudoku-variant made me think you would, but by the time I saw the first "chess" puzzle, I figured that you'd know that Chess problems wouldn't actually give you a (meaningless) choice of planning the move of the opposing party!
If you can write about that kind of thing, I'd like to hear more about the collaboration with the publisher and the movie PR people.
Some solution is about the book "Da Vinci Code". Each question or puzzle is so excited!!:) (Well...I am not an American citizen, I 'll quit the puzzle competition before the final. Sorry, I just want to try the game:P)
And may I ask you one thing?? Although you are really busy , but can I post the two article about Sledgehammer I translated into Chinese in my Blog??(last time I e-mail to you)
So did something funky happen on the day 14 puzzle? I've been getting them done in 3 or 4 minutes, but I started today's puzzle and got lost. After half an hour (during which I figured out the answer to the final puzzle, but not how to finish the first half) I gave up and went to lunch. Came back to it this evening, and the first half was different and fell into place in a couple of minutes. Then the second half was different as well, although the same difficulty as previously. What gives?
There's often a reasonable variance in difficulty even on some of the difficult Challenges. The idea is to give everybody the feeling of accomplishment -- true puzzle fans, I expect, would hit "Get New Puzzle" until they found an actual challenge. (I know that I'm going to be doing that for Day 19.)
How will you keep people honest during the Final Phase?
If my reading of the official rules is correct, the winner will be determined not by how soon after 1PM on May 19 they solve the Final Phase puzzles, but by how soon after they start solving the Final Phase they finish, with the former serving only as tiebreak.
If this is correct, there's an easy and undetectable way to cheat; have a friend take the Final Phase challenge before you, and capture the puzzles by writing them down or making screenshots, then save at your leisure. Once you have the solutions, "start" your Final Phase, and finish shortly thereafter.
You could prevent this by having multiple versions of the Final Phase challenges, but then some will unavoidably be easier than others, and the winner will be someone who gets lucky and gets the easiest Final Phase.
Or will even the Final Phase have the "give me another version of this puzzle" option, in which case making a quick decision as to whether to solve the current version or ask for a new one will be an important part of the skill of fast solving.
Anyway, the first part of the challenge was fun, though I was hoping things would get a little more challenging by the end. Given the popularity of 9x9 Sudoku, I was surprised that you didn't go beyond 6x6 in this puzzle. The "restoration challenges" were my favorite; was this an existing puzzle type, or did you invent it?
Re: How will you keep people honest during the Final Phase?
Unfortunately, I'm not allowed to make any comment that will help readers of this blog but not be known to players who don't read this blog. :-(
The difficulty of the puzzles was tuned to make things fun for as wide an audience as possible. I hope in the future to have chance to also make some challenging puzzles for the diehards.
(Case in point: the 6x6 occasionally would give a really tough one, but at Sony's insistence there were also some really easy ones too.)
As far as I know, I invented the Restoration Challenge myself, although Brian Tivol did a lot of the puzzle-generation code, turning my concept into workable puzzles. We traded off, amusingly enough: He came up with the concept of the Curator Challenge but I did the puzzle-generation code.
I know google's big on data mining, and, after the whole thing is over with, there's some stats I'd love to see:
# of people who started # who finished shortest time to completion longest time to completion my ranking
also, once it's done, is there any way to get the puzzles made available again? It'd be fun to go through them all untill I'd done every one.
and, a nit, my one complaint: It would have been nice if the registration process immediately emailed back to the registered address as a way of confirming that your registration really happened. Now I'm sitting here wondering if I 'really' registered, and I guess I won't know until next Monday...
I totally agree with this. I managed to solve and register 8 minutes after the 24th puzzle was launched, but I still don't know if my registration was successful. Being in the software biz myself, I inherently don't trust submitting a page without receiving confirmation - there are so many moving parts something could have gone wrong somewhere.
I've also been watching the comments at http://www.warpedfromthepipe.com/. They've been posting the answers for the puzzles since the contest began. Obviously they can't help solve the symbols, jigsaw, restoration, curator, but I'm guessing some people got through the chess challenge and observation that shouldn't have done.
The hosters of the site probably hosed themselves somewhat, because I don't think they read the rules. Having the observation challenge the last one somewhat sucked, since once the answers were published it became easy for others to enter. I would have liked a really tough symbol challenge as the last one - they were my favorite.
Anyway, once the contest is over I'd love to see some data too. I don't think google will publish absolute numbers (although it'ld be cool), but I'd like to see drop-off rate over time per puzzle. What percentage of people starting the quest finished it. Time to complete stats would also be good.
