Jan 08, 2008 One Word Wonder Puzzle

Comment added by error

This comment from early in development...edited, no salt here.

I thought I knew what to do but can't find any of them. :(

I'm sorry, I'm finding most of them and getting gibberish. I really hope this puzzle works out...

I have an answer but apparently it's wrong. Hmm.

Hmmm... should the last two characters of the fourth row be 8A, instead of BA? Otherwise, I've got something that makes sense, despite the answer not being accepted.

it's not rainbow....I'm not getting this!!

Is there a list that contains these??? I found a big list that contained none of them.

[5] ditto

[8] Me too. We must be missing something.

[5] ditto here also...not taking the answer I derive

HUH?

[6] Indeed after all my trying so hard to get it right, I can't get an edited version to update. Line 4 should read E6 BE 8A 4

I found a list that helped me on wikipedia

[14] that's as far as I got too!

[14] except I had a different line 5

[14] is way salty, but that does mean something to me, and nothing I can think of works as an answer

[14] Got deleted :( Somebody repost it?

[14] got deleted most likely because it was way too salty.

anyone solve this??? I know what the numbers mean but it doesnt make sense

ninjoo, any guidance on where to find meaning in what used to be in comment 14?

[20] Exactly, so we need someone to repost so people can actually have a shot at this.

yeah, i see where the letters point to, but can't figure out the final step...

[14] got deleted because I posted a string of 12 letters that looked like gibberish to me; the fact that it's salty comes as a surprise to me. Clearly my taste buds are broken.

I've got an answer, that fits in with the theme, but the system isn't recognizing it as an answer. I believe a few other Tangans are also experiencing this as well.

Either we're all wrong, or something is wrong somewhere.

Heavy salt that only some people got to see is really unfair.

Shouldn't answers be words?

[25] Tangagram them to me?

Any salt on how to solve this one?

me to

nm, I now got one more step along the way, but the answer doesn't seem to work

[28] They should be. This one isn't?

There is more than one answer that fits the theme and you have to figure out which to use.

if you wiki search any of these lines, you should get to a list that helps

blahmcblah: then are you going to Tangagram them to everyone else? Because salt that only YOU get to see is really unfair. :)

Presumably anyone who saw the salt, [27], ignored it because it was gibberish to them, too. (I mean, seriously, 12 letters, two vowels. That meant something?)

Incidentally, the answer in the system may be wrong; that's what one of the first two posts seemed to imply before it was edited.

[27] That's always been the case, that the people who are on this site early get to see an occasional piece of salt that then gets removed.

[30] Do those collections of letters and numbers look like anything to you?

I got four top 20's and I don't feel at all satisfied by it.

[36] I would repost it, and then spam it if it got deleted again.

blahmcblah...go to LJ

A DNA sequence???

Ridiculous :( Once again, as Hope said in [28], One WORD Wonder?

Sigh, I have all 12 but don't know where they point.

Foul! Not a word!
At least it's not in any dictionary I checked...

The first 2 edited posts were placed PRIOR to the puzzle being posted and referred to the wording in the solve method. Not the answer. No salt was there. I had no idea they would be visible when the puzzle posted.

I give all credit for me getting this to Ducky. I was trying everything else. Kudos to him for even thinking to try what I never would.

Ohhhh. I see. Apparently what I posted was in fact right, with the right spacing even, but with one letter wrong.

To be honest, I'm not all that impressed with this puzzle; the only thing you can do is go look up a bunch of stuff in Wikipedia. (For those who don't know what these things are, that's even harder; try searching on a line without the spaces, and without the last number.) After that, you get a message that's so abbreviated as to be almost incoherent.

And, of course, the six-letter answer that should be working, isn't...

[14] was salty, and I had gotten that far without the salt, so I will not repost it because the second half of solving the puzzle is where we are getting stuck...14 had one wrong letter, but it would also only be salty if you get the reference, but I can't think of a non-salty hint for what to do with the first clue right now

[46] The answer still isn't a WORD. I have no idea how puzzles like this get posted. This is almost as bad as the patents puzzle of a few weeks ago.

[48]The six-character answer that does work, does. It's just not in the form of the six-letter answer you are trying....

if you go to wikipedia, and type in the first 6 characters from any of these lines, you'll get a list to help you... from there, you end up right where the deleted line 14 was... which apparently is still a ways from the answer because I still don't have anything this puzzle will take

[48] You are probably on the right track, but (believe it or not) the answer gets even more obscure. Same idea you are using from the sound of it.

Is this actually solvable, because I'm starting to see ED0A3F!!!

OK, I've tried the colour and I've tried the hex equivalent. What am I missing?

[54] Yes, it is....just repeat what you just did.

haha, davey, you're close with that...that's the form of the answer

I agree with the comments - I would have never tried that for the answer because it's not a word...it's clever, but come on...

okay, that was a bit silly in the end

[28] Apparently, they are not. Think of them as an abbreviated text msg, then figure out what it means.

Oooookay. I had already tried the right answer, in the right format, but... okay, how do I say this without giving it away? I found a source to decode all the info given in the puzzle. Using that same source on the answer doesn't work. Using a completely different source on the answer did work.

I am... not impressed.

[58] No,it was a LOT silly

That sucked. I found several different answers for this.
Fun for a while but ambiguous at the end.

(60) try not using the source at last and think like the puzzle maker

Bad, Bad puzzle. *shakes finger in disgust*

[62][64] Agreed. Awful.

Good to great puzzle with an absolutely garbage twist to get the lousy answer

I've got to call a foul here as well; for the first half of the puzzle, all the translations consistently came from one company's canonical list, but the final answer did *not* come from that list.

Boo.. The encoding used in the final step is inconsistent with the encoding used in the first step...

Oh. Oh my god. That was terrible, in the sense of "bad", "should never have been published", "what the [censored] was he thinking".

Even if the final six-character answer is going to be utter gibberish, there is no reason, no reason whatsoever, that you shouldn't translate your answer word back into hexadecimal by *the same mechanism you used in the first place*. Especally since the number Wikipedia uses isn't especially authoritative; there are lots of variant hex-codes one can use.

You know what? I've never done this before, in general I'm opposed on principle, but: if you're vaguely near the end and can't get the answer, just Tangagram me and I'll tell you. I swear, cheating on puzzles is so completely against my personal honor code; but this isn't a puzzle, it's a guessing game, and a stupid one at that.

OMG! Finally figured this out. The wikipedia page that I was using as a resource that actually had all the info I needed (except for that next-to-last step of course) had a different answer for the final step.

I finally found a page with tons of different choices and tried them one at a time until one worked.

Would have been a much better puzzle without those last two steps (especially the next-to-last one!), but even at best it still required some specific knowledge that the average puzzle solver isn't likely to have (unless most of us here happen to be web developers).

I finally figured it out, what I thought was gibberish finally gelled for me. However, maybe the puzzle could have given a better clue how to break up the results to get to the answer a little easier by adding a blank line at the break.

I tried breaking it up different ways to make it mean something and eventually stumbled across something that looked familiar to me. At that point it became obvious. I actually liked the puzzle but the last step took a jump due to the seemingly gibberish results.

Good idea, but ridiculously vague clue from the first step. Then the answer is not only not a word, but not even the answer in the form of the original step.

Omigod. Everything everybody else said!

Seriously, this could have been a good puzzle if not for the final step. Glad I at least slogged through it quickly enough (well, shamelessly scoured the blog, I mean) to earn some bonus points.

After reading the comments up to now, I think I'm going to pass on this one. I have the 12-character clue, but it seems that putting any more effort in than I already have will simply be unrewarding.

[69] I apologize for the bad reception of this "guessing game" and clearly have a lot to learn about designing clever puzzles. To me the answer not being a word didn't mean so much after a few of the cryptopixes reached for far to the edge of "word." I challenge anyone who did not enjoy the method, answer, concept...anything about this puzzle to do what I did when I didn't like one...submit your own.

Even better, apparently the source I used to translate this was using some limited edition renames for some of the items... so I got a few letters wrong too.

Thankfully, I was helped past that. Now I have the answer, and retranslating it doesn't give me something that's taken as a correct answer. Guess I have to go try to find unrelated ways to translate it back now?

I had to have help to understand the abbreviation... how the heck am I supposed to get from those six letters to the full clue? Yeesh. And to have the answer NOT come from the same "box" as the rest of the clues is just bad. :(

[75] Some of us are upset because we do submit puzzles and they don't get published. Cryptos can be more than one word. We get just as upset, almost, when a one word wonder is two words with no space.

I'd love to have one of my puzzles published and get some criticism and then make better puzzles.

WORD

[75] I have. MANY of them... about 2 were published.

I'm not saying all mine were great, but most were leaps and bounds better than this, and haven't been published.

[76] Wiki

[75] From the FAQ: "Cryptopix puzzles are created by having pictures put together to form a word or phrase."

Cryptopixes can be phrases. None have stretched the definition of a "word." At least this was a little closer to a word than the Patents answer. At least there are letters in this one.

our problem also was that the table we decoded all the originals, did not have the correct translation of the final answer, we had to use a different table...but alas quentin would have appreciated me dropping so many f-bombs :-)

Oh yeah, that one sucked, too!

this isn't my language, so i spent a long time getting in the ballpark.
i am still stuck finding a reference that will provide the "names" needed.
i've plowed through a few lists, but none are comprehensive enough to include these.

any help?

ok, before i even start guessing wrong answers from wiki, can someone post the link to the site that has the correct code for the next to last step?

[75] Well theres my problem its a cryptopix and not a one word wonder.

Oh silly me!

[86] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X11_colors

[85] Tangram sent

[86] See [81]. Try a few of the possibilities, not just the first one you see.

I agree with [73]; this would have been a good puzzle if the last step had used the same reference.

thx both

[88] Right, X11 colors. As opposed to Wikipedia's entry for [almost-the-answer] itself, which has something different. Brilliant, isn't it?

whoa. I enjoyed it right up until the very last part where there were so many choices. After my first couple didn't work, I started second guessing my work and trying different combinations of the same things. That was kind of sad. Over all though, I applaud you for trying something a little "out side the box". Thanks for the memories. LOL!

DID ya all go to bed????

[94] Why, do you still need help?

"One Word Wonders are puzzles where the answer to the puzzle is exactly one word"

FOUL!

[95]
Naw, but thanks for the offer!
Thanks Tahnan!

I could not have gotten this without a LOT of help! Tahnan is right, it's not a puzzle - puzzles are generally designed to have ONE correct answer. This is a get-you-part-of-the-way-there-and-use-intuition-to-get-to-the-next-step-which-may-or-may-not-line-up-with-your-reasoning-and-throw-you-back-off-track-while-all-the-while-the-author-isn't-doing-proper-fact-checking-on-their-sources.

Phew.

Paint = Pantone

This is not Pantone.

Wow, I must be slow. I have the 12 characters but it makes no sense to me =^<

Not a word.