Is The Best Puzzle Ever A Wordsearch About Canadian Prime Ministers?!

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Is The Best Puzzle Ever A Wordsearch About Canadian Prime Ministers?!

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5 жыл бұрын

This extraordinary puzzle appeared in the Galactic Puzzle Hunt 2019 last week. Suffice to say, it is one of the most complex and beautiful puzzle creations we've ever seen. Do visit the site to investigate it further.
2019.galacticp...
You can send us puzzles you'd like us to cover on the channel at
crackingthecryptic@gmail.com
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Пікірлер: 68

@Luke-og6jh 5 жыл бұрын

I dont know whats more impressive, you solving it or someone creating it. Insane and Amazing!

@tremkl 5 жыл бұрын

I was going to say the exact same thing. Who on earth was like "Yeah, I could probably make a puzzle out of this."

@TimWalton0 4 жыл бұрын

I saw "wordsearch" and thought "this will be easy for a change!". I have never been so wrong about anything in all my life.

@DatainBS 5 жыл бұрын

This video needs to be shared with Numberphile!

@CrackingTheCryptic 5 жыл бұрын

If you can get their attention that would be amazing :)

@davidberardo8517 7 ай бұрын

Looks like you managed to get their attention all on your own!

@41-Haiku 5 жыл бұрын

As a maths nerd, my reaction to Graham's number being referenced in a puzzle was as follows: "Um..." "UMM..." "U H H H H H H H H..."

@NYsummertimeCHI 5 жыл бұрын

How on earth was this puzzle crafted to contain all those hidden messages AND use the names of prime numbered Canadian pms! That is mind boggling.

@G.Aaron.Fisher 5 жыл бұрын

Putting it all together is pretty simple compared to devising the puzzle to begin with. First, create a valid wordsearch, then create a rearrangement that matches letters from your final answer down the diagonal. Your Graham's number rearrangement rules must point toward that solution, but the rest of them can be chosen arbitrarily so long as they don't allow for another valid wordsearch. The letters from the final clue that don't appear in your Graham's number PM rearrangement will constrain the first hidden message. But that is so few constraints on such a long message that it's easy to fill it in.

@thewhamji 5 жыл бұрын

KZfaq recommended this video to me. I was like, what the hell KZfaq. Ended up watching the entire thing lol.

@emprox1 5 жыл бұрын

This is one of those videos that I come across once in a while that, while I don't fully understand the subject, is just fascinating to me. These always wind up being some of my favorite KZfaq videos, and are what makes this website so cool. Thanks for the video.

@gogothewind123 5 жыл бұрын

I love seeing these different and unique kinds of puzzles and especially your enthusiasm for them. Keep it up!

@redtaileddolphin1875 5 жыл бұрын

It got me when you said you had to recreate the remainder signature of Graham’s number, that’s the coolest part to me

@arcanmster 5 жыл бұрын

This was also one of our favourite puzzles in this hunt. The best part was having to work hard to create the most invalid word search possible... to obtain a message telling you to do the exact opposite!

@tashkiira7838 5 жыл бұрын

Good lord, this was mindboggling. I'm impressed as all heck. Totally ingenious puzzle too..

@CarpeGuitarrem 5 жыл бұрын

This was ABSURD. Loved seeing this puzzle laid out. I can't even begin to imagine how it was constructed.

@lilyremote1430 5 жыл бұрын

our team spent almost an entire day trying to solve this one

@niko9023 5 жыл бұрын

same

@maksymiliank5135 5 жыл бұрын

why are you using internet explorer?

@zmaj12321 4 жыл бұрын

When I realized that you had to use Chinese Remainder Theorem I completely math-fanboyed.

@zmaj12321 4 жыл бұрын

GRAHAM'S NUMBER??? SERIOUSLY!!

@thanderhop1489 5 жыл бұрын

I was about halfway through the video when the Chinese Remainder Theorem started screaming out to me. Glad someone on the team had heard of it or at least it came up in a google search when trying to solve that system of equivalences came up. Prime numbers are really useful for creating puzzles like this. You want puzzles to have a unique answer and both CRT and just simple unique prime factorization are nice theorems that guarantee the uniqueness of a number you try to index based on how it relates to some given primes. This was an amazing puzzle to see

@phyphor 5 жыл бұрын

You had half the number of people on the team I am a member of and you finished 60 places higher? Bravo! I wonder whether you take part in the MIT hunt at all?

@MizzRosenrot 5 жыл бұрын

This is so nerdy! What KZfaq was made for. I love it!

@chipmunk6947 3 жыл бұрын

I've never been notably intelligent, but not quite thick as shit. Watching your videos is incredibly humbling... I feel like I understand and know almost nothing and I love it

@CauchyIntegralFormula 5 жыл бұрын

I enjoyed this one quite a bit, although the Graham's number part at the end just felt like a pointless extra step. The rest of my team was... not quite as enthused about it, so I ended up doing the vast majority of it myself.

@FT029 5 жыл бұрын

Wow-- so creative, and so many layers. Fantastic puzzle and great explanation!

@johnbouttell5827 5 жыл бұрын

I seem to have wandered into word search nerd heaven -- or is it hell?

@danielleanderson6371 5 жыл бұрын

Pardon my language, but that is fucking bonkers. Absolutely brilliant.

@nadivkaspi6211 5 жыл бұрын

Yes. This is genuinely the best, most complicated word search I have ever seen in my entire life. Better than Cicada 3301, thats for sure.

