The Furious Angels

FA Discussion => General => Topic started by: Anonymous on October 16, 2004, 01:24:06 pm

Title: Puzzle Randomness
Post by: Anonymous on October 16, 2004, 01:24:06 pm
While the puzzle is dead and recruitment is currently closed, T did kind of ask me to toss something together as a back burner sort of project.

An idea with a complete backstory has been simmering in my mind and I finally sat down and banged out a piece of the puzzle today.

Parts might be a bit daunting, but it is solvable using no more than a browser and google. I swear. In fact, it might be a wee bit too easy.

If you want to give it a whirl, Click me! (http://telnet://garth.hn.org:21) and ignore the under construction notice. Type: connect white_pawn to get started. I'll make a nice login message at some point.

Ideas, bugs, etc. are always welcome.

I have not written the backstory aside from an outline, but it is technically feasible... That is, you can use two lasers to measure electron flux and do adaptive prediction in order to pierce things that would otherwise be anethema to radio transmissions (like the sky in the real world). I have thought about this and will pen it if this is something that is deemed useful/wanted/whatevah.
Title: Puzzle Randomness
Post by: Anonymous on October 16, 2004, 01:52:37 pm
hmm, I have the hexadecimal translation when debugging the error, but when I hit enter all I get is "Huh?"  Is there some command I'm supposed to put in before the translation?
Title: Puzzle Randomness
Post by: Anonymous on October 16, 2004, 01:54:54 pm
% signs are bad. So don't use escaped hex. I might change it to octal or 64 just to get rid of that since lots of hex translators like to escape. And there isn't really any error checking yet. In other words, if you don't put in the right answer, it will always say: Huh?
Title: Puzzle Randomness
Post by: Anonymous on October 16, 2004, 01:55:41 pm
Maybe I mistranslated then, because I didn't have a percentage sign anywhere in there

I translated it to text and then back over and ended up with the exact same Hex code, so I have no idea.
Title: Puzzle Randomness
Post by: Anonymous on October 16, 2004, 02:19:34 pm
Is this puzzle based on "Detective Story" from the Animatrix ?  "White pawn" and "Red Queen" kind of ring a bell.

Anyways, I love it until now.  I really like all the surrounding technical output, like the trace.  It gives "texture" to the puzzle.  It makes it more "real".

Keep up the good work.
Title: Puzzle Randomness
Post by: Anonymous on October 16, 2004, 02:21:31 pm
Yep, I tried it, too.
HEX:
3232392E3239353300
BINARY:
0011001000110010001110010010111000110010001110010011010100110011
EDIT: It worked the second time I tried.

I like this idea. However, it seems that if you miss it the first time and get a "Huh?" you have to start over.
Title: Puzzle Randomness
Post by: Anonymous on October 16, 2004, 02:24:46 pm
Hmm, I got a different hex result than you did Redux, I got 3232392e32393533
Title: Puzzle Randomness
Post by: Anonymous on October 16, 2004, 02:26:05 pm
Quote from: "Wolf"
Hmm, I got a different hex result than you did Redux, I got 3232392e32393533

3232392E3239353300
Hm... you're missing the last character.
Title: Puzzle Randomness
Post by: Anonymous on October 16, 2004, 02:26:51 pm
What translator, wolf?
Title: Puzzle Randomness
Post by: Anonymous on October 16, 2004, 02:31:29 pm
I used Nick Ciske's. http://nickciske.com/tools/hex.php
It gives you the option for both escaped and pure bytes.
Title: Puzzle Randomness
Post by: Anonymous on October 16, 2004, 02:40:25 pm
When I first translated it I did it by hand, the second time I got an actual program but don't remember where it was, so it seems the most likely problem is that I'm just a moron.
Title: Puzzle Randomness
Post by: Anonymous on October 16, 2004, 03:13:13 pm
Contact info goes here. You are teh winnar!
I enjoyed it, but I feel like it needs more steps.
We want members with a little perserverance, right?
...I know! We should hide some information in a rasterized page, and provide the keyword as a metatag. =D There's one idea.
Title: Puzzle Randomness
Post by: Ketamininja on October 16, 2004, 03:38:57 pm
Gerenal bug: Doesn't work in opera. IE is fine.
Haven't tried netscape/mozilla, but I suspect thats all fine.
Title: Puzzle Randomness
Post by: Anonymous on October 16, 2004, 03:48:03 pm
Yeah. That opera bug has been reported by myself and about a hundred other people roughly ten thousand times. They just don't care.
Title: Puzzle Randomness
Post by: Anonymous on October 16, 2004, 03:54:22 pm
Moz works fine :D
Title: Puzzle Randomness
Post by: Anonymous on October 16, 2004, 05:03:21 pm
Hey, this is totally cool!  I still gotta get past the second part.  Looks great so far.
Title: Puzzle Randomness
Post by: Ketamininja on October 16, 2004, 05:05:37 pm
Quote from: "Gillette"
Yeah. That opera bug has been reported by myself and about a hundred other people roughly ten thousand times. They just don't care.

