...WARTRON SPOILERS... If you plan to play in the "re-run" of WarTron, then you don't want to read this page ...WARTRON SPOILERS...
The WarTron Game was based on the movies WarGames and Tron. It was the morning of the day's second game. According to the plot of the game, we were about to escape from the computer back out into the world.
At the elevator I/O port, we addressed Karl:
"Hello, ferocious security guard!" Karl told us to wait.
We told him the password. This convinced Karl that we must
be users and that thus he should
let us pass. We took a step towards the elevator I/O port
before Nikhil remembered that we needed to pay our parking fee. So we
paused to vend some parking onto our ticket. And then
we entered the elevato I/O port for our triumphant
return to the roof leve world outside the computer.
We were getting sillier as we got more sleep-deprived. As the elevator doors closed we glimpsed someone walk past outside: Portland's sherrif, according to the patch on his shoulder. Since we'd just gone through a "security protocol", this gave us a case of the giggles. It seemed hilarious at the time, I swear.
Time to get back in the van. The el-wire was gone. Where were we supposed to go now? Someone thought to try entering our security-guard password as an answer. This got us a message: a link to a YouTube video, an old video diary entry Lisa Goto had recorded in the late 80s. She said that she'd left a backdoor in BigMac—but to use it, we'd need to use a secret terminal hidden in the Portland area. 80s-Goto was worried that she'd forget the location, so... so she wasn't telling herself that location in this video. Instead, she was telling herself where she could find a clue to the location of the terminal. Fair enough. Time to start up the van.
We drove a bit. We were quieter now than we had been. There was less chatter in the van. We were somewhat worn out. We'd been gallivanting around and puzzling for about 24 hours. We stopped off at a supermarket for breakfast foods and a bathroom break. Then back in the van, making fun of the mapping software which insisted on telling us the full address of our destination; city, state, country and phone number, said phone number read out as if it were a 11-digit number "15 billion..." In spite of these software shenanigans and Washington Park's twisty roads, we made our way to the Rose Test Garden.
We arrived at our goal: the International Rose Test Garden; we were to look for a "Royal Rosarian". The garden was laid out in tiers on the side of a steep hill. As we walked down stairs from the parking lot to the uppermost level of the garden, a team was coming up: they warned us: you'll need your BITE device. Fortunately, we had ours. When we found a GC member, he gave us a codephrase to enter into the BITE. He also told us that the garden was big and had lots of benches; if we wandered a bit, we could probably find a nice spot to sit and solve.
The GC guy was standing next to a statue... of a Royal Rosarian. I'd assumed that the name was a game-pun making fun of the Rotarians. But apparently the Royal Rosarians are a real thing. He explained that in theory, we were looking for this statue so that we could just pick up the code phrase from an attached sign. But in practice, this GC guy was here because they were worried about the sign coming un-attached.
The BITE "connected" us to a Portland Board of Tourism BBS; telling us to enjoy sightseeing here in Washington Park and the Greater Portland Area, Welcome to the City of Roses... wha? Then, it gave us a list of phrases. Strange ones. "Lord Gunkroot" "Agent Cycle Voice" "Battery Humor" The phrases didn't make much sense. But from our situation, I was pretty sure that those phrases were rose names. Surely we'd have to find those roses. Why else put a clue in a rose garden, right? Other folks on the team thought that the names sounded less rose-y and more anagrammy. But what did they know? The GC guy had encouraged us to wander to find a bench; so we wandered a bit... and found a map of the garden, marked wih many varieties of roses, pointing out in which beds one might find those roses. Aha, my theory was coming together great.
We found a bench, spent a while gathering the team, gathering data from the map. The list of phrases were not rose names, at least they didn't match rose names listed on the map. Maybe they were anagrammed rose names? Uhm... no, they weren't that either. Minutes passed. Theories came up, theories went away. Maybe half an hour had passed on this puzzle, and I wasn't helping much anymore. I took some time to wander away from the team and refill my water bottle at a fountain. And when I got back, folks had noticed the crucial thing. So it's a good thing I refilled my bottle. They'd noticed that one of the phrases anagrammed to OREGON ZOO with one letter missing. And other phrases anagrammed to other locations, each time with one letter left over. E.g., "battery humor" anagrammed to HOYT ARBoRETUM, but missing one O.
We did some anagramming. Maybe another half hour passed as we swizzled letters around. We weren't able to figure out all of the anagrammed locations, but we figured out enough of them to look at the "missing" letters and figure out a message: go to a royal walk and get the name of one of the royals. Now it was time to look at that map; not for a rose name, but so that we could see that this garden featured a Queen's Walk. Portland has an annual Rose Festival where they crown a queen. Each queen gets a commemorative brick with her name in the Rose Test Garden's Queen's walk.
Time to get back in the van. There was more van chatter now than there had been on the way to the Rose Garden, but now we were mostly trying to navigate. We had very specific directions: they weren't just directing us to a particular park, but saying that we should drive there via a particular bridge. I thought that maybe they'd given specific directions because computer-directions had gotten playtesters lost, so I said that we should ignore our computer navigation and instead figure out a route to our destination via this bridge. This took some doing; various folks wrestling with various map applications. But once we got closer, I could see I was wrong: GC had wanted to send us across a pretty green art-deco bridge.
Our destination, Cathedral Park was partly in the shadow of that bridge. When we hopped out of the van, the heat wave was back in effect... except when we could slouch into the shade. So we were glad for that shade. The shade was pretty nice. (Later on, one of the local puzzlehunters showed up and said, "Gah, here again? We've done so many puzzles here." I guessed he was joking about a DASH or something.) We walked down the hill further into the park and bumped into Brent Holman walking out with a big smile on his face. "Warning: fun puzzle ahead," he warned us. As it turned out, he was right.
Our puzzle was a sheet of hex paper. Each hexagon contained six letters, one on each side. Reading those letters that were around the edge of the paper, there were instructions—something about keeping red edges and assembling. One of the hexes letters were something like FREDTO. Oh, that had RED in it. And another hex had ROJO in it. And this other hex almost had RED, no wait that was VERDE. Aha, each hex had a color-word in it, sometimes English but mostly other languages. And each hex also had some leftover letters. We brandished highlighters and colored pencils to mark each color word. But we could have just highlighted the red ones; those were all that mattered. We brandished our scissors, cut away the other hexes, leaving behind a network of hexes. Someone recognized that this could be folded up into a soccer ball shape. So we brandished our sticky tape and assembled.
A member of the Haberdashers team stopped by: they wanted to exchange information. You may recall that we'd picked up name badges, an identiy disk, and a code segment. We'd guessed that we'd need to put this information together with other teams' information at the end. The Haberdashers had figured the same thing and wanted a head start on the data. So we traded.
When we had an assembled soccer ball, we could trace a wriggly path through the leftover letters to get a message: AL ASY EIR WUH ONC AUN U. Er what? Then someone found a different way to trace a path which brought in different letters in a different order: PLAYER WHO CAN USE HANDS. Oh, our answer was GOALIE.
Back in the van, we drove on. It felt like we were getting close to the end. Now we had some information from other teams: the data from their discs, code segments, and the like. How would it all fit together? It seemed like the code segments were telling us formulae for combining pieces of information. I pointed out: by the time we get to the end and it's time to put all this together, the Burninators will have already figured it out; we could just sit back and relax. And we kind of slumped in our seats then. I was sorry I'd brought up the idea.
Thus we arrived at the secret military base... well, really we arrived at Pearson Field, a former army airfield which was now an airplane museum. A couple of folks piled out of the van to pick up our puzzle: a wordsearchy grid. And then they piled back into the van: it was hot out again. Maybe we wanted to stay in the nice air-conditioned van while we solved. And that's what we did: we drove to a spot in the parking lot next to a big building, deployed clipboards and laptops and commenced staring.
The wordsearchy grid wasn't made up of letters, but of numbers. But the word list underneath was names, not numbers. We sat and stared for a while. Someone realized that the words at the bottom were the names of series of numbers: Wilson, harmonic, Ulam. But some he hadn't heard of. Nevertheless, we were soon looking up sequences. I looked up a few, then hopped out of the van to brave the heat in search of a restroom.
It took a while to find an entrance to the hangar (although if I'd gone around it clockwise instead of counterclockwise, I would have found that the humungous hangar doors were open). Inside, there was a restroom. And when I emerged from the restroom in more of a mood to look around, I saw there were also airplanes, displays, interpretive text. This place looked pretty interesting. Perhaps I could look at just one... I reminded myself why I was here. Time to get back in the van.
Back in the van, the team had figured out what we were looking for in the grid. To find "Bell", you would use the first 26 Bell numbers as your alphabet. So if they went 1, 1, 2, 5, 15, 52, 203, 877,... You'd set up an alphabet
A 1 H 877 ... B 1 I 4140 C 2 J 21147 D 5 K 115975 E 15 L 678570 F 52 M 421359 G 203 N 27644437...and then BELL would be 1,15,678570,678570. Most of the team set about translating words into the things we were supposed to find in the grid.
(Actually, I'm not sure if that's how the puzzle worked. It might be that all of the words were encoded using the, uhm, prime numbers alphabet. That is, they might all have used
A 2 H 19 ... B 3 I 23 C 5 J 29 D 7 K 31 E 11 L 37 F 13 M 41 G 17 N 43I wasn't paying attention to the encoding because I was doing something else:)
I started typing the grid into my laptop so that I could throw the Burninator's wordsearch helper program at this grid. That program is nice: it's not so easy to spot 115678570678570 in a grid, but if you tell the program to highlight a sequence, it does so lickety-split. It takes a while to type in a grid, but sometimes it takes a long time to find things in a wordsearch, too. Mmmaybe I'd save us time... But in the end, there were just two things left to find by the time I was done typing. We'd probably have gone faster if I'd done what the rest of the team was doing.
The leftover numbers in the grid made a message using the prime-numbers alphabet: to factor something... and then the message devolved into nonsense. Wait, not nonsense: we should smush together the "nonsense" digits and then factor that. Since I had my laptop out, I unhelpfully helped by typing this long number into some online factoring webpages. But it was a long number, and they didn't use precise math libraries, so we ended up with weird-looking factors. But we didn't know that, and started thinking of strange theories of what our next step should be.
It was around this time that a brave GC member dropped by to visit. We told them what we'd done so far, and they were surprised that the factoring hadn't gone better. Another GC member, who knew the puzzle better stopped by: we had the number OK. Someone thought to try Wolfram Alpha for factoring; that, unsurprisingly, used a better math library. The numbers factors were all in the first 26 primes. So we anagrammed those letters to get our answer.
So we drove to another building on the former army base. In the game plot, this was the site of the secret BIGMAC terminal. In real life, this used to be a barracks, but had been re-purposed as a sort of community center. We were in a heat wave, and the building didn't have air conditioning. It did, however, have what appeared to be every fan that GC could rustle up, again.
We were not the first team to arrive. Other teams had been there for a while, and had been preparing. They'd set up a shared cloud spreadsheet where everyone could enter their badge+disc+code segment data. Thus, we wouldn't have to walk around and share data "by hand". So we entered our data and waited for other teams to arrive.
GC gave us another puzzle to solve, borrowing our BITE device for some last-minute repair: the device flashed some strange symbols on its LED display. It was a 16-segment display, something new to learn about. Some folks worked on the puzzle; I didn't really follow our progress. It was hot. We'd arrived at the end location. I figured that GC was just giving us puzzles to solve to keep us distracted until the last teams arrived. I was done. So I wandered into the building's kitchen, refilled my water bottle, drank deep. I tried to find a place to stand where the fans would keep me from keeling over from the heat. Thus, I wilted a bit, but didn't quite melt. "We" solved a puzzle. GC gave us another puzzle. I zoned out.
When the last team arrived and plugged their data into the shared spreadsheet, it was time for the teams to override BIGMAC. One member from each team came up to the front of the room so that GC could wire together all of the BITE devices. Other folks got to watch this happen: the hunched over backs of a bunch of nerds at a table, hooking up wires. It took a while to get this right; I couldn't tell if there was a puzzle involved or if it's just tricky to wire up that many electronic boxes.
Then those folks had to play SIMON. The BITE devices, it turned out, had some colored LEDs and extra buttons so that they could play SIMON. The way to override BIGMAC was for everyone to be successfully playing SIMON at the same time. This was a challenge: not everyone is good at SIMON. Some folks had to learn how to play. The rest of us got to watch this happen. I was pretty proud of myself for not keeling over.
Then they'd done it. There were cheers. There was some speechifying. There were cheers for GC. I roused myself from my stupor long enough for some vigorous cheering: they'd earned it. And then there was an end party and I let myself slide back into stupor. After a while, the Jefes were ready to head back to hotels.
It was time to get back in the van. And then it was time to get back out of the van at a hotel and soon I was asleep. The next day, I headed home.
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