@MrHatsuka1 5 жыл бұрын

You forgot to give us the most important answer - did you make it into work that day????

@t.s.a.d6478 5 жыл бұрын

Campbell's not a 'he' 😂😂😂

@no-feetmcgee5577 4 жыл бұрын

Coming back to this in a last-ditch effort to understand what on Earth might be going on in the top half of "Reaper", part of the puzzle hunt published by Cracking the Cryptic XD

@crazypomp927 5 жыл бұрын

Whatttttt that is puzzle insanity

@CauchyIntegralFormula 5 жыл бұрын

Our in on this puzzle was extracting the leftover message, actually. We pasted a couple grids into our Google Sheet for this puzzle and noticed a similar string starting both of the grids. Since messages are normally hidden in the leftover letters of a word search, we were able to extract the message by checking which letters were common to both grids, pasting in a new grid whenever we got stuck to help us nail down the message. We were at six grids by the end, and from there we were able to identify the words. I think we noticed the primeness of the ministers next, which immediately made me realize that the Chinese Remainder Theorem was at work.

@martinepstein9826 3 жыл бұрын

In case anyone is wondering, here is an example of how to find the remainder of Graham's number (G) on division by a number. Let's say 7. All we need to know about G is that it is a very tall power tower of 3's: G = 3^(3^(3^...)) with more 3's than we'll ever need. Let's look at how powers of 3 behave on division by 7. I'll write m % 7 for the remainder on division by 7. We have 3^0 % 7 = 1 3^1 % 7 = 3 3^2 % 7 = 9 % 7 = 2 3^3 % 7 = 2*3 % 7 = 6 3^4 % 7 = 6*3 % 7 = 4 3^5 % 7 = 4*3 % 7 = 5 After which the cycle repeats. So we need to find where the exponent of G = 3^(...) lands in this cycle of length 6. This amounts to finding the remainder of the exponent on division by 6. The same technique as above works, but we can just note that the exponent is an odd multiple of 3 so is 3 more than a multiple of 6. So we have G % 7 = 3^3 % 7 = 6 i.e. G is 6 more (or 1 less) than a multiple of 7.

@rosiefay7283 Жыл бұрын

Thanks for that. Now this was easy, because we know that G=3^n where n is an odd multiple of 3, so n=3 mod 6. But how do you calculate G mod 11? This needs n mod 5. -- Oh, beautiful, I see it now. n is itself 3 to some insanely great odd power. So later results exploit earlier ones. G mod 2 = 1; G mod 3 = 0; G mod 4 = 3 because n mod 2 = 1; G mod 5 needs n mod 4, but we know n=3 mod 4 so G=2 mod 5; G mod 11 needs n mod 5, but we know n=2 mod 5 so G=9 mod 11. And so on.

@Mattpoppybros 5 жыл бұрын

Holy fuck this is so good

@bristolrovers27 4 жыл бұрын

There were parts of that that didn’t fly over my head, but I did get the incredible complexity of it.

@cycklist 5 жыл бұрын

Absolutely breathtaking!

@wordiebirdie 5 жыл бұрын

this made my brain so happy

@clumsyjester459 5 жыл бұрын

Didn't exactly understand the part about Graham's number, but the rest was genious. What was the goal? Was it finding the remainders of Graham's number when dividing it by the primes 2 up to 23? And then finding a puzzle with the same remainders?

@joshodom9046 5 жыл бұрын

For each number, there's a formula you can use to generate its word search. They had to generate the word search for graham's number, by hand it looks like.

@mphayes98 4 жыл бұрын

I was confused too but it sounds like they multiplied all the prime numbers from 2 to 23 up (which equals 223,092,870) and then divide grahams number by that. The remainder then would be the puzzle number. That has to be less than 223 million, which is less than a billion, but he misspoke and kept saying billion was the max but actually 100 million was.

@antisocialbob968 5 жыл бұрын

The product of all the primes less than or equal to 23 is only about 200,000,000 which means that each possible wordsearch would show up if there were 1,000,000,000 puzzles available Either you could have put in the ID of the puzzle that related to Grahams number or you misstated the number of puzzles (potentially 100 million?) there were. (Feel free to correct me if I have made a mistake myself)

@antisocialbob968 5 жыл бұрын

P.s. a very good video and I enjoyed all the number theory going on being very mathematical myself.

@kelviusselviuk8861 5 жыл бұрын

99,999,999 is the actual upper limit, just checked on their site myself. Good catch!

@CauchyIntegralFormula 5 жыл бұрын

Yeah, 99,999,999 is the upper limit. I calculated the residue of Graham's number and typed it in, only to find that it was outside the range. I was a little disappointed, since the product is only around 200,000,000, and finding the largest number could have been a hint towards what to do (or at least confirmation that you were on the right track).

@kelperdude 5 жыл бұрын

I now feel more stupid than a box of rocks.

@non-pe8xn 3 жыл бұрын

how long did this take you guys, damnnn

@minijimi 5 жыл бұрын

Wow, what a journey!

@TamDNB 5 жыл бұрын

We're on the road to a silver button folks!

@Taterzz 5 жыл бұрын

i would strongly suggest adding an eye tracker to your videos. i'm sure many of us would like to see how it is you generally scan the board and see possible moves.

@Boy314 5 жыл бұрын

simply amazing

@Lariat_V 4 жыл бұрын

Kinda surprising you didn't bring up the hidden message, at least partial, in the puzzle that lead you to Graham's number. I spotted "GREATWORKYOUR FIR ST CLU E IS" then couldn't make anything else out