As Frank Herbert put it "The beginning of knowledge is the discovery of something we do not understand."
Some Hints:
1) There are no hidden codes, no hidden case, emphasis, bold or anything else. The entire puzzle is just in that list of words. What you see is what you get. If you had them presented to you written on a piece of paper, with no HTML, then the puzzle would be just as easy or just as hard.
2) The "words" are broken by commas. So for the purposes of this puzzle "zip-locking" is one word. So is "ionic foot"
3) Look for what is unusual in this list of words, compared to a hypothetical list of random English words.
4) Each word will resolve to a single letter of the answer phrase
5) In particular, what is unusual about the choice of vowels. What could that mean?
6) For Mikalye's Second Tricksy Riddle - This is three
Solution
The only vowels that appear in this list of 49 words are i's and o's. Interpreting them as 1's and 0's, we get a series of binary numbers. Specifically. 10011, 10100, 101, 1, 1101, 111, 1001, 110, 10100, 10011, and so on. We can convert these to decimal numbers getting 19, 20, 5, 1, 13, 7, 9. 6, 20, 19 , and so on. Some people tried to convert these to ASCII characters and got no printable characters, but using the more basic code of A=1, B=2, etc. and letting the case of the word determine the case of the letter, the message translates to
"Steamgifts Giveaway Code is AmdtF. Go Binary, Dude"
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I have some leads. Bumping to point out that this puzzle is not abandoned.
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One hour, totally no clue...I think I'll wait the solution. But have a bump for this crazy puzzle! :D
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Well it has now been solved. SilentGuy was the first to post in the giveaway thread.
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I only just saw this, so all your hints were already here, but with them it was fairly easy... :)
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Still puzzling over the list of words above...
Thanks for such a great set of puzzle-making. Just wanted to confirm that you saw this thread about March's Science Puzzle event and recall at the top of Space Kitty's pyramid you expressed interested in making a real-world application of physics puzzle.... are we on for this plan? Thanks for letting me know Mikalye! Looking forward to it all! :)
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no idea whatsoever.....working hard or not so hard on it :P
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Right . .. back on the case. I reckon my thinking will be clearer after a few too many beers.
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Ok, so the beers haven't helped, it's getting late and my head is beginning to hurt (I'm sure this is puzzle related, and nothing to do with alcohol).
If I may ask a question of you Mikalye . . . (based on a hunch I had when I first saw the puzzle):
Could I swap "microchips" with "imposition" or "biologist" with "digitoxin" without impacting the solution?
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No you could not. But you could swap "microchips" with "kickboxing", "biopic", "scissors-kick" or "fish-oil" without impacting the solution.
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What if I changed "D"ivisors with "millions" ? Without making it "M"illions?
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"Divisors" could become "Millions" without changing the puzzle. However, if you made it "millions" then a letter in your answer would probably have the wrong case.
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So it turns out alcohol wasn't the solution for everything, asking for help was . . . I've got some pondering to do.
Bump for solved!
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Congrats VillaNZ,
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, but sometimes vowels symbolise something else again.
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Well I finally found what is unusual about the choice of vowels after your reply to VillaNZ, but I still don't know where to go from there.
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Ok, so I think I got something, but I don't know where to go now, hahaha
Edti: This is the first puzzle I've tried to do, and I never knew they were so exciting? funny?
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I'm so glad you enjoyed it arodfer, and congrats on solving.
I was wondering if I needed another hint, but if a first time puzzler can solve it, I think that I have the difficulty about right now.
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i see some pattern of the pronounciation of o in most words, have no where to go from there.
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I already have Portal 2 so not even gonna try
Best excuse I could find... Have no idea where to go XD
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I'm on the same boat. Have been thinking for 3 days and nothing comes up. Bump.
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Yes mrt39, seeing your comments on the giveaway page, you really did overcomplicate it. One of the reasons that a first time puzzler could solve it, and experienced puzzlers cannot is I think that the experience comes with our thinking ourselves into a box. So if we see the Hex codes "41 43 54", we can immediately convert those to Decimal codes "67 65 84" and those are the ASCII Codes for "C A T" so we know that it is CAT.
But if I had to encode "CAT", is ASCII converted to hex the most logical thing that I could use? Obviously on SG, it is, because we see it a lot. But in the real world that is just bizarre. I think that this has baffled experienced puzzlers, since I used a much, much more basic encoding.
Whether I can get this principle to work for me in Nordhbane's cafe remains to be seen.
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Man, I cracked the code, but it is a codeception, dunno what to do with that bunch of letters (and I'm sure I'm on the right way because the most of it made sense, but not the last letters) .-.
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Two and a half hours to go. Quite a people solving in the last few hours. The next puzzle is ready to go and will open after this one finishes.
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Oh come on. Binary was the idea I had 2 days ago, but I grouped it in groups of 8... Should have paid more attention to the hints. :P
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Well I continue with my weekly 2016 puzzles, This ends in 4 short days, and I am creating this on my birthday.
This is a puzzle that consists of a list of words. I call it "A List of Words" and it is here:
Philosophizing, ionic foot, microchips, strings, imprisoning, bikinis, biologist, millions, ironing-room, bio-politics, Nihilism, microscopic, imposition, zip-locking, thrills, prioritizing, knight, idiomorphic, Misprints, criticizing, discomfort, dissolving, whippoorwill, iconophilist, Cliffs, digitoxin, whirlpool, sigmoid colon, Divisors, Script-writing, disciplining, Unicorn, isotonic, ignition, flight, mitochondrion, criminologist, Risotto, isodimorphism, igloo, siphoning"
The prize this week is Portal 2
Good luck
Mikalye
This is my seventh(or possibly eighth) 2016 puzzle after
6th As Easy as ABC (logic) (http://www.steamgifts.com/discussion/NaTeF/mikalyes-6th-2016-puzzle-as-easy-as-abc-ends-17-feb)
5th Movie Stargazing (Movies and Topology) (http://www.steamgifts.com/discussion/bku0l/mikalyes-5th-2016-puzzle-movie-stargazing-ends-7-feb)
4th Queens Play (Mathematics) (http://www.steamgifts.com/discussion/tBtXy/mikalyes-4th-puzzle-anno-2070-full-pack-ga-queens-play-ends-1-feb)
3rd Keep Your Distance (logic) (http://www.steamgifts.com/discussion/V8Ggp/michaels-third-puzzle-of-2016-keep-your-distance-ended)
2nd Hunting Lie and Hoe (Wordplay) (http://www.steamgifts.com/discussion/Jo54c/mikalyes-second-giveaway-puzzle-of-2016-now-closed)
1st Mixed Bag - Not linked as I will alter one of these soon
0th History of Computer Role-Playing Games (http://www.steamgifts.com/discussion/8ayLm/my-first-puzzle-and-a-bit-of-history-at-the-same-time)
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