Neal has outdone himself yet again. I had it until the roman numerals and adding upto 25 ones but lost my cool when it said it must include today's wordle answer.
I gave up when I needed to represent the best chess move in algebraic notation, but I couldn't because the text from the captcha I had to solve earlier contained an illegal move... rage
I gave up after having to include a leap year (Rule 15), I don't know if this is a spoiler but I ended up with January99Pepsi?XXXVggd7maboutZrJapan (there was an emoji in there for the current moon phase but HN stripped it out)
Looking at the code it should be possible to get a lot further, in theory. Wonder how Paul is doing!
My country was El Salvador. I would not have guessed it (I kept trying equatorial countries). I had to reverse engineer the URL encoding of the embedded map.
Spoiler: There is !1d and !2d, followed by coordinates.
Debatable - the concept of leap years was invented before 0 AD/CE but I'm not aware of any reason to believe that particular year (which certainly wasn't called 0 AD at the time, it was possibly the Roman year 753) was considered to be one.
Interesting that there seem to be a large number of scholars who would accept either 4 AD or 8 AD was the first AD leap year. But less clear what such a year would have been called by Romans at the time. I'm assuming it wasn't common to include full dates (including the year #) on written documents at the time, otherwise surely we'd know pretty much exactly.
I gather AD-based year numbering wasn't actually introduced until ~525 AD (but before that a number of systems had been in use).
0 is a year if we say it is, which astronomers have for hundreds of years (because its extremely mathematically convenient), and which ISO-8601 does.
Year 0 is what historians like to call 1 BC, but historians are also just making that up. Nobody numbered years from Anno Domini anywhere near year 0.
I'm sure it's clear to everybody here why year 0, -1, and -2 are significantly better arbitrary, ahistorical names for the three years preceding year 1.
I'm stuck at "iatetomatoesyesterday0265Z#521juneVpepsiVIIxngxcaboutAg[moon emojis]italy2020Bf7+" trying to solve the chess notation puzzle.
I especially laughed at the rule "must include today's Worldle" and I'm happy with my solution including every emoji for "must include the current phase of the moon as an emoji."
(HackerNews doesn't seem to display emoji. My solution is to paste every moon phase emoji.)
Excited to see what's next after figuring out the best move in this Chess puzzle.
This reminds me of trying to manually construct an Autogram like below. This one is a quote someone else made. I tried to do it myself and it is so hard because the counts keep changing as you write out other counts!
Only the fool would take trouble to verify that his sentence was composed of ten a's, three b's, four c's, four d's, forty-six e's, sixteen f's, four g's, thirteen h's, fifteen i's, two k's, nine l's, four m's, twenty-five n's, twenty-four o's, five p's, sixteen r's, forty-one s's, thirty-seven t's, ten u's, eight v's, eight w's, four x's, eleven y's, twenty-seven commas, twenty-three apostrophes, seven hyphens and, last but not least, a single !
Using the column they are on, or the row if they are both on the same column. For example Rac8 moves a rook from a8 to c8, R1d2 moves it from d1 to d2.
Rae1 - rook a to e1. if two rooks on the first line can move to e1.
R4d4 - if two rooks on the 4th line can go to d4.
Ngxh2# - the knight from g captures on h2 with checkmate.
Nd2e4 - In a rare case that there are 3 knights that can go to a single square
Pawn captures are denoted as exd5 (pawn on the line e captures a pawn on d5) even if there is only one pawn that can make a capture.
I couldn't get it to accept a move which involved the knight jumping over a hostile piece. It was definitely the best move (I fed it into stockfish and got the same response). I refreshed the page to get a new puzzle and got a new street view as well. (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻
Edit: Oooohhh, I think I forgot to add a + for check!
Haha, yeah I used Chess.com analysis and it gave me a clearly best sequence of moves (three to checkmate) but it didn't take the first move from white that it asked for. :( I saw many other struggle with this one too. Anyway, I gave up here and seeing some of the subsequent steps I doubt I'll reach the end anyway!
I got the chess one pretty easily but I'm stuck on "The elements in your password must have atomic numbers that add up to 200". I haven't found a way to satisfy both this and "The roman numerals in your password should multiply to 35" simultaneously. Iodine (I) and Uranium (U) have high atomic numbers which blow out way higher than 200 and I haven't found a way to avoid them.
Edit: OK, just realised that it's case sensitive. So I can use a lower case "u" to avoid it being interpreted as an element.
Yeah, I got an Rf8+ and between that and the roman numerals, didn't know how to get down to 200. Then I tried to move the egg to a different spot and the chicken died.
Now it seems progress has become literally impossible because the chess move + the captcha includes digits that add up to more than 25. I guess having to restart is intended to be part of the game, or is this a bug?
This is indeed what ended up transpiring, but only after trying really hard to figure it out all the while thinking the meanings of gold and green were the opposite of eachother.