I'm hoping I'll make the first 10,000, and then the challenge really begins. I'm going to be blogging about the final stage (if I make it) on http://esylum.blogspot.com/. I'm not going to give too much away though...
People are dying here.. just confirm this one thing and we'll be cool
Hello,
You are awesome. As you can guess, my friend and I and prob like 1000's of others are freaking. So, we discovered that if we go to google.com/davincicode while we are logged into google, we will see a page - mine says "congratulations... you have received our message... completed 24 puzzles" etc etc basically we're too early for the final challenge. Does this page mean that we are finalists if we see it? You will seriously be helping the mental capacity of many ppl if you can answer this. I swear I won't post about this quest ever again if you can answer this.... PLEASE! Thanks, DWB
Re: People are dying here.. just confirm this one thing and we'll be cool
OK, so I read this again and it does seem like we are indeed finalists. Thanks for making me think more about this. So will we get a confirmation email or just get the cryptex? I must say, I am concerned I entered my email address incorrectly, although I feel it was correct. I guess this is a common thing to worry about. And pls don't say that "Well it was your responsibility to make sure what you entered was correct" b/c honestly, we were freaking out when we entered that info. Anyways, and advise to alay our fears??! THX DWB
given that i finished in less that 60 seconds after watching the video on a dsl line, i'm having just a little bit of trouble imagining that 10,000 people were faster.
Doesn't matter how quickly you completed it, the servers screwed everything up. My puzzle completion form was submitted by about 1:05 and I wasn't a finalist, even though many people who submitted afterwards did make it.
From what I understand, anyone winning the Grand Prize will be dinged for over $50,000 in taxes. Any plans for Google to pick up the tab on that one, or are the contestants better off not winning? Remember the Oprah car giveaway fiasco...?
It seemed pretty clear in the rules that you could only enter once, with one google ID, and that there was only one prize per household.
There are a couple of entries in this blog (http://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=22200521&postID=114767299047333346) that seem to negate that:
Jeff Blankenburg said...
I actually got two cryptexes in the mail today. One for me, and one for my wife. I figure if we team up, our second try at the content ought to go pretty well.
here's to $40K in taxes!!!
H-sizzle said...
Yay! My cryptexes arrived! (I entered twice, with 2 gmail accounts...)
I LOVED the original 24 puzzles and am excited about the Final challenge on Friday.
I was wondering how you have anticipated the following scenario:
A husband and wife each get into the final 10,000 under 2 Google IDs and one takes his/her time solving the final challenge, then hands the answers off to the partner, who enters it in record time.
Have you randomized the puzzles to prevent this from happening?
I assume so, I just want to hear you say so.
Thanks again for the hard work getting this done! It's awesome and I love my cryptex!
Additionally, what is to prevent waiting 'til the end of the final challenge timeframe, where someone undoubtedly posted the answers somewhere on the internet. I'm aware some of the quizzes require abstract thinking, but the sudoku-like challenges can be solved in less than a minute with the answers sitting in your lap.
Thank you so much for all your hard work on these puzzles. It was loads of fun. I mean, of course, I'd love to win as well, but I enjoyed thinking about the technical aspect of the puzzles and all the work that went into them.
It seems that there is a major flaw in the technology used for the final challenge.
You can access the puzzle without logging into Google.
Anyone can go to http://www.google.com/ig/davinci/puzzle.html?puzzle=100 (http://www.google.com/ig/davinci/puzzle.html?puzzle=100) and play the puzzle. You don't need to have logged in.
Judging by comments on my blog (http://esylum.blogspot.com/2006/05/da-vinci-code-quest-on-google-final.html#114811483992611917), people are doing just that.
I'm hoping google are tracking IP Address as a way of spotting such behaviour, but there's still a scenario in which this won't work.
If you have a mouse / key logging / replay program, you can go to Starbucks with your laptop, use wifi there (one IP address), go to the URL (without logging in), play the game while recording keystrokes, then go home, log into google, replay the keystrokes.
There's no way Google can spot this, apart from an absurdly fast time. However, if the time is close, but slightly faster than the guessed minimum, its not traceable.
I think they'll find the results are impossible to parse, and they cannot disqualify those that cheated. In that case they may have to think about rerunning the final round with more security.
Well, between the static puzzles (Hello copying a friend) and sudoku solving programs (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=sudoku+solver&btnG=Google+Search) I don't think that anyone that legitly attempted the puzzles has any chance of winning.