Such a shame, its my preferred browser!
Title: Puzzle Randomness
Post by: Anonymous on October 16, 2004, 08:48:09 pm
Go Opera!!!  It rules.  Mouse gestures all the way...  Too bad its not available on Opera.
Title: Puzzle Randomness
Post by: Anonymous on October 16, 2004, 10:29:41 pm
Hey, I just completed it, and am very proud of being teh winnar, great puzzle Gillette
Title: Puzzle Randomness
Post by: Anonymous on October 16, 2004, 10:59:29 pm
Opera < FireFox
Title: Puzzle Randomness
Post by: Anonymous on October 16, 2004, 11:22:07 pm
AvantGo is similar to IE, but you get tabbed browsing, mouse gestures, aliases, pop-up blocking (very effective since it's part of the browser itself), and also java script blocking, active X, flash, etc blocking that's all toggle-able also.
Title: Puzzle Randomness
Post by: Anonymous on October 17, 2004, 06:00:15 am
You can always get people to do it manually by opening up a dos shell.
Title: Puzzle Randomness
Post by: Anonymous on October 17, 2004, 06:47:23 am
Opera > Firefox


By the way...I had no problems using Opera..
Title: Puzzle Randomness
Post by: Anonymous on October 17, 2004, 10:38:46 am
Rar! There's actually no reason I can't do it in any other language - including java or flash or php or straight html. I just like the terminal console that telnet provides for its archaic flavor. :P So yeah. It's just an idea, and I can code and change text-based stuff faster in tm3.1 than in anything else.

It was just a quick little throw together demo of what could be done - I'm interested to hear ideas about how to expand and enrich it - if we end up reinstating some sort of puzzle.
Title: Puzzle Randomness
Post by: Ketamininja on October 17, 2004, 01:43:48 pm
hmmmn, although a flash version could be more... I dunno, involved? I think I prefer the telnet box. :)
Title: Puzzle Randomness
Post by: Anonymous on October 17, 2004, 01:47:00 pm
I like the terminal style, what you could do is start with the telnet box and then as they get further then they access a java site, or the other way round.
Title: Puzzle Randomness
Post by: Anonymous on October 17, 2004, 01:56:31 pm
Well, using telnet has the possibility of some script kiddy digging up telnet exploits... but I love the flavor of telnet.
Title: Puzzle Randomness
Post by: Anonymous on October 17, 2004, 02:15:57 pm
Assuming that what was listening was a telnet server, sure.

But it's tm3.1. And with every hard coded command but connect, logout and quit disabled... There just aren't that many holes. :)
Title: Puzzle Randomness
Post by: Anonymous on October 17, 2004, 04:53:25 pm
thumbs up on telnet style
Title: Puzzle Randomness
Post by: Anonymous on October 17, 2004, 11:04:46 pm
Point taken, Gilette.
Title: Puzzle Randomness
Post by: Anonymous on October 18, 2004, 05:28:33 am
I think there ought to be some sort of FA style client for it anyways, I'm annoyed at my basic telnet window and not being able to see what I'm typing :P
Title: Puzzle Randomness
Post by: Anonymous on October 18, 2004, 04:58:19 pm
Turn echo on, you... non-echoey person.
Title: Puzzle Randomness
Post by: Anonymous on October 19, 2004, 09:31:53 am
I changed it over to the default ftp port (21) and fixed the link in the original post. That should allow some people to connect that had outbound ports blocked.
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