I take puzzles way too seriously, and I suck at word puzzles.
"Only the fool would take trouble to verify that his sentence was composed of ten a's, three b's, four c's, four d's, forty-six e's, sixteen f's, four g's, thirteen h's, fifteen i's, two k's, nine l's, four m's, twenty-five n's, twenty-four o's, five p's, sixteen r's, forty-one s's, thirty-seven t's, ten u's, eight v's, eight w's, four x's, eleven y's, twenty-seven commas, twenty-three apostrophes, seven hyphens and, last but not least, a single !"
There doesn't seem to be a way to search YT videos (except videos you yourself post) by exact length. I got 21 min 45 seconds. Looking up "3000 second timer" on YT got me close (only 4 seconds out), but not exact. Do you have a way to find exact-length videos that I'm missing?
A warning to future players: I got to rule 16 and was given an egg named paul that I had to keep safe. Then on rule 18 a fire (of emojis) broke out in my password, killing paul and ending the game. Dont be like me, keep Paul safe.
I was immensely disappointed when I googled "13 minute 39 second video" and then the Youtube video titled "13 minute 39 second countdown" was in fact 13 minutes and 54 seconds long.
You can keep Paul safe by adding something like a lot of = before the egg and continuously delete the appearing fires and at some point the fire will be gone
I killed Paul when trying to get the atomic numbers to equal 200. My plan was to add "H" until the rule was satisfied. Then, I thought I accidentally went past it, so I started holding backspace. I went too far.
VIIJuneVShell65$bw6n6aboutHecroatia0000 so far. Croatia was extraordinarily hard to guess. Currently stuck on the chess game, if anyone has generic advice on how to not suck at chess.
Fun bonus: it can't seem to figure out what's going on with the knight. Using "K", "N", or "S" for knight all get me "invalid notation" warnings. I'm having a lot of fun.
New update: got the chess answer! It will accept "N" for my Knight iff I make stupid moves with it. Moving my knight to take a bishop is "invalid notation", but apparently putting it in the middle of nowhere to be captured by a rook is the best possible move.
I don't think it's easy. Verification is much easier than generating correct solutions for this.
Looking at the JS, these rules use RNG such that you can have an inconsistent or impossible password. E.g. if the only youtube video URLs that work with your duration have roman numerals that multiply above 35 in it you are hard stuck. Your youtube URL can also hard stuck your atomic number summation to 200 if it happens to contain enough elements that adds above 200. Your color hex can hard stuck your 25 sum, etc. The code does not try to generate working passwords given all the rules, it simply adds checks and randomly generates the requirement per rule.
You'd have to have the RNG rules to align well in order to win i.e. youtube video with no roman numerals or numbers or elements, captcha with no numbers or roman numerals or elements, to minimize conflict.
I uploaded a video quick just to pass that step since the length was hard to find. The generated video ID was a bunch of Roman numerals so I was totally fucked.
I wonder if something like quickcheck could be used to randomly generate characters which pass the criteria. I don't know how it would handle Paul though...
For a given video length, there will be some youtube video urls without roman numerals, and with low digit sum, and atomic number.
I first search this on Google
"0:00 / mm:ss" site:youtube.com
Where mm:ss is the desired length. Then I used some Javascript to scrape the results, finding only youtube urls without roman numbers, and print them out sorted by digit sum and atomic number
I've done it a few times, never had a situation where there was no suitable url
As for the color hex, if it's not suitable, you can regenerate it
It doesn't necessarily mean that they don't know how to escape special characters, it just might mean that they're employing a defence in depth approach.
I once had to deal with an site that would be fine with a ' in the password when setting it, but would throw a mysterious error every time you tried to log in.
For about 2 years I reset my password many times, always to the same one and that would also log me in. I just figured the site was broken for me but this worked and contacting support is rarely helpful for stuff like this so whatever, until it suddenly dawned on me the ' might be the "problem".
This turns into a mildly frustrating riddle as some of the challenges are random (captcha, Street View, chess challenge) and end up making it impossible to continue. Got my number added up from the captcha and the best chess move came to be Qh6 (I would need a chess master to disagree with me) so I'm already busted on the add to 25 and then it tells me the "Qh6" notation is illegal (Ok, I was never good with chess notation but I'm pretty sure that says Queen to H6...)
Yeah I think there's a bug with the chess notation, I also had it tell me Rh3 was illegal notation. Interestingly Rf3 is not illegal notation but an illegal move for me.
I also had to figure out how to enter chess notation. As it turns out you have to add "x" after the piece if you want to capture or "+" suffix for check.
Ah. That might be it... Anyhow after staring at that chess challenge I was sure to get a mate in two moves with the Qh6 but the captcha filled with numbers plus the add to 25 left me with only 3 to spare... So no way am I winning this game.
