Manor

If you play pen and paper role-play games you will likely encounter otherworldly challenges. Whether you find yourself fighting unspeakable horrors, trapped in cold, dark rooms filled with deadly puzzles, or exploring vast stretches of untamed wilderness, seldom do these adventures prepare you for the bone rattling thrill of property development in a medieval fantasy setting.

Playing the latest Dungeons and Dragons publication, Waterdeep Dragon Heist, presents the player characters with a lovely establishment known as Trollskull Manor. The building is mapped by DysonLogos, who creates maps in the classic pen and ink style. A style I find very endearing.

After first seeing the map of the tavern/homestead, something caught my attention. The first two floors lacked toilets. I can suspend my disbelief for a world where an enormous floating eyeball with the ability to disintegrate anyone who looks at their pet fish in an disrespectful fashion and still finds the time to maintain a prosperous multinational organisation (which is actually in this adventure), but not for one moment can I imagine that a drunken patron in a pub would walk up two flights of stairs (having to go outside first I might add) to relieve themselves and be content enough with the situation to return.

Thankfully, remodelling exists and to make the process easier I recreated the map digitally. While I don't find the style as evocative as the hand drawn original, it sure is easier to work with. Time to squeeze in a privy or two.

Escape

Having completed a fair few escape rooms since being introduced to them some three years ago, I'm confident in saying, that new rooms have to go a little further in their design to stand out from the crowd. Puzzles that reveal codes using ultraviolet light are more often met with groans than gasps of excitement, as it's become a bit of a trope in the escape room culture. Never the less, each room I've gone to has always had at least one memorable puzzle, concept or mechanic that was new to me. An escape room I went to recently separated the players into two cells. The two groups had information that would help their counterparts unlock their cell doors making communication vital. This however was the only positive I could draw from this particular room. The other puzzles weren't as creative.

Avoiding the location or specifics on the room, one of the puzzles solutions was so odd that I spoke to the host about it at the end. Imagine going to an escape room where the theme was that of this website (it would certainly keep the decorating options to a minimum). You have collected three tokens, each with a letter on one side and a number on the other. The letters are O, E and J with numbers 2, 3 and 1 respectively. Of course, you come to the conclusion that the letters spell “JOE”, after all that fits with the room's theme and they don't spell any other words. The code must be “123”. But you'd be wrong in this case. The answer is “EOJ” with the code “321”. The reason for this reversal being “that would be too easy”, according to the instructor at the end of the session. No other puzzles were reversed and none of the flavour text in the room suggested doing anything backwards. This puzzle, as well as several others in the room, stuck me as nonsensical for the sake of replacing a challenge with a way to drain the players time.

This location boasts a twenty percent pass rate with no one completing it without some clues. This strikes me as poor design. I've not completed a room without at least some clues, but in most cases the clues have been met as a revelation and not with me trying to unravel the mystery of the clue itself.

Every time I visit an escape room I feel the itch to design a puzzle that is both interesting and has its own internal logic. I think it's time I got to making one.

Bacon

The Baconian cipher, despite having nothing to do with bacon, is a delightful means of hiding and encrypting one message within another.  Firstly, convert all the letters in a secret message using the table below (I prefer the second version of Bacon's cipher as it uses all twenty six letters of the English alphabet).  Then create a plain text message that has at least five times the number of letters as the secret message.  Finally, using the converted secret message, change the typeface of the plain text message so that all the letters which correspond to “0” are of one type (like this), and all the letters which correspond to “1” are of a different type (like this).

A

B

C

D

E

F

G

H

I

J

K

L

M

00000

00001

00010

00011

00100

00101

00110

00111

01000

01001

01010

01011

01100

N

O

P

Q

R

S

T

U

V

W

X

Y

Z

01101

01110

01111

10000

10001

10010

10011

10100

10101

10110

10111

11000

11001

For example, let's take “hello” as our secret message and convert it to:

00111 00100 01011 01011 01110

Using the plain text message “There is a secret message here”, we would get:

There is a secret message here.

It can be quite a subtle effect that would make for yet another fun postcard to send/receive.

Transistor

Many people don't appreciate the humble transistor.  The little switch that makes up the building blocks of so many electronic devices.  With an external influence it flips its output from one position to the other to change the flow of electricity much like a light switch.  A light switch that can be as small as one nanometre.  That's a billionth of a metre.  The diameter of a helium atom.  You could stack about a hundred thousand of them on top of each other to match the width of a human hair.

Back in 1971, the Intel 4004 integrated circuit had some 2,300 bloated 10,000nm transistors in it.  Today, some Intel i7 processors contain over a billion tiny 14nm transistors.

Gordon Moore, a co-founder of Intel, once mused (and published) that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit would roughly double every two years.  This became known as Moore's Law and has held up fairly well since its creation in 1965, despite being obviously unsustainable.

In 2014, Forbes estimated some 2,913,276,327,576,980,000,000 transistors had been created.  That number is of the same order as grains of sand on all the beaches in the world.

Belt

Following on from last weeks post; I made a video very briefly explaining how accurate my treadmill was.  Have a watch.

Treadmill

During conversations where people discuss their running routines, I noticed two constants; they invariably use a smart watch to record their data and they are faster than me.

This trend could be because of observer bias, that people present their best times as their average, people tend to inflate their numbers during comparison, or that they are in fact faster than me.  While these points are certainly likely, especially the latter, I've always thought that the inherent 3m to 5m inaccuracy in mobile GPS devices causes an over estimation in distance travelled which a treadmill (my more common means of running) doesn't have.

While there is a fair amount of data on the Internet that suggests this idea is correct, and that the software doesn't account for the variance in all cases, at some point in the future I'll have to test the theory out myself.  But in the meantime, I thought I'd calibrate the treadmill I use.  Which is what a normal rational person would do.  After all, I need to be sure my data is accurate.

Running a length of masking tape around the treadmill belt and subsequently measuring the tape with...well a measuring tape, shows the belt length was 3.135m (for my own future reference).  Then marking a point on the belt (again with the masking tape) allowed me to time how long it took to complete a certain number of rotations.

The data showed that on average, the treadmill speed is nine percent more than expected.  Frankly this is great news, as it means I'm faster than I thought.

I ran the self calibration function on the treadmill and repeated the test.  The treadmill reduced the speed at all settings but still measured an average of six percent faster than expected.  This makes me think that the treadmill is compensating for the weight of the individual using it and as such it runs a little fast when not under load.

The next step is to either rig up an Arduino to count the number of rotations while I use the treadmill, enlist a fellow runners help, or make a new video.

Wine

The Rule of the Realm is hosting a wine tasting event for one thousand of their most loyal citizens, each of whom has been asked to provide one bottle of wine the day before the event, so that it may be prepared properly.   Unfortunately, the Spy Master informs the Ruler that one of the attendees has poisoned a single bottle of wine, and alas, no one knows which one.

The Ruler refuses to cancel the event as the shame would be unthinkable.   Buying another thousand bottles of wine is also out of the question.  Oh, and allowing their guests to die is pretty frowned upon too.

Fortunately, the Spy Master informs the Ruler, that there happens to be ten prisoners in the dungeon, which everyone seems quite comfortable using as test subjects to identify the poisoned wine.

The poison used is undetectable despite being lethal in the most miniscule of amounts.   Astonishingly, the poison also takes twenty four hours to take affect, at which point it is instantaneous, so there is only time for one set of trials with the ten prisoners.

The question is; what action can the Spy Master take to rescue the Rulers' most ridiculous of parties?

Firstly, label each bottle of wine, in binary, from one to one thousand (or zero to nine hundred and ninety nine if you prefer).  Place the prisoners in a line and ensure their order does not change.  In turn, take each bottle of wine, look at the number on the bottle, and give a tiny drop to each of the prisoners in positions that correspond to a one in the number.   For example, the forty second bottle (0000101010 in binary) would be tested by the fifth, seventh and ninth prisoner (from left to right).

Then, simply wait twenty four hours and see which prisoners have died.  The dead prisoners now represent ones and the living prisoners zeros.  The bottle of wine with that binary string has been poisoned.

Poles

Imagine yourself standing in an open flat park. In front of you stands two thin poles, mounted perpendicular to the ground.  The tops of the poles are both fifty metres from the ground and are connected by a single piece of inelastic rope that is eights metres long.   The lowest part of the rope dangles ten metres above the ground.

The question is; how far apart are the two poles?

The two poles are adjacent to each other, or rather zero metres apart.   If you were to take the eight metre long rope, hold both ends, it would now be forty metres long.  If each pole is fifty metres tall and touching each other, the bottom of the rope would be ten metres from the ground.

When I was asked this riddle I worked it out by calculating the upper and lower boundaries of the solution.   At most, the poles would be eighty metres away, with a taught rope fifty metres from the ground.  At least, the poles would be zero metres away, with a completely slack rope, now half it's length, so ten metres off the ground.  Ah ha!