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif?v=91.7){kind=small}
onigame) wrote,
Anonymous
April 18 2006, 04:07:56 UTC 6 years ago
Coolness
I haven't figured out the first puzzle yet... triangle on an eye, I've tried all sorts of variations on triangles, the all-seeing eye, and so forth. I just mentioned it on mathpuzzle.comApril 25 2006, 08:59:45 UTC 6 years ago
Re: Coolness
Triangle? Eye? Myst be an Illuminati thing.Anonymous
April 18 2006, 04:36:55 UTC 6 years ago
Flash 8
Doesn't work in Linux (needs Flash 8). Not your fault I guess but by the time Flash-8 is released for Linux the quest will be well over. I hate being discriminated against.Anonymous
April 20 2006, 11:56:22 UTC 6 years ago
Re: Flash 8 for Linux
It bugged me that it didn't work for Linux either, but this sounded like such a cool game that I took the time to figure out the work around.Here's what you do:
1) Download the windows/netscape version of flashplayer 8 from
http://macromedia.com/shockwave/download/a
2) Download CrossOver Standard from http://www.codeweavers.com/ ($40 or 30 day free trial with nag messages).
3) Install CrossOver and tell it to install flash, but use the advanced option to specify the flash 8 exe file. (Otherwise it defaults to flash 7.)
Ta da! You now have flash 8 working under Linux.
--Ben Wong
Anonymous
April 22 2006, 18:15:01 UTC 6 years ago
Should've guessed.
Heh. I was wondering whether you'd have something to do withthis. The sudoku-variant made me think you would, but by the
time I saw the first "chess" puzzle, I figured that you'd know
that Chess problems wouldn't actually give you a (meaningless)
choice of planning the move of the opposing party!
If you can write about that kind of thing, I'd like to hear more
about the collaboration with the publisher and the movie PR
people.
May 5 2006, 08:57:17 UTC 6 years ago
Re: Should've guessed.
I like to think of it as creating a new sort of chess puzzle, where youget to decide what black's move is too ... and there's only one that works.
(But actually that's known in the literature as a "helpmate in 1.5".)
I asked Noam Elkies for advice, and he sent me a wonderful puzzle that I wasn't able to include for technical reasons.
Anonymous
6 years ago
April 24 2006, 12:21:52 UTC 6 years ago
The puzzle is interesting
Some solution is about the book "Da Vinci Code". Each question or puzzle is so excited!!:) (Well...I am not an American citizen, I 'll quit the puzzle competition before the final. Sorry, I just want to try the game:P)And may I ask you one thing?? Although you are really busy , but can I post the two article about Sledgehammer I translated into Chinese in my Blog??(last time I e-mail to you)
Thank you:)
May 5 2006, 08:57:46 UTC 6 years ago
Re: The puzzle is interesting
Oh, sorry. Yes, go ahead and post it. I will get around to reading itsometime. :)
May 1 2006, 08:41:16 UTC 6 years ago
Day 14?
So did something funky happen on the day 14 puzzle? I've been getting them done in 3 or 4 minutes, but I started today's puzzle and got lost. After half an hour (during which I figured out the answer to the final puzzle, but not how to finish the first half) I gave up and went to lunch. Came back to it this evening, and the first half was different and fell into place in a couple of minutes. Then the second half was different as well, although the same difficulty as previously. What gives?May 5 2006, 09:00:06 UTC 6 years ago
Re: Day 14?
There's often a reasonable variance in difficulty even on some of the difficult Challenges. The idea is to give everybody the feeling of accomplishment -- true puzzle fans, I expect, would hit "Get New Puzzle" until they found an actual challenge. (I know that I'm going to be doing that for Day 19.)6 years ago
6 years ago
May 10 2006, 17:13:51 UTC 6 years ago
Nice job!
I've just finished the last puzzle, and I have to say it was a fun, relaxing series of puzzles. Exactly right for such a contest, in my opinion.Thanks
May 10 2006, 20:16:16 UTC 6 years ago
How will you keep people honest during the Final Phase?
If my reading of the official rules is correct, the winner will be determined not by how soon after 1PM on May 19 they solve the Final Phase puzzles, but by how soon after they start solving the Final Phase they finish, with the former serving only as tiebreak.If this is correct, there's an easy and undetectable way to cheat; have a friend take the Final Phase challenge before you, and capture the puzzles by writing them down or making screenshots, then save at your leisure. Once you have the solutions, "start" your Final Phase, and finish shortly thereafter.
You could prevent this by having multiple versions of the Final Phase challenges, but then some will unavoidably be easier than others, and the winner will be someone who gets lucky and gets the easiest Final Phase.
Or will even the Final Phase have the "give me another version of this puzzle" option, in which case making a quick decision as to whether to solve the current version or ask for a new one will be an important part of the skill of fast solving.
