“Find Satoshi” PerplexCity puzzle solved | Hacker News Reader

“Find Satoshi” PerplexCity puzzle solved

findsatoshi.com

248 pointsteamonkey69 comments

Lead designer of Perplex City here! Perplex City was an ARG (alternate reality game) produced by Mind Candy in 2004. Unlike almost all ARGs at the time, it wasn’t promoting a movie or TV or associated product - instead, we sold packs of puzzle cards that tied into the game’s story.

Lots more on Wikipedia here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perplex_City

This is a puzzle card I thought would either be solved very quickly (within a year or two) or not at all. To have it solved after 14 years is very special.

Perplex City has had a lot of interesting alumni. It was made by Mind Candy, which was founded by Michael Acton Smith, who is also co-founder of Calm. The lead writer was Naomi Alderman, who became an award-winning novelist and whose novel The Power was one of Obama’s top books of the year and is being adapted into a $100m Amazon TV show.

I went on to co-found Six to Start with my brother Dan Hon (who you may know from his popular newsletter, and later left the company to do a lot of good work in the US government digital services realm and Code for America). Six to Start is best known for Zombies, Run!, which is the world’s most popular smartphone fitness game and is sort of like an ARG, if you squint at it.

I continue to do a lot of thinking and writing around ARGs (which are still fascinating) and gamification (which I mostly dislike). My blog post, What ARGs Can Teach Us About QAnon, went somewhat viral a few months ago: https://mssv.net/2020/08/02/what-args-can-teach-us-about-qan...

Edit: That blog post also gets into the confusion between the Perplex City Satoshi and the Bitcoin Satoshi (which conspiratorially-minded people DM me about regularly) along with my supposed involvement in Cicada 3301.

Awesome to see it solved! May I ask how Satoshi himself was chosen? Does he have connections to the game founders in some way?

Yes – I can't recall precisely who it was who knew him (or was friends of friends) but it was one of the Mind Candy team. We were obviously worried that people might figure out who he was through these social connections but it didn't happen that way in the end!

Edit: The puzzle card was designed by Jey Biddulph so possibly it was him who knew Satoshi!

Perplex City was awesome, and I still miss it. It had a really unique storytelling mechanism, the cards were generally pretty fun, high production values.

I thought the second season suffered a bit when they introduced human actors as characters, instead of just illustrations. It lost a bit of charm. And as a Euro-centric game it was harder as an American to be as involved. But it was still a great multi-platform experience. I would love to see something like it again (or even work on such a game)

I loved Perplex City, and had a small pocket of friends working on the puzzles at the time!

Thank you for providing this behind the scenes, and for your initial work on the game itself. I’ll definitely be keeping an eye on your blog.

Thanks :) I still hold a soft spot for ARGs and I’m sure it’s something I’ll come back to again, one day.

Perplex City was great, thanks so much for all you did on it! Fondly remember the community that built up around solving these. I lucked in to being the first to solve one of the silvers (Differently Lethal), and remember all the efforts to solve this one back in the day.

I deeply miss the golden era of ARGs circa the 2000s. I keep feeling the impulse to log onto the Unfiction Forums and check what's going on, but alas, even those are gone now! Without a central watering hole, I think it'll be that much harder for the medium to come back—everything's siloed into separate Discords now, without a single sustaining community. It's not really possible to lurk or hop between games anymore, and scattershot chat messages are harder to catch up on than forum threads, and don't preserve as well or make for very good reading after a game is over.

I'm probably younger than most of the crowd that was involved in that ARG scene, so I wanna say thanks for helping to create a piece of my childhood! I actually remember the name Six to Start and that there was a lot of hope behind it when it launched, so I'm glad to hear it's doing well.

Indeed, I still listen to the I Love Bees radio drama every couple years. I was in high school while that was happening and even took a day off school to go answer a payphone at the nearby University, where I met some older nerds :) Fond memories.

Thanks! There are still new ARGs out there, though IMO not as focused on narrative or worldbuilding (especially through websites) as those in the 2000s. You're right about the fractured community, and I think to some extent ARGs are getting less accessible because they're hyper-targeted to specific communities that might be harder to discover or join.

