The end of the contest

[Edit:  I had the wrong answer to #11.  Thanks to Diana Yost and Christopher Denault for giving me the right answer.]

[Update 10/25:  According to Ken Jennings's blog post, only 17 people had solved puzzle #8 by last Friday, which might have led you to think only a few people were competing in the contest.  But as of now, this blog post has over 550 reads.  While these 2 numbers are obviously imperfect indicators, I would take this to mean that if you managed to come close to solving all 11 puzzles by Monday, you were in fairly elite company.  So give yourself a hand.]

I've spent the last 5 days obsessing about the Great American History Puzzle, which just ended Monday.  I was at first not very optimistic that I would win.  Then for a while there it looked very likely.  And then, not so much.  Finally, it came down to forces mostly beyond my control, and I didn't have the right answer, anyway.  If nothing else, I had the right idea pretty early.  Here's how it went down.

Note:  if you want to solve the puzzles on your own, better stop reading now, as I give away a number of the answers (not to puzzle #11; but if you read the comments you'll probably figure it out).

As things stood, noon on Friday (Pacific Time)

Friday

The contest was structured with different puzzles being released throughout the month of October.  After the initial puzzle, which got you a password to the website, there were 9 puzzles, the next-to-last of which was released last Friday, October 19.  The 9 puzzles each had as an answer a 'treasure' from the Smithsonian Museum, e.g., "Morse telegraph".  As you solved a puzzle, the grid would be filled in with a piece of the final puzzle (number 11), which it became clear early on was an acrostic.

Puzzle #9 (the middle bottom) wasn't very hard, and I solved it in about half an hour, leaving the grid pretty much as it is above (not quite, as at the time the final puzzle square in the bottom right was grayed out).  I didn't know if the acrostic was solveable or if it was even the real puzzle #11.  But I printed out a screenshot and took it to lunch.

I'd solved a few of the clues already (A, D, N, O, S).  I guessed F might be 'Wrought' (from 'What hath God wrought', the first message sent by telegraph), T might be 'Swine Flu Victim', and G might be 'Garde Meuble' (where a precursor of one of the treasures, the Hope Diamond, used to be kept).  A couple of these guesses turned out to be wrong, but I had a sufficient number of correct answers and could make some good guesses to start getting a few more clues, such as B, C and Q.  Soon I realized the answer to G was 'Fort McHenry', which was a huge breakthrough, as the only thing that might have been in Fort McHenry that was now in the Smithsonian was The Star-Spangled Banner flag (also known as the Great Garrison Flag).  But we hadn't had that as an answer yet, so that meant it had to be the answer to puzzle #10 in the bottom right.  If I was right, that meant that once puzzle 10 came out I could instantly solve it and finish the contest, assuming I could solve this acrostic.

Eventually the whole acrostic fell into place, even though a number of clues are not even on the portion shown (G-M and V-Z).  When finished, the acrostic reads:

Years ago James Smithson's legacy founded an establishment for the increase and diffusion of knowledge.  Borrow two letters from each of all your nine treasures.  Increase and diffuse those letters to obtain your final answer taken from a great American poet.

In most acrostics, the initial letters of the clued words spell out the author and title of the work that's being quoted.  In this puzzle, the initial letters of the clue words spell out:  "Borrow fourth and last letters."

Say, you could see it at Fort McHenry, and now at the Smithsonian

Puzzle #2

 So, if you take the 4th and last letters from the nine treasures, you get

hdztmsshmhnkctblsr

[This is assuming 'The Star-spangled banner' is the answer to puzzle #10.  I also considered 'Star-spangled banner', 'Great Garrison Flag' and 'The Great Garrison Flag', but the Smithsonian website on the museum exhibit calls it the Star-Spangled Banner, and most of the previous treasures have included the 'The', so I considered 'The Star-Spangled banner' to be the most likely variant.]

Anyway, the letters above are clearly nonsense, and I struggled with them for a while.  Do we turn the letters sideways to give vowels (something that was done in an earlier puzzle)?  For example:  H sideways = I.  M sideways = E.  And what does 'increase and diffuse' mean?  I gathered diffuse meant to anagram, but are we supposed to make extra copies of some of the letters?  Or maybe just add in the vowels?

Finally, it came to me:  shift each letter one position in the alphabet.  So H turns into I, D into E, etc.  Now we have plenty of vowels, and a reasonable mix of consonants:

ieaunttiniolducmts

Unfortunately, these letters are too easy to anagram.  The Internet Anagram server said it found over 80,000 anagrams, and it doesn't usually use proper names.  I easily found some very suggestive words:  'document', 'institution', 'education', 'music' (under the assumption the 'Great American Poet' might be someone like Bob Dylan), 'costume', 'statue'.  Using the advanced options on the Anagram server, I tried requiring the server to use those words and seeing what it could make of the remaining letters.  But nothing looked good enough for a final answer.

Next, I investigated the Great American Poet angle, thinking the answer might be something like "Emily Dickinson's teakettle".  Unfortunately, the only poet that seemed to qualify and that I could get out of the given letters was T.S. Eliot, and I couldn't make anything out of the remaining letters, and couldn't find anything the museum had on display from T.S. Eliot.  I went to bed Friday night to sleep on it.