The "two digit periodic table symbol" is also arbitrary - it has to be initial caps! Then if you refresh the page, the random stuff resets, so I gave up at that point with !marchpepsidn26n2555VIIVabout where "dn26n" is random captcha.
Yeah, I'm stuck on the chess part too. Figured out how to put black in check, figured out the notation, including the +, but it doesn't agree that's the best move. Put the positions into a chess engine... it agrees with me with what the best move is.
Fun game though, I laughed out loud at the Wordle requirement.
539 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 338 ms ] threadScreaming and crying.
Im already stuck here with `Password!25XXV` or `Password!1234567890123456789012345` or `Password!34` (9+25)
I'm not native english, so if there is a pun in the rules description, I might not get it :'(
Copy your password and reload to continue with only a few missed rules.
Looking at the code it should be possible to get a lot further, in theory. Wonder how Paul is doing!
Spoiler: There is !1d and !2d, followed by coordinates.
Wikipedia has some information on leap years around this time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_calendar#Leap_year_erro...
Year 0 is what historians like to call 1 BC, but historians are also just making that up. Nobody numbered years from Anno Domini anywhere near year 0.
I'm sure it's clear to everybody here why year 0, -1, and -2 are significantly better arbitrary, ahistorical names for the three years preceding year 1.
I especially laughed at the rule "must include today's Worldle" and I'm happy with my solution including every emoji for "must include the current phase of the moon as an emoji."
(HackerNews doesn't seem to display emoji. My solution is to paste every moon phase emoji.)
Excited to see what's next after figuring out the best move in this Chess puzzle.
This reminds me of trying to manually construct an Autogram like below. This one is a quote someone else made. I tried to do it myself and it is so hard because the counts keep changing as you write out other counts!
Only the fool would take trouble to verify that his sentence was composed of ten a's, three b's, four c's, four d's, forty-six e's, sixteen f's, four g's, thirteen h's, fifteen i's, two k's, nine l's, four m's, twenty-five n's, twenty-four o's, five p's, sixteen r's, forty-one s's, thirty-seven t's, ten u's, eight v's, eight w's, four x's, eleven y's, twenty-seven commas, twenty-three apostrophes, seven hyphens and, last but not least, a single !
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autogram
Edit: figured it out
K = King
Q = Queen
B = Bishop
R = Rook
N = Knight
Pawns have no letter
.
You append a "+" to the end when it is a check move
You append a "#" to the end when it's a checkmate move
You add an "x" when your move eats another piece
.
Examples
- Moving a rook to g6: Rg6
- Moving a queen to d7 which eats a piece: Qxd7
- Moving a bishop to a3 which checks the opponents king: Ba3+
- Moving a pawn to e5: e5
- Moving a queen to h7 which eats a piece and checks the king: Qxh7+
- Moving a pawn to f4 which checkmates the king: f4#
Rae1 - rook a to e1. if two rooks on the first line can move to e1. R4d4 - if two rooks on the 4th line can go to d4. Ngxh2# - the knight from g captures on h2 with checkmate.
Nd2e4 - In a rare case that there are 3 knights that can go to a single square
Pawn captures are denoted as exd5 (pawn on the line e captures a pawn on d5) even if there is only one pawn that can make a capture.
- d8N# pawn moves and promotes to a knight resulting in checkmate (it can happen)
Edit: Oooohhh, I think I forgot to add a + for check!
Edit: OK, just realised that it's case sensitive. So I can use a lower case "u" to avoid it being interpreted as an element.
Also Rg1+ is a rather pretty attraction/clearance sacrifice/double check/mate-in-2.
I take puzzles way too seriously, and I suck at word puzzles.
nice job! autograms are strangely pleasing.
Password26$_june_pepsi_VIIV_33p4e_about__germanyQxh7+
V = vanadium, 23
I = Iodine, 53
So in your password they add up to 167
1. Your password must be at least 5 characters.
2. Your password must include a number.
3. Your password must include an uppercase letter.
4. Your password must include a special character.
5. The digits in your password must add up to 25.
6. Your password must include a month of the year.
7. Your password must include a roman numeral.
8. Your password must include one of our sponsors. (pepsi/starbucks/shell)
9. The roman numerals in your password should multiply to 35.
10. Your password must include this CAPTCHA:
11. Your password must include today's Wordle answer.
12. Your password must include a two letter symbol from the periodic table.
13. Your password must include the current phase of the moon as an emoji.
14. Your password must include the name of this country.
15. Your password must include a leap year.
16. Your password must include the best move in [algebraic chess notation].
17. ← This is my chicken Paul. He hasn't hatched yet, please put him in your password and keep him safe.