Anyway, the first part of the challenge was fun, though I was hoping things would get a little more challenging by the end. Given the popularity of 9x9 Sudoku, I was surprised that you didn't go beyond 6x6 in this puzzle. The "restoration challenges" were my favorite; was this an existing puzzle type, or did you invent it?
May 10 2006, 20:27:58 UTC 6 years ago
Re: How will you keep people honest during the Final Phase?
Unfortunately, I'm not allowed to make any comment that will help readers of this blog but not be known to players who don't read this blog. :-(The difficulty of the puzzles was tuned to make things fun for as wide an audience as possible. I hope in the future to have chance to also make some challenging puzzles for the diehards.
(Case in point: the 6x6 occasionally would give a really tough one, but at Sony's insistence there were also some really easy ones too.)
As far as I know, I invented the Restoration Challenge myself, although
Brian Tivol did a lot of the puzzle-generation code, turning my concept
into workable puzzles. We traded off, amusingly enough: He came up
with the concept of the Curator Challenge but I did the puzzle-generation
code.
6 years ago
Anonymous
6 years ago
6 years ago
6 years ago
May 11 2006, 08:22:52 UTC 6 years ago
data mining
I know google's big on data mining, and, after the whole thing is over with, there's some stats I'd love to see:# of people who started
# who finished
shortest time to completion
longest time to completion
my ranking
also, once it's done, is there any way to get the puzzles made available again? It'd be fun to go through them all untill I'd done every one.
and, a nit, my one complaint: It would have been nice if the registration process immediately emailed back to the registered address as a way of confirming that your registration really happened. Now I'm sitting here wondering if I 'really' registered, and I guess I won't know until next Monday...
Anonymous
May 11 2006, 16:19:40 UTC 6 years ago
Re: data mining
I totally agree with this. I managed to solve and register 8 minutes after the 24th puzzle was launched, but I still don't know if my registration was successful. Being in the software biz myself, I inherently don't trust submitting a page without receiving confirmation - there are so many moving parts something could have gone wrong somewhere.I've also been watching the comments at http://www.warpedfromthepipe.com/. They've been posting the answers for the puzzles since the contest began. Obviously they can't help solve the symbols, jigsaw, restoration, curator, but I'm guessing some people got through the chess challenge and observation that shouldn't have done.
The hosters of the site probably hosed themselves somewhat, because I don't think they read the rules. Having the observation challenge the last one somewhat sucked, since once the answers were published it became easy for others to enter. I would have liked a really tough symbol challenge as the last one - they were my favorite.
Anyway, once the contest is over I'd love to see some data too. I don't think google will publish absolute numbers (although it'ld be cool), but I'd like to see drop-off rate over time per puzzle. What percentage of people starting the quest finished it. Time to complete stats would also be good.
I'm hoping I'll make the first 10,000, and then the challenge really begins. I'm going to be blogging about the final stage (if I make it) on http://esylum.blogspot.com/. I'm not going to give too much away though...
BXCellent
6 years ago
Anonymous
6 years ago
6 years ago
Anonymous
May 11 2006, 23:15:07 UTC 6 years ago
People are dying here.. just confirm this one thing and we'll be cool
Hello,You are awesome. As you can guess, my friend and I and prob like 1000's of others are freaking. So, we discovered that if we go to google.com/davincicode while we are logged into google, we will see a page - mine says "congratulations... you have received our message... completed 24 puzzles" etc etc basically we're too early for the final challenge. Does this page mean that we are finalists if we see it? You will seriously be helping the mental capacity of many ppl if you can answer this. I swear I won't post about this quest ever again if you can answer this.... PLEASE! Thanks, DWB
Anonymous
May 11 2006, 23:42:21 UTC 6 years ago
Re: People are dying here.. just confirm this one thing and we'll be cool
OK, so I read this again and it does seem like we are indeed finalists. Thanks for making me think more about this. So will we get a confirmation email or just get the cryptex? I must say, I am concerned I entered my email address incorrectly, although I feel it was correct. I guess this is a common thing to worry about. And pls don't say that "Well it was your responsibility to make sure what you entered was correct" b/c honestly, we were freaking out when we entered that info. Anyways, and advise to alay our fears??! THX DWB6 years ago
Anonymous
6 years ago
6 years ago
Anonymous
6 years ago
Anonymous
6 years ago
Anonymous
6 years ago
Anonymous
6 years ago
May 16 2006, 02:33:33 UTC 6 years ago
now i REALLY wanna see stats
just got the 'you are not a finalist' email.given that i finished in less that 60 seconds after watching the video on a dsl line, i'm having just a little bit of trouble imagining that 10,000 people were faster.
oh well.
