GCHQ puzzle

[Sporky McGuffin]

3D1 - Wassail
3D3 - Stringy?

 

[Steve Maskery]

Both had occurred to me, but I do a cryptic every morning and I don't see where sailors come in. In cryptic crosswords, sailors usually mean AB for Able Seaman (why is it not AS?) or RN for Royal Navy. If Wassail is right, Sailors must mean something else here.

Stringy. Again why? It's not an anagram. At least, not perfectly.

There are some clever people in this world. I know my place.

S

 

[Sporky McGuffin]

Wassail is in the clue - Withdraw as sailors hold festive sing-song - "hold" indicates that it's that clue type.

Stringy is an anagram of try and sing, as indicated by "medley", and some violin parts (the strings) are indeed stringy.

I'm through to the next stage now (largely thanks to John Brown) and stumped immediately!

 

[Steve Maskery]

Do you know what the DD... answer is? I don't, I just broke it by brute force
S

 

[jimmy_s]

Steve - do you mean the last one in part 2?

If its that question - its Santa's reindeer names

 

[Steve Maskery]

That did occur to me, but I don't know them, and it was something I thought of when I wa nowhere near a computer...

 

[John Brown]

Sung by Gene Autrey, as I mentioned...

 

[John Brown]

I confess I never got the Jingle Bells answer(except by brute force, as I got the others). I was looking for something far more complicated than a direct ASCII to decimal thing, probably because:
a) I've been an emedded firmware programmer for nearly 40 years, so that sort of thing seems totally trivial
but
b) I originally learnt the ASCII values as hexadecimal, much easier to convert to binary for observing data streams on the 'scope.

Anyway, I've solved enough of this to satisfy myself that dementia hasn't overtaken me yet, but I would never had had the patience to solve the initial grid problem as Steve did.

Strange mixture of difficult and easy. The semaphore thing was immediately obvious to me, as was the morse code, but the problem with the morse is one of guessing where the inter-character spaces are to arrive at a real word. I thought the phonectic alphabet thing was fairly obvious too, although I still don't know what goes with Love, the Wilde and Beckham gave it away from the start. When I got to part three I didn't have a clue about any except the morse code, so I haven't seen the next part yet.

 

[Sporky McGuffin]

I'm happy to post some hints and pointers for part 3 if that's helpful?

 

[Dave D]

For Part 4 C ignore the value of the numbers. Rearrange the individual digits until you recognise some patterns.

It is possible that the same would apply to parts A and B but I have failed with those so far.

 

[PeterBassett]

I've just started a little script to brute force it. It'll hit all 6*6*6*6*6*6 (46,656) pages in turn and see which one says something other than "Sorry - you did not get all the questions correct."

It's up to 1000 already.

EDIT : I doubt it'll work though. I'de have made all but one path 6 levels deep and the correct path would be 7. Thus all ABCDEF.html pages would give an incorrect answer.

We'll see.

EDIT : Or even just have the last correct link go to a differently named page. That way all the ABCDEF.html pages do answer incorrect. One of them wouldn't be linked to from the others. Umm. Thats stage two then.

Its' up to AEDBFB.html now, 6000 in.

 

[PeterBassett]

And we have a winner! It was taking too long so I kicked it off again with 20 threads, starting where it had left off.

The next stages starts with this :

Congratulations on solving Part 2 of the Director's puzzle.
Part 3 consists of four questions. The answer to each puzzle is a single word, which can be used to create a URL.

I'll not publish the url that I found unless people want it. Let me know.

Pete

 

[gasman]

I am stuck on 4B
The numbers are all products of various exponentials of prime numbers
eg 101250000 = 2exp4 * 3exp4 * 5exp7
1728000 = 2exp9 * 3exp3 * 5exp3
4900 = 2exp2 * 5exp2 * 7exp2
360 = 2exp3 * 3exp2 * 5exp1
675 = 3exp3 * 5exp2
200 = 2exp3 * 5exp2

But I can't see a pattern in these - and never mind the fact the first 3 are negative values
It is certainly getting harder!
Mark

 

[gasman]

4A is powers of 2 ignoring 2nd digit I think

 

[bugbear]

I've just started a little script to brute force it. It'll hit all 6*6*6*6*6*6 (46,656) pages in turn and see which one says something other than "Sorry - you did not get all the questions correct."

It's up to 1000 already.

EDIT : I doubt it'll work though. I'de have made all but one path 6 levels deep and the correct path would be 7. Thus all ABCDEF.html pages would give an incorrect answer.

We'll see.

EDIT : Or even just have the last correct link go to a differently named page. That way all the ABCDEF.html pages do answer incorrect. One of them wouldn't be linked to from the others. Umm. Thats stage two then.

Its' up to AEDBFB.html now, 6000 in.

I'm surprised that worked - if I was them I'd have put in some IP checking to prevent it, or make it too slow to be useful.

BugBear

 

[Racers]

I've just started a little script to brute force it. It'll hit all 6*6*6*6*6*6 (46,656) pages in turn and see which one says something other than "Sorry - you did not get all the questions correct."

It's up to 1000 already.

EDIT : I doubt it'll work though. I'de have made all but one path 6 levels deep and the correct path would be 7. Thus all ABCDEF.html pages would give an incorrect answer.

We'll see.

EDIT : Or even just have the last correct link go to a differently named page. That way all the ABCDEF.html pages do answer incorrect. One of them wouldn't be linked to from the others. Umm. Thats stage two then.

Its' up to AEDBFB.html now, 6000 in.

I'm surprised that worked - if I was them I'd have put in some IP checking to prevent it, or make it too slow to be useful.

BugBear

Won't hacking in to the system give you extra points? in the films it does!



Pete

 

[PeterBassett]

I'm sure they want people who can come up with answers, regardless of methodology. Brute force is valid when it can be applied effectively.

 

[Sporky McGuffin]

I am stuck on 4B
The numbers are all products of various exponentials of prime numbers
eg 101250000 = 2exp4 * 3exp4 * 5exp7
1728000 = 2exp9 * 3exp3 * 5exp3
4900 = 2exp2 * 5exp2 * 7exp2
360 = 2exp3 * 3exp2 * 5exp1
675 = 3exp3 * 5exp2
200 = 2exp3 * 5exp2

But I can't see a pattern in these - and never mind the fact the first 3 are negative values
It is certainly getting harder!
Mark

They are also all squares, ignoring the negatives. Or allowing for complex numbers. I'm not sure that's it though.

 

[Sporky McGuffin]

Ah. No. Rounding errors. Don't mind me.

 

[Mark-numbers]

I bet they can't hang a door