18. The elements in your password must have atomic numbers that add up to 200.
19. All the vowels in your password must be bolded.
20. Oh no! Your password is on fire. Quick, put it out!
21. Your password is not strong enough
22. Your password must contain one of the following affirmations: (i am loved, i am worthy, i am enough)
23. Paul has hatched! Please don't forget to feed him, he eats three every minute.
24. Your password must include the URL of a <random> long YouTube video.
25. A sacrifice must be made. Pick 2 letters that you will no longer be able to use.
26. Your password must contain twice as many italic characters as bold.
27. At least 30% of your password must be in the Wingdings font. 28. Your password must include this color in hex.
29. All roman numerals must be in Times New Roman.
30. The font size of every digit must be equal to its square.
31. Every instance of the same letter must have a different font size.
32. Your password must include the length of your password.
33. The length of your password must be a prime number.
34. Uhhh let's skip this one.
35. Your password must include the current time.
36. Is this your final password?
Update: this strat works. But then don't immediately overfeed him.
Honestly though, this is still better than some of the "secure password" prompts I've encountered in life.
Don't be like me, don't overfeed Paul
I'm completely stuck on it... I've tried every single combination that came to mind :/
Also make sure to add the x for captures and the + for check and things like that
If you put the opposing king in check you need to put the +
"SiP@pepsin.VII@Vmay8y63f-2aboutcolombiaKh6"
Decent password 10/10
OH NO!!
Is there an api planned, or is it open source?
In fact, also the length should be obscured, show nothing, as is the way in Unix password prompts!
Fun bonus: it can't seem to figure out what's going on with the knight. Using "K", "N", or "S" for knight all get me "invalid notation" warnings. I'm having a lot of fun.
New update: got the chess answer! It will accept "N" for my Knight iff I make stupid moves with it. Moving my knight to take a bishop is "invalid notation", but apparently putting it in the middle of nowhere to be captured by a rook is the best possible move.
Final update: Paul died in a fire. :I
Your password must include a number.
Your password must include an uppercase letter.
Your password must include a special character.
The digits in your password must add up to 25.
Your password must include a month of the year.
Your password must include a roman numeral.
Your password must include one of our sponsors:
The roman numerals in your password should multiply to 35.
Your password must include this CAPTCHA:
Your password must include today's Wordle answer.
Your password must include a two letter symbol from the periodic table.
Your password must include the current phase of the moon as an emoji.
Your password must include the name of this country.
Your password must include a leap year.
Your password must include the best move in algebraic chess notation. (picture of chess puzzle)
← This is my chicken Paul. He hasn't hatched yet, please put him in your password and keep him safe.
The elements in your password must have atomic numbers that add up to 200.
All the vowels in your password must be bolded.
Oh no! Your password is on fire. Quick, put it out!
Your password is not strong enough
Your password must contain one of the following affirmations:
Paul has hatched! Please don't forget to feed him, he eats three every minute.
A sacrifice must be made. Pick 2 letters that you will no longer be able to use.
Your password must contain twice as many italic characters as bold.
At least 30% of your password must be in the Wingdings font.
Your password must include this color in hex.
All roman numerals must be in Times New Roman.
The font size of every digit must be equal to its square.
Every instance of the same letter must have a different font size.
Your password must include the length of your password.
The length of your password must be a prime number.
Uhhh let's skip this one.
Your password must include the current time.
Is this your final password?
Looking at the JS, these rules use RNG such that you can have an inconsistent or impossible password. E.g. if the only youtube video URLs that work with your duration have roman numerals that multiply above 35 in it you are hard stuck. Your youtube URL can also hard stuck your atomic number summation to 200 if it happens to contain enough elements that adds above 200. Your color hex can hard stuck your 25 sum, etc. The code does not try to generate working passwords given all the rules, it simply adds checks and randomly generates the requirement per rule.
You'd have to have the RNG rules to align well in order to win i.e. youtube video with no roman numerals or numbers or elements, captcha with no numbers or roman numerals or elements, to minimize conflict.
Make the generator use Pupetter and your YT credentials to upload an empty mp4 video of the given length.
I first search this on Google
"0:00 / mm:ss" site:youtube.com
Where mm:ss is the desired length. Then I used some Javascript to scrape the results, finding only youtube urls without roman numbers, and print them out sorted by digit sum and atomic number
I've done it a few times, never had a situation where there was no suitable url
As for the color hex, if it's not suitable, you can regenerate it
i gave up when it got to chess, guess "55A%SeptemberXXXVStarbucksgny6baboutgeorgia2016" will have to be enough
“A special character…” Okay, how about: “
“No, not THAT special!! (Shh, we are worried about a SQL injection attack… in your password… which we dont even know how to escape)”
Let the many implications sink in for a minute.)
For about 2 years I reset my password many times, always to the same one and that would also log me in. I just figured the site was broken for me but this worked and contacting support is rarely helpful for stuff like this so whatever, until it suddenly dawned on me the ' might be the "problem".
Fun game though, I laughed out loud at the Wordle requirement.