Anonymous
May 16 2006, 18:10:30 UTC 6 years ago
Re: now i REALLY wanna see stats
Doesn't matter how quickly you completed it, the servers screwed everything up. My puzzle completion form was submitted by about 1:05 and I wasn't a finalist, even though many people who submitted afterwards did make it.Anonymous
6 years ago
Anonymous
May 16 2006, 03:22:48 UTC 6 years ago
Yay
Well, I'm officially a finalist. Yay! Well, I hope no one else figures out that this is your blog! THX DWBAnonymous
May 16 2006, 05:42:28 UTC 6 years ago
I'm a Finalist - don't sell your Cryptex Just yet...
Click here for the finalist email and some pics of the Cryptex (http://esylum.blogspot.com/)And an interesting observation. I wouldn't sell your Cryptex on ebay just yet...
BXCellent
Anonymous
May 16 2006, 06:14:17 UTC 6 years ago
Serious Question - Taxes
From what I understand, anyone winning the Grand Prize will be dinged for over $50,000 in taxes. Any plans for Google to pick up the tab on that one, or are the contestants better off not winning? Remember the Oprah car giveaway fiasco...?BXCellent
May 16 2006, 06:50:20 UTC 6 years ago
Re: Serious Question - Taxes
I know of no such plans.Any volunteers out there? If all the participants of the Quest donated a buck it'd be much more than enough. :)
Anonymous
6 years ago
Anonymous
May 16 2006, 16:27:16 UTC 6 years ago
Did Google scan for rule-breakers?
It seemed pretty clear in the rules that you could only enter once, with one google ID, and that there was only one prize per household.There are a couple of entries in this blog (http://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=2
Jeff Blankenburg said...
I actually got two cryptexes in the mail today. One for me, and one for
my wife. I figure if we team up, our second try at the content ought to
go pretty well.
here's to $40K in taxes!!!
H-sizzle said...
Yay! My cryptexes arrived! (I entered twice, with 2 gmail accounts...)
Anonymous
May 16 2006, 20:14:13 UTC 6 years ago
DaVinci Code Quest Cheat?
Hey there.I LOVED the original 24 puzzles and am excited about the Final challenge on Friday.
I was wondering how you have anticipated the following scenario:
A husband and wife each get into the final 10,000 under 2 Google IDs and one takes his/her time solving the final challenge, then hands the answers off to the partner, who enters it in record time.
Have you randomized the puzzles to prevent this from happening?
I assume so, I just want to hear you say so.
Thanks again for the hard work getting this done! It's awesome and I love my cryptex!
Lou Berger
LouJBerger @ Gmail com
Anonymous
May 17 2006, 22:26:30 UTC 6 years ago
Re: DaVinci Code Quest Cheat?
Additionally, what is to prevent waiting 'til the end of the final challenge timeframe, where someone undoubtedly posted the answers somewhere on the internet. I'm aware some of the quizzes require abstract thinking, but the sudoku-like challenges can be solved in less than a minute with the answers sitting in your lap.Anonymous
6 years ago
May 16 2006, 20:56:55 UTC 6 years ago
Anonymous
May 20 2006, 17:00:36 UTC 6 years ago
Final Round / Fatal Flaw
It seems that there is a major flaw in the technology used for the final challenge.You can access the puzzle without logging into Google.
Anyone can go to http://www.google.com/ig/davinci/puzzle.h
Judging by comments on my blog (http://esylum.blogspot.com/2006/05/da-vinci-code-quest-on-google-final.html#114811483992611917), people are doing just that.
I'm hoping google are tracking IP Address as a way of spotting such behaviour, but there's still a scenario in which this won't work.
If you have a mouse / key logging / replay program, you can go to Starbucks with your laptop, use wifi there (one IP address), go to the URL (without logging in), play the game while recording keystrokes, then go home, log into google, replay the keystrokes.
There's no way Google can spot this, apart from an absurdly fast time. However, if the time is close, but slightly faster than the guessed minimum, its not traceable.
I think they'll find the results are impossible to parse, and they cannot disqualify those that cheated. In that case they may have to think about rerunning the final round with more security.
BXCellent
Anonymous
May 20 2006, 19:23:47 UTC 6 years ago
Final Challenge
Well, between the static puzzles (Hello copying a friend) and sudoku solving programs (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=sudoku+solver&btnG=Google+Search) I don't think that anyone that legitly attempted the puzzles has any chance of winning.