Animated gifs:  slightly more annoying than the <blink> tag

More anagramming, and my (incorrect) solution

The next morning, I thought the answer might be a poem written for the Smithsonian, maybe with the word Institution in the title.  I could find no such poem.  I noticed 'castle' was also in the letters, so I tried that to no avail.  I asked the Internet Anagram Server for all of its 80,000 anagrams, and was discouraged when I found they all began with the word 'A', even though you can ask it to find anagrams with no 1-letter words and it will still find tens of thousands.  This is when I started to sour on the Internet Anagram server.

Finally, I turned to a friend for a fresh look.  I knew he'd been working on and off on the contest, but probably hadn't been trying as hard.  He didn't have any ideas, and then he did, writing me a few hours later saying he noticed you could get 'at si edu' from the letters.  So maybe the answer was an e-mail address.  I didn't see how that would work logistically, but I did manage to anagram the remaining letters to 'columnist in'.  

My next thought was maybe it was a web address:  something-something.xyz.si.edu  Go to the URL, find the answer.  Again, I couldn't make much of this, but working with 'columnist' some more, I noticed you could make the word 'ultimatum' out of the letters if you didn't use 'at' for an e-mail address.  Oh, no you can't (not enough m's).  But wait, you can make 'ultimate', which is a synonym for 'final'.  Hmmm.  After mucking about with the remaining letters, I noticed they anagram nicely to 'ultimate inductions', a synonym for 'final answer'.  This, I decided, was the correct answer.   [Note:  I was wrong.  There is an answer that actually comes from a legitimate Great American Poet.]

The big hitch

 

Unfortunately, it was now only 1pm on Saturday, and I realized after my initial moment of triumph that even if I was way ahead of other solvers (debatable), there was still plenty of time for other people to solve it.  And, judging from the Twitter feed, plenty of people eventually did.  Which set us up for what was, in my opinion, a terrible ending.  The contest rules said the winner was the first person to send all their answers to an undisclosed e-mail address (which would be revealed to you after you solved all the puzzles).  But because solving the acrostic gave you a solution for the last 2 puzzles, this meant the right strategy was to pre-write the e-mail, wait for the final puzzle to be revealed, then type in your answers (to get the e-mail address) and send off the e-mail as quickly as possible.  In other words, the fastest typist with the best Internet path to the Smithsonian would win.

A couple of us wrote to Ken Jennings on his Facebook wall and in the puzzle's blog, asking them to consider a liberal interpretation of the tiebreaker rule:  in the event of a tie, the contestants would get another puzzle to determine the winner.  We suggested they consider any correct entries that came within the first few minutes after the final puzzle was released to be a 'tie'.  But apparently they did not listen to us.  At 11am Monday morning, I madly refreshed the puzzle page until the puzzle opened, pasted 'The Star-Spangled Banner' in the answer space (already had it in my clipboard, of course), got the e-mail address, and sent off the e-mail.  My e-mail timestamp says 11:00:34, but that's just a local clock somewhere, and what really matters is when it arrived at the Smithsonian.   I had the wrong answer, but other people who did it in roughly the same time with the right answer didn't win either.   Guess we'll be paying for our trip to Washington D.C. out of our own pockets.

Can we fix it?  Yes we can!

Fixes

 

All in all, the contest was challenging and well-run, but the ending was unsatisfactory.  The contest administrators underestimated their audience, which is a common mistake.  At some point, they had to have convinced themselves that the final puzzle was too hard to be done with only incomplete information, but that's just the sort of obstacle that a large group of people will overcome.

In addition, the final e-mail address should have been a completely new e-mail address (they re-used the help e-mail address, and I can't help thinking the winner skipped putting in the answer to #10 step and just e-mailed their answers as soon as the puzzle was revealed).  But this turns out to be a minor point if people cannot fully pre-solve the final puzzles.

[One more bug, while I'm nitpicking:  a number of people report that they put in the wrong answer to puzzle #10 and got the e-mail address and the link to the full acrostic anyway.  That just should not have happened.]

For this contest, I believe there was an easy fix to the main problem:  switch puzzle #10 and #8.  Puzzle #10 could be easily pre-solved by solving the acrostic, because clue G gives away the answer.   But puzzle #8 is not referenced in the revealed clues.  It is referenced in the final puzzle:  "Middle name of a president two after the owner of one of your treasures."  Answer:  Ulysses.  But in the absence of the clue, it's hard to see how you could go from 'Ulysses' to the answer to #8:  "Lincoln's stovepipe hat."  So #8 would be extremely difficult to pre-solve.  In addition, both #8 and #10 are visually-oriented puzzles where you have to examine pictures closely, so the challenge would be roughly the same.

Also, if you can't solve #8, you're missing 2 letters in the anagramming step, which makes finding the solution to #11 much more difficult.

Note, however, that clever and determined people could still pre-solve the acrostic portion of the final puzzle, and be in a better position to finish the contest.  But they would still have to answer #8 and the anagramming after that, and the contest would come down to puzzle-solving, not quick typing and a blessed ISP.

Photo Credits

 

Wrenches: shimgray via photopin cc