Six to Start is doing well and we still play around with ARG-like ideas in Zombies, Run! for our seasonal virtual races :)

I honestly can't believe there's a front page Hacker News post about Perplex City today. I was literally searching for cards on eBay last night. I would love to see a game like Perplex City return some day. It was one of the first ARGs I followed on Unfiction, and it helped introduce me to the world of puzzling and puzzle hunts, and also helped push me towards my current career path. So, I guess I want to say thank you for working on such a unique and interesting game that had a massive positive influence on me when I was a teenager. It was so exciting to see the mid-2000s internet work together in a whirlwind of multimedia creativity.

Also, this is completely random, but do you happen to know if there's a warehouse somewhere with a bunch of unopened boxes of Perplex City cards? I always keep an eye out for cards, but it's hard to find people selling things from a game that ended over a decade ago.

The surplus stock was incinerated. Source: wished at mind candy in the early 2010s

Just want to express my admiration for what you and the team did with perplex city. Thank you for making something so damn cool.

The believable near future sci-fi. The beautiful art and design work. The binding of a community from all across the globe long before it was the norm. It was a palpable universe.

Sucks that it ended when it did, but I'll always cherish the veritable mountains of quality content we got.

Now that this puzzle is solved, can you explain how it was intended to be solved?

It was solved using reverse image search, which was present when this puzzle was created but not very reliable for uncommon images. So it's likely that you did not intend for it to be solved via a reverse image search.

So what was the intended way to arrive at the solution?

> Now that this puzzle is solved, can you explain how it was intended to be solved?

It says that it was supposed to be a test of the "six degrees of separation" theory. So presumably the idea was that if every player asked everyone they knew if they recognized the guy, there was a reasonable chance that someone would.

In case others are wondering:

> Q: Is this related to Bitcoin?

> A: No. Satoshi Nakamoto is the pseudonym used by the person who created Bitcoin, but it’s not the same Satoshi.

Weirdly this apparently pre-dates that other Satoshi puzzle by a few years.

Maybe Nakamoto named themself after this Satoshi.

It's a normal Japanese given name.

The first letter of it is the character 'S'.

No, it's サ

;)

If we're being pedantic, that's not a letter. It's a mora. Also, we don't know the correct Japanese spelling of Satoshi Nakamoto, because there like 8 common first names pronounced Satoshi (哲, 悟, 敏, 智, 聡, 慧, 訓, and 諭) and he never wrote his name in Japanese.

Are they all transliterated as "Satoshi" as well, or just pronounced that way? I know absolutely nothing about Japanese, so this may be a stupid question.

Same transliteration because they are read the same. Romaji (Latin characters used to phonetically transcribe Japanese words -- "Satoshi" in this case) are based on the phonetics of the word. If two words have the same pronunciation but different kanji, they'll be transcribed the same way in romaji.

This is equally true for hiragana and katakana (the other two Japanese writing systems, which are phonetic) and all the names would be written as さとし in hiragana.

Chinese characters (In Japan they referred to as Kanji), are ideographic rather than phonetic.

This means they represent an idea (or concept?) instead of a sound. The meaning is completely divorced from the pronunciation. In Japanese each character usually has at least two 'readings' for pronunciation onyomi (chinese-origin reading) and kunyomi (Japanese reading).

But often have even more than that, and specifically with peoples names the readings some times feel completely arbitrary.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanji#Readings

Basically, there are multiple ways to get the same 'sound' from different kanji, or get a different 'sound' the same kanji.

While we are continuing this chain of pedantry, few characters are in fact ideographic. Mainly the the oldest ones. Most are "Phono-semantic" i.e. a combination of "sounds like this, but means like this".

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_character_classificati...

BTW I recall later Egyption hieroglyphs were not strictly ideographic either, leading up to the Phonetician alphabet. I wonder how similar that process was.

GP probably meant logographic rather than ideographic (and kanji are a logographic writing system), because they were making a comparison to phonographic writing systems.

I imagine most non-linguist nerds (myself included) would confuse the distinction between logographic writing systems and ideographs.

Many Japanese publications decided to use "哲史" [0], but it's only an arbitrary choice.

[0] https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%82%B5%E3%83%88%E3%82%B7%E3...

Or possibly a few other characters...

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E3%81%95%E3%81%A8%E3%81%97#J...

I like that idea, because he knew everyone would try to 'Find Satoshi'

I only clicked because I thought it was Bitcoin related. Even though it predates Bitcoin, I assume the popularity is given by Bitcoin's current media coverage.

There was a somewhat viral video which included a lady explaining the search in detail which is more likely where the recent popularity stems from.

It's not clear to me how they find the crucial picture of him (the one he holds the beer). The article says "user th0may used a reverse image search and discovered a photograph of a man holding a beer", but /u/th0may's thread on Reddit doesn't say anything like that [1].

If anything, /u/th0may himself said in thread, "maybe you already found this image", which implies that the image itself is already known (and likely NOT discovered by "reverse image search", but by other ways). /u/th0may then reverse-searched the image to find the website, which lead to the answer.

Anyway, I'm still curious how they find this beer image, since this looks to me is the most important step.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/FindSatoshi/comments/kktjhc/found_s...

One of the comments says:

I heard about the story a year ago, but forgot about it. Then I remembered and told my family about on Christmas. So I wanted to check out if this is still unsolved and found this reddit. I’m currently researching about AI and found a few image backwards search engines way more powerful then google image search. It turned out that I found the image of him holding the beer, when I fed in the card. Just wanted to play around, but it looks really promising now. ;D

https://www.reddit.com/r/FindSatoshi/comments/kktjhc/found_s...

Thanks, I didn't read that deep into the comments.

So he used some face-recognizing engines that just indexes random images on the Internet? I wonder what it is, since he didn't name (I assume it's a public tool?). I knew Baidu has one, for what it's worth [1].

[1] https://ai.baidu.com/tech/face/search (in Chinese)

It seems so. He writes "They use facial recognition to find faces instead of google image search which is just comparing the similarities of the different pixels."

https://www.reddit.com/r/FindSatoshi/comments/kktjhc/found_s...

I took a look at [1], seems to require bringing your own training set, and hosting one with a huge set of random Internet images would presumably be prohibitively expensive.

Maybe I linked the wrong page, but I have used its API before, it does have a built-in database even with all the names of celebrities marked already.

It used to have a free trial on web too, but it's gone now.

I don't know much about the state of the art in image recognition but does it really seem plausible? The picture of him holding the beer is not super high quality, he has a different expression, a slightly different haircut and he appears quite a bit older. You can't even see his distinctive freckles. The idea that you could just scan random images of people online and find him that way is wild to me, tuning the network not to miss it but also not to report millions of false positives seems like a very high bar.

It's pretty creepy if we're already at the point where any random people can trace you online using apparently unrelated low quality photos.

We don't know how much effort it took. The searcher could very well have gone through thousands of images, following up on hundreds, before zeroing in on this one. Or not-- I'd certainly like to know more about that part of the process.

i know little about the state of the art in image recognition, but it strikes me that this could be better described as facial recognition, and afaik, that does a pretty good job identifying faces

No idea is it is state of the art but I just tested PimEyes(the reverse image search service mentioned) with an old photo of me, it returned a bunch of photos of random people but also two of me within the first 30-40 results. One is older, 7-8 years maybe, and one is more recent, 2 years perhaps.

I have different facial expressions and the pose/angle is different than the one I submitted.

From a comment further down that thread:

"heard about the story a year ago, but forgot about it. Then I remembered and told my family about on Christmas. So I wanted to check out if this is still unsolved and found this reddit. I’m currently researching about AI and found a few image backwards search engines way more powerful then google image search. It turned out that I found the image of him holding the beer, when I fed in the card. Just wanted to play around, but it looks really promising now. ;D"

I found this part the most interesting too. There’s a comment in the reddit thread now where the author says: It is called PimEyes but it does not give you the full url unless you pay. So I had to start digging from what I got.

He guys, first up I’m the guy who found the image of him holding a beer. It was barely simple I used the webpage https://pimeyes.com/en uploaded the image from the card, cropped it a little to hide the Japanese characters etc. The first two result where the same that I scanned. The third was the image holding the beer. I saw some resemblance, but didn’t think it would work. PimEys let’s you search for free but you have to pay for the full url. So I took the fraction of the url figured out the full one. Found the original image on the webpage. And then posted my findings to Reddit. I and also other users found new pictures of him the following days. On the 28th of December we found an image