AI
Gold Bug 2024: 242 Teams, 44 Scoring
Last year’s Gold Bug contest had 242 teams register. Only 44 scored points. Teams submitted 3,447 answers. Team Psycholics won by solving 12 of 14 puzzles during the con. Two puzzles were solved after con. The theme was Victorian parlor games. Each puzzle was based on a parlor game. The contest runs over Friday and Saturday. No gimme puzzles exist. The meta puzzle required solving 13 sub-puzzles.
Designing Puzzles: The Balance Between Too Easy and Too Hard
Puzzle design requires balancing difficulty. It is easy to make a puzzle everyone can solve or no one can solve. The hard part is finding the middle. Hints act as a dial to adjust pacing. The goal is to avoid a winner Friday morning or no points Sunday afternoon. Designers must anticipate weird gotchas and use hints to nudge solvers without giving away the answer.
Solving Stories: Labyrinth and Bottles
One puzzle featured a rotating 3D labyrinth. The creator accidentally made a dead end. A solver brute forced the last seven letters by guessing from a subset. He found an English word and submitted it. Another puzzle involved bottles with colors and shapes. Solvers had to decode a shift instruction. They misread the output for hours because it was rotated. The answer was there all along.
The Meta Puzzle: 13 Cards, Caesar Cipher, and a Hedge Maze
The meta puzzle used 13 cards with gibberish text. Each card had a Caesar cipher shifted by the number on the card. Decoding gave quotes from 13 different authors. The cards had white lines with dots. Solvers had to line them up using joker cards that gave color order. The route through the hedge maze required counting paces. Each step correlated to a letter. The answer spelled out the final solution.
Music Box and Elephant’s Foot Umbrella Stand
The music box puzzle had sheet music with missing notes. The solver ignored the missing notes and skipped two notes. He overlaid the notes on wrapped text to reveal 12 letters. It took three days. The shopping for granny puzzle was based on the game Elephant’s Foot Umbrella Stand. Players guessed items Granny bought. Each word had to start with a specific letter. The letters in order gave the answer.
Notable Quotes
We had the answer for like a solid four to six hours. We just weren’t reading it at the right orientation. Theo · ▶ 30:33
The hardest problems are the easy ones. Kevin Hulan (Krypto) · ▶ 31:06
If you fell down yesterday, stand up today by HG Wells. Panelist · ▶ 42:25
I’m a JavaScript YouTuber, but I had friends who were into this puzzle. Theo · ▶ 6:47
Key Takeaways
- Gold Bug had 242 teams but only 44 scored points.
- Puzzle design requires balancing difficulty with hints.
- Creative solving often involves brute force and serendipity.
About the Speaker(s)
Psychoholics is a group of nerds that love solving puzzles, drinking drinks, and doing escape rooms. They compete in contests and CTFs, and run TFH, Crash&Compile and Dungeons@Defcon. They have a Krux. 110001011100001111101 100011100110001101101