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Posting rules
  • Please do not post solutions to puzzles, but rather post hints as appropriate in response to queries
  • Type [spoiler] ... [/spoiler] around the outside of any hints so they can't be read by accident - e.g. [spoiler]have you tried looking at the corner of the page?[/spoiler]

Pages: 1

#1 2019-11-18 23:14:58

winterer
Member
Registered: 2019-11-18
Posts: 126

No progress

Hi,

got stuck on that one:

▼Spoiler

Sources = words? 'twenty-six characters' = alphabet? Or letters {einstwxy}? Or something completely different? And is there a clue in 'held in custody'?

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#2 2019-11-19 08:26:08

doublecross
Member
Registered: 2019-11-18
Posts: 37

Re: No progress

▼Spoiler

the first one, and sort of

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#3 2019-11-19 20:48:38

winterer
Member
Registered: 2019-11-18
Posts: 126

Re: No progress

Thanks, cracked it.

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#4 2019-11-22 19:52:24

Rolytic
Member
Registered: 2019-11-18
Posts: 23

Re: No progress

Sorry still stuck here.

▼Spoiler

so I'm looking for words for alphabet?

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#5 2019-11-25 19:03:50

winterer
Member
Registered: 2019-11-18
Posts: 126

Re: No progress

Rolytic wrote:

Sorry still stuck here.

▼Spoiler

so I'm looking for words for alphabet?

▼Spoiler

No, you are looking for something more specific.

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#6 2019-11-25 19:44:48

Rolytic
Member
Registered: 2019-11-18
Posts: 23

Re: No progress

Still super stumped here hmm

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#7 2019-11-26 07:14:54

winterer
Member
Registered: 2019-11-18
Posts: 126

Re: No progress

▼Spoiler

You are looking for all occurrences of one specific element.

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#8 2019-11-26 12:45:40

Becky_P
Member
Registered: 2019-11-26
Posts: 31

Re: No progress

how many letters?

▼Spoiler

do i need to look for this "-" character?

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#9 2019-11-26 15:49:46

Rolytic
Member
Registered: 2019-11-18
Posts: 23

Re: No progress

▼Spoiler

If I'm looking for 5 puzzles, each describing one of the bullet points, then I'm at a loss for #2-5. sad

If I'm looking for something else, then I have no idea what I need

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#10 2019-11-26 16:02:41

winterer
Member
Registered: 2019-11-18
Posts: 126

Re: No progress

Rolytic wrote:
▼Spoiler

If I'm looking for 5 puzzles, each describing one of the bullet points, then I'm at a loss for #2-5. sad

If I'm looking for something else, then I have no idea what I need

▼Spoiler

You are looking for one specific character, which one is hinted at in the scrap (this is the part that initially stumped me). Write down all its 'sources'. The rest should be easier.

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#11 2019-11-27 10:42:53

Becky_P
Member
Registered: 2019-11-26
Posts: 31

Re: No progress

ok.  I have looked for 2 specific characters and i still can't make any word that is correct....

▼Spoiler

i've written down the word with "-" and the words in square brackets. argh

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#12 2019-11-28 21:07:21

Stavr0s
Member
Registered: 2019-11-18
Posts: 29

Re: No progress

Also at a loss here. Two possible directions I'm thinking of:

▼Spoiler

- are the sentences between [ ] 'held in custody'? If so, what character to look for?

-There are a lot of words in there hinting at looking (watching, visualize, gaze, ...

But no idea what to look for and what sources that might have.

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#13 2019-11-28 21:45:59

Wabanaba nubnub
Member
Registered: 2019-11-19
Posts: 3

Re: No progress

Agree with Stavr0s, no clue here

▼Spoiler

I was thinking something like eyes, drones, lenses...

Hints?

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#14 2019-11-29 06:31:15

Becky_P
Member
Registered: 2019-11-26
Posts: 31

Re: No progress

Wabanaba nubnub wrote:

Agree with Stavr0s, no clue here

▼Spoiler

I was thinking something like eyes, drones, lenses...

Hints?

I have figured this part out

▼Spoiler

26 character... The 2 words withing [ ] that contain that character

After that... I am still figuring it out

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#15 2019-11-29 07:06:00

winterer
Member
Registered: 2019-11-18
Posts: 126

Re: No progress

▼Spoiler

You simply need all sources of that character. Custody is not restricted to the bracketed part.

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#16 2019-11-29 11:17:32

Becky_P
Member
Registered: 2019-11-26
Posts: 31

Re: No progress

winterer wrote:
▼Spoiler

You simply need all sources of that character. Custody is not restricted to the bracketed part.

AH.. got it.  thank you

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#17 2019-11-29 12:50:17

Stavr0s
Member
Registered: 2019-11-18
Posts: 29

Re: No progress

▼Spoiler

I'm being really thick, I still don't know what character to look for. Is it possible this is an issue to me because I'm not a native speaker? Any further nudges, also more explicit ones are greatly appreciated.

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#18 2019-11-29 14:17:31

winterer
Member
Registered: 2019-11-18
Posts: 126

Re: No progress

Stavr0s wrote:
▼Spoiler

I'm being really thick, I still don't know what character to look for. Is it possible this is an issue to me because I'm not a native speaker? Any further nudges, also more explicit ones are greatly appreciated.

▼Spoiler

πάρτε τη ζωτική γράμμα

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#19 2019-11-29 14:51:05

Alex55
Member
Registered: 2019-11-18
Posts: 121

Re: No progress

Stavr0s are you from Greece?

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#20 2019-11-29 15:23:00

Stavr0s
Member
Registered: 2019-11-18
Posts: 29

Re: No progress

Hehe,

I am not. Running through Google translate gives me a hint but I still don't know what to do with it.

