I need help from anyone who is good with puzzles… Here is a puzzle that may be pretty easy to figure out. The clue is that the answer is a coordinate.
The coords will start with 39° ??.??? & 077° ??.??? (the zero in front of 077° may or may not be part of the answer)
Here is a link to the image that shows the puzzle.
http://i293.photobucket.com/albums/mm72/brekkon/problem1.jpg
Anyone able to figure this out?
I am afraid I am currently at a loss to understand this puzzle.
It is a puzzle for a geocache. The answer is a set of coordinates. Here is the complete text placed before that table of numbers.
Well, I was walking down the street the other day, minding my own business … when out of the shadows jumps Bertha Beaver and her brother Bubba yelling “BOO!!!”
“Haven’t seen you two in ages … you sure have grown up … must have been at least 3-4 years …” “I can’t believe that you, Bertha, are in high school and that Bubba is in Middle School”. “It seems like just yesterday you two were only knee high to a grasshopper.”
Bertha and Bubba were jumping up and down, smiling ear to ear, and giving me those big - I haven’t seen you in a month of Sundays - hugs.
“What brings you two to Ashburn?” I asked with a knowing smile …
They responded, “We dreamed up a new puzzle for those caching friends of yours … we think they will like it …”
They showed me their work, you can see it in the table below, and I was immediately confused by all the numbers … rows and rows of seemingly random numbers …
“Don’t worry”, they said laughing, "It’ll be solved in no time at all … very easy really … "
Well, I couldn’t refuse the kids their fun, so here is the puzzle, just as they handed it to me …
What’s the GC#?
Well, 39 degrees north and 77 degrees west is just north of Washington DC…but that’s all I’ve got at the moment…
That text looks very artificial, like it was written under constraints. Like, trying to get the right frequency of certain letters, or forcing the letters in certain positions to spell something, or something like that. I’m pretty sure it’s an integral part of the puzzle.
How did you get “39” and “077” out of that?
The 39 and 77 are a must since the cache has to be within 2 miles of the starting coordinates.
GC30FZG is the cache number and its for premium members only so you wont see it unless your a premium member. The actual location is west of DC towards WV along the Potomac river.
In your OP you state it that may be pretty easy to figure out but it’s been out almost a month and there’s no FTF. Your definition of easy must be different from mine.
Actually with the 2 mile rule I have figured that the coordinates must start …
39 0?.??? and 77 2?.???
All possible solutions will fall between the below numbers due to the 2 mile rule as well.
Answer is between 39 00.000 and 39 04.000
2nd part is between 77 24.000 and 77 28.000
Maybe that can help even further?
bump…
Anyone been able to figure it out?
…but I do agree with Chronos regarding the oddity of the text, what with the many distinct fragments off by ellipses. Depending on how you count, there’s a dozen or more fragments. Many something to do with the number of characters in each?
Other items to note:
Matrix is 7 x 12. Doesn’t say anything to me, unless each of the 12 rows gives one digit of a set of coordinates in the form of xxx.xxx, xxx.xxx.
Top row, fifth cell has a leading zero, which might imply you have to do something with the digits of each cell entry, rather than consider it a value in its entirety.
I’m currently working on this geocache puzzle as well. I’ve solved a number of puzzle caches before, but this one is stumping me as well.
Here’s my take so far.
Most geocaches puzzles deal with 7 numbers per lat or long coordinate. So, I’m pretty sure that each column represents one number in either the lat or long coordinate or both.
More than likely, the coordinates are something like 39 02.xxx and 77 26.xxx since the author of the puzzle cache put those as the starting point coordinates. So, more than likely we can use the first several numbers as hints that we’re figuring out the solution. So, we need to get a 3 and/or 7 from the first column, and a 9 and/or 7 from the second column, etc.
As a previous poster mentioned, some of the numbers begin with 0. Also, most (but not all) of the numbers have digits that don’t repeat. This is telling me that we shouldn’t be treating each number unto itself. We should be looking for patterns in the digits being used. Maybe find the numbers that have not been specified in each box.
The number of digits in each box (per row) going down… is… 7, 7, 6, 6, 5, 5, 4, 4, 3, 3, 2, 2. In other words 6 sets. I’m thinking we need to split these sets up… so we take the 1st, 3rd, 5th, 7th, 9th, and 11th rows as one set of coordinates, and the 2nd, 4th, 6th, 8th, 10th as another set.
This gives us something like:
8036912 4618023 3049851 6187932 2834679 0768349 1832650
906271 739804 170869 914805 914267 216478 327619
65967 69524 47823 03162 98503 59210 72146
3891 5437 1207 3679 8202 2053 9834
814 311 565 844 375 154 562
13 67 25 42 45 54 76
3178920 6872401 9542068 7632958 8643917 2408156 6120743
508613 672109 639745 968523 324150 629731 251690
14897 71492 57980 61509 64127 87641 62193
5413 6931 5406 8412 3089 7815 8261
156 615 872 724 271 952 247
83 44 86 72 53 91 64
Again, the idea, me thinks, is one of these 6-row sets is the latitude, the other is the longitude.
Note, that the only rows with repeating digits is one in the 3rd from the bottom row, 3 in the 2nd from bottom row, and one in the 6th from the bottom row.
An other ideas/clues?
