Ackanomic Cyclopedia of Knowledge Volume 1 issue 11 September 6, 1998 ========================================================================== How We Found the Curious Clock ------------------------------ by /dev/joe (and TJ) First, note that we only found this through help from two-star, who has visited Acka IRC quite a bit recently, though not so much as either of us. Second, it was pointed out that it isn't clear that the JT trinkets are forgeries since that rule doesn't mention former names, only former players, so I, /dev/joe, hereby give the two trinkets I recently created containing the string "JT" to TJ, if I have them. Now, /dev/joe figured out the first part of the puzzle after two-star kept throwing that StEo clue at us. This appeared twice in his publicly posted clues as well. Two-star had told JT that the first of my two completions of the Tromino Go grid from issue 9 of the ACK was right. This puzzled me partly because I had looked this over and knew there was no valid starting place for a tromino go game in either grid -- all attempts to do so either result in not being able to find a valid move; in many cases, this fails on the third move, where the C tromino is not allowed to touch the A tromino. Anyway, assuming this rule was missed, and that the game had been played with all trominoes following the rule for trominoes after the 4th, I noticed that the letters corresponding to one of the A trominoes in that grid were 'StE', and a b tromino next to it had the 'o'. I followed the rest of the game, in the following order: h B G hhll BBCC eLOo 9 ccdlk C ccACb A lNEfT 991c5ddkkp CCAcBAAbbA HiSctoEaHy gg2115566pp aabAABBccAA EcftEDhINEE g2234467ee abbCaacAbb rEoGEneDTW a334877e aCCabAAb TRidrScc aabo88ff aaBcbbCC oSsruNEB ibboomf cBBccaC tuIQerk siijjqmm accAAbaa HNaAeLLT ssnj qqr aaBA bbC AtAE wUV nn rr BB CC Ug Ai The first grid here has the order of the plays, 1 through 9, then a through s. The second in the completed tromino go game, and the third is the other letters from the original jumbled grid. JT had figured out, somehow, part of the mesning of the Curious Clock's description. The minute hand running counter-clockwise and the hour hand running clockwise meant that the letters corresponding to each capital tromino were to be read counterclockwise and the letters for each lower case tromino were to be read clockwise. Initially we were reading these starting at the "break" in each tromino, and found about 4 transposed pairs in the final message, but later we figured out that we were supposed to start at the 1 o'clock position on clockwise trominoes and end there on counterclockwise ones. Only a few trominoes are placed so that this even matters, but we eventually got from this: A b C a B c StE oEf RiG ndE tDh NeI ScD Nur AHi SoT uIs Ncl EoE WcT EkB crE eLG aNt AEe HaT Ofo TLr AUg eQr EEy UwL AiV tAH Reading the lower case letters forward and then the capital letters backward, in line with the original clockwise and counterclockwise rule, we got "to find the curious clock create a forgery witH A VALUE EQUAL TO THE ANGLE BETWEEN ITS HANDS IN DEGREES". Now, another puzzle remained to be solved. The clock's description said it had a time while buried that had something to do with its map. We couldn't really find much of a clue anywhere. One of the ones that was troubling us was this bit from one of two-star's clues: Remember, the encryption was made by the confused sad VAX. (5, 4) Two-star revealed that this was a key hint, and a tip that I probably have done a lot of these puzzles in GAMES led us (and Weishaupt, who was also on IRC trying to help out) to believe it was a cryptic crossword clue. After rejecting this notion a couple times because we couldn't figure out an answer, two-star finally confirmed for us that it was a cryptic crossword clue. 'Confused' suggested an anagram, and eventually Weishaupt hit on the right words to anagram, 'morose DEC' (for 'sad VAX') which I figured out anagrammed to 'Morse code.' So, we took the string of letters generated from the first part of the hunt to somehow represent Morse code, and we assumed caps vs. lower case was significant. It took us a while to figure out, but noticing that the sequence never had more than 2 consecutive capital or lower case letters, we eventually figured out that one capital letter was a dot, two were a dash, one lower case letter was a break between dots and dashes, and two lower case letters were a break between letters. This gave ..... ...-- -.... .--. .-.-.- -- .-.-.- which decodes to "536p.m." Now, I figured the angle between the hands by calculating the hour hand's position relative to 12:00 is 30 degrees per hour x 5 hours, plus 1/2 a degree per minute x 36 minutes = 168 degrees. The minute hand's position is 6 degrees per minute x 36 minutes = 216 degrees. This gives 48 degrees, but I noted that since the minute hand of the curious clock ran backwards, it might actually be at 144 degrees or a difference of only 24 degrees. TJ and I tried both, and he was right.