▼Spoiler

How do i know what letter is 'vital', I don't get any clue from what's written in the scrap

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#21 2019-11-29 15:25:25

winterer
Member
Registered: 2019-11-18
Posts: 126

Re: No progress

Stavr0s wrote:

Hehe,

I am not. Running through Google translate gives me a hint but I still don't know what to do with it.

▼Spoiler

How do i know what letter is 'vital', I don't get any clue from what's written in the scrap

Ha, sorry, was fooled by your username.

Major hint:

▼Spoiler

The bolded letter is a zeta.

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#22 2019-11-29 18:14:54

Alex55
Member
Registered: 2019-11-18
Posts: 121

Re: No progress

ok, I find it. I am from Greece!!!

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#23 2019-11-29 19:12:17

Stavr0s
Member
Registered: 2019-11-18
Posts: 29

Re: No progress

Congrats alex!
I'm still drawing a blank, no idea at all at how to interpret 'held in custody'.

I've also tried

▼Spoiler

listing all words from the progress report with the letter z (as hinted to by winterer (though I don't understand where the 'z' comes from), but that also doesn't give me anything.

This is driving me nuts :-)

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#24 2019-11-29 20:43:22

Alex55
Member
Registered: 2019-11-18
Posts: 121

Re: No progress

▼Spoiler

first letter of these words

Last edited by Alex55 (2019-11-29 20:44:40)

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#25 2019-11-29 21:10:39

Stavr0s
Member
Registered: 2019-11-18
Posts: 29

Re: No progress

Ha, finally, thanks!
Can someone explain

▼Spoiler

why we had to look for words with the letter z? My copy of the book says 'all twenty-six characters', not 'all twenty-sixth characters'.

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#26 2020-01-14 01:07:23

Cpostano
Member
Registered: 2019-12-31
Posts: 25

Re: No progress

Stavr0s wrote:

Ha, finally, thanks!
Can someone explain

▼Spoiler

why we had to look for words with the letter z? My copy of the book says 'all twenty-six characters', not 'all twenty-sixth characters'.

Yeah, I didn't understand that part either, although I did figure out the puzzle....

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#27 2020-01-28 21:11:25

mcwuzzy
Member
Registered: 2020-01-27
Posts: 34

Re: No progress

It's possibly a clue error

▼Spoiler

the note mentions All 26 characters, which would imply the alphabet, or a-z, and indeed there are a lot of words that have a and z in them, except one, tweeze, which spoils the pattern.

Last edited by mcwuzzy (2020-01-29 09:49:28)

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#28 2020-01-29 00:47:40

404
Administrator
Registered: 2019-11-17
Posts: 45

Re: No progress

There are no errors in the book, and all the clues have a grammatical interpretation which precisely fits their intended meaning. It might not be the most obvious interpretation, but that doesn't make it an error.

Since the clues are written cryptically, you have to work out how to interpret the clue. In this case:

▼Spoiler

You can imagine that there are implicit quote marks around the 'twenty-six'. So you are looking for all 'twenty-six' characters. It's then up to you to understand that the simplest interpretation of 'character twenty-six' is 'Z'. Similarly you also need to work out that a 'character' means a letter in this context, and that 'held in custody' refers to the letters being held in the custody of other letters, i.e. within a word. Then you must 'find the source', i.e. the start of those words.

And just to be clear, you don't need to have the quote marks for this to be valid. I only suggest imagining them in order to make it clearer how you could parse the clue differently. Working out how to break down a cryptic clue is one way to solve a small number of the puzzles in this book, and if you aren't familiar with this type of deliberately misleading cryptic phrasing then you can arrive at the solution without fully parsing the clue by observing that twenty-six is a very unusual number to have in writing, and what a coincidence that there are 26 letters in the alphabet - and we have other puzzles where 1=A, 2=B etc in the book.

A third way to tackle the puzzle is to observe some highly unusual phrasing, such as 'worker gaze', 'agonizing failures', 'tweeze out the weak', 'visualize improvement', 'idealized outcome' etc and notice the connection between them. Despite sometimes deliberate appearance otherwise, there is almost nothing in the book which has no meaning - even if it isn't part of the apparent solution, it often acts as a clue to an alternative way to reach an observation that clues the solution. I'm not going to explain this further, since it will spoil the puzzles, but any time there is something seemingly unrequired on the page you can be sure it actually has a purpose - just not necessarily an essential one.

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#29 2020-01-29 10:06:41

mcwuzzy
Member
Registered: 2020-01-27
Posts: 34

Re: No progress

▼Spoiler

I understand your explanation. If you need quote marks, probably best to print them, there's none in my copy and guessing where implicit quotes might be is a bit of a stretch!
So I needed to find the sources for all twenty-six characters. I would interpret 'all 26' as the alphabet, or an abbreviation of such, e.g. a-z. As all the words that make the answer, apart from tweeze, contain, or 'hold in custody', an 'a' and a 'z' in order, this seemed a very logical solution.
Requiring a solver to imagine random implicit quotes and then to make a leap from all twenty-six to character 26 is not a logical process.

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#30 2020-01-30 00:09:13

kite
Member
Registered: 2019-11-29
Posts: 13

Re: No progress

▼Spoiler

Saying that the phrase 'all twenty-six characters' can be logically interpreted to mean 'only z' as long as one imagines random emphasis quotes is not very satisfying.  (I liked the book! I generally found the puzzle-solving logic good! But this one felt frustratingly random, even with the explanation.) 

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#31 2020-09-11 08:06:53

AcidBurn39
Member
Registered: 2020-08-11
Posts: 120

Re: No progress

SOLVED

▼Spoiler

Find the words with a Z
Only first letter is important

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