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Puzzle In xkcd Book Finally Cracked
An anonymous reader writes "After a little over five months of pondering, xkcd fans have cracked a puzzle hidden inside Randall Munroe's recent book xkcd: volume 0. Here is the start of the thread on the xkcd forums; and here is the post revealing the final message (a latitude and longitude plus a date and time)."
First Post
The start of the thread, containing spoilers, isn't much use if you want to attempt the puzzle and haven't got the book. Do I need the book? If so, this is something of a non-story, isn't it?
So we now need to build a computer to know what the actual question was...
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
The gripe is not that it's a story about a solved problem, the gripe is about the story being about a solved problem inside a dead-tree version of xkcd - and we can't even be certain we were told the actual problem so the informational content of this story boils down to: "Randall Munroe has apparently put some tricky puzzles into an xkcd book of his and someone solved a really hard one and got a set of coordinates. You'll have to trust us on this one, we don't have further data." As far as news go that's really weak.
/. readers who own the xkcd books - and those who do and are interested in the puzzles are most likely already reading the xkcd forum, making this story mostly pointless.
There's no link to details about how the answer was found and we can only guess at what the problem was (apparently Randall gave some cyphertext and an initialization vector, leaving the reader to figure out which algorithm was used and how to decrypt the string). There's no actual article and the matter isn't urgent/all-important enough to warrant turning a set of posts incompehensible to those without the book into a news story.
Had someone written a nice blog post that explains the problem, how the solution was determined and what the answer means this would have been much more newsworthy. As it is now it's only of use to the subset of
In short: This story would be a lot more interesting if it was comprehensible without the book. As it is now it might as well be a stealth ad for the book. "Buy now and you too can have the faintest clue what kdawson is so excited about."
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
Prediction:
XKCD used all profits to rent out a C-130 Herc to drop a metric ton of Ball-Pit Balls on that location.
FYI, a google maps link to the location:
http://maps.google.com.au/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=37.769573+-122.483123&ie=UTF8&t=h&z=16
time and date: 2010-06-26 14:28:57
I.O.U One Sig.
I think you have spoiled me the end of LOST, thanks :-P
-Woof woof woof!
As I suggested in the linked XKCD forum, now that the puzzle is solved, it would be really nice to have a full write-up of the entire thing, including the unsolved puzzles themselves and a little more detail and background about the whole thing. That would have made for a much more interesting story to the general public.
Direct linking to an unorganized web-forum thread isn't really much of a story. Oh well.
For what it's worth, the puzzles in the XKCD book were really fun. They ranged from pretty simple (ROT-13, etc) to fiendishly clever. Even though every comic is available online for free, I'm glad I spent the money on the book.
I was lucky enough to solve the final puzzle myself, and therefore happened to be the first person to have all eight keys and decrypt the message. As lame as this might sound, it was pretty thrilling.