You can still bump the other post :D
What promise?
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I have 2 group GA-s going. The one you can access (and apparently have not entered so far) is http://www.steamgifts.com/giveaway/J0SdS/gauntlet
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Omg, I really loved this puzzle cause I had some experience with implementing MRI algorithms. Unfortunately, I did not have enough time for puzzles last two weeks. So, I yesterday's evening I quickly found 3 giveaways and went to sleep. Today's morning I found one more giveaway and also the parabola equation thereby finding the 5th link. But I already have 3 of these 5 games, so I was able to enter only 2 giveaways. And I won both! Unbelievable!
Thank you for the games and for really great puzzle! I enjoyed it even more than your previous one where we needed to figure out how pseudo random numbers are generated in Java. I hope we will get more epic puzzles from you soon!
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Thanks again for the fun and unique puzzle! Unfortunately, my losing streak with Gauntlet remains intact.
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EDIT 14/07/2015: opening this very page is enough for solving the rat brain part of Recycling puzzle. No evil Flash Player things are needed (just noticed a thread right now)
In the previous puzzle 8 people voted for "I really wait for some puzzle about the anatomy of the rat brain". And I have not voted, especially not 8 times. So everything below is their fault.
Edit: some people say they find the puzzle pretty solvable, and chances are that some of them are not actual neuroscientists. I do not know if they are from the 8 or not.
As you probably all know, the Waxholm Space atlas of the Sprague Dawley rat brain, the first open access atlas for any kind of rat brain is already available for some time (INCF). Besides the raw data, there are online and offline (this one is brand new) viewers for the MRI, DTI volumes and the actual segmentation (practically: color coding for the different brain regions).
There is also a set of meshes for the segmentation, however they are not released yet.
This detail allows creating a
boring and tediousnovel and exciting puzzle. A page contains a viewer with the meshes, just the name of the structures have been replaced by a number and a character. There are things which are preserved however: the colour of the structures (so everything uses the same colour in all 3 viewers), and their alphabetical order. Like "alveus of the hippocampus" is 01 and "ventricular system" is 80 (this one is not an actual brain structure anyway, but a set of cavities filled with cerebrospinal fluid). The middle one happens to be "inner ear", number 40 (this is not brain at all, just the canals were nicely visible on the MRI). So the numbers are simply preserving the alphabetical order, and the character next to them is used for building 5-letter codes.For example if someone wrote here "medial lemniscus decussation", "habenular commissure", "commissural stria terminalis", "nucleus of the stria medullaris", "ascending fibers of the facial nerve", the solution would be 45, 35, 12, 49, 05, and the letters next to them could form a giveaway code. These are some of the smallest structures in this segmentation, rather impractical to find anyway.
Finding the largest 10 structures should not be painful though: "neocortex", "molecular layer of the cerebellum", "granule cell level of the cerebellum", "brainstem", "corpus callosum and associated subcortical white matter", "spinal trigeminal tract", "basal forebrain region", "striatum", "olfactory bulb", "glomerular layer of the olfactory bulb"
Here are some less random structures, all of them are visible in the initial slice: "perirhinal area 36", "perirhinal area 35", "fasciculus retroflexus", "dentate gyrus", "lateral entorhinal cortex", "cornu ammonis 2", "mammillothalamic tract", "substantia nigra", "descending corticofugal pathways", "commissure of the superior colliculus"
Some from slicing the brain horizontally (so the initial slice has to be rotated by 90 degrees): "fornix", "presubiculum", "fimbria of the hippocampus", "septal region", "genu of the facial nerve", "bed nucleus of the stria terminalis", "stria terminalis", "middle cerebellar peduncle", "optic tract and optic chiasm", "anterior commissure, posterior part"
Then something from the front: "optic nerve" (its continuation has been used already, then comes) "supraoptic decussation", the middle: "thalamus", and from the back: "central canal", "periventricular gray"
The GA-s are running for a pretty long time. Even the ones saying "1 week left" in my profile now, were saying "2 weeks left" yesterday, so 13 days are left for even those.
Have fun, it is not that terrible.
Users guide:
The slicing tools start in MRI view, the droplist in the top-left corner allows switching to DTI and segmentation. In segmentation view the structure under the mouse cursor is going to be displayed at the bottom of the window. This applies to the main view, which shows a rectangular slice of the brain at arbitrary postion and orientation (and size). The other three views show an overview of the entire brain in perpendicular planes, and the rectangle representing the main view is drawn over them.
All views support dragging: the main view moves in its current plane, the other three either rotates the main view in their plane (drag almost anywhere), or moves the main view in their plane (drag the dot in the middle, becomes yellow).
The online viewer requires Flash and it is slow.
The offline viewer requires 3GB of memory, and in case of 32-bit Windows, the 4GT option has to be enabled.
The mesh viewer is even simpler to use, dragging results in rotation, and the structures can be switched on(checkmark)/off(x)/transparent(empty) individually (or all at once with "Set All"). Transparency is set by the first numerical stepper (starts at 50%). There is support for cutting too, so it is possible to set up similar views in both kind of viewers.
The mesh viewer requires Flash. It also requires hardware support for Shader Model 2 (DirectX9), which should not be a real issue. If it is (software rendering with super slow operation, cutting results in hollow view), Chrome may still help (it uses OpenGL, even on Windows). Funny thing is that debug Windows builds (like the Windows 10 preview) support a full software implementation of DirectX, resulting in extremely slow, but visually perfect operation on whatever old hardware.
Hint0 is just a summary to make things less scary: more than half of the structures (43 out of 80) are mentioned above. 8 of them are fully specified.
Hint1: if I were going to solve this puzzle, I would create an Excel (or whatever) sheet with 80 numbered lines, put the fully specified 8 structures into their position, order the rest of the named structures alphabetically in a different column, and roughly position them between the already known ones. Then start experimenting with the viewers.
Obvious enabler hint: so far every single example in my puzzles was an actual giveaway.
Solution
The mesh generator tool along with a pack of meshes have been released on INCF. Online viewer of the set (with real names) is also available here
OHJJe80hGbtfY15xRg3wCPOFr3PySzmd2jZp9hMd is the sequence of all characters encoded above.
After finding any 3 of the giveaways (not counting the OHJJe example here), one could apply the method described in the example, and enter an Alien: Isolation giveaway.
Random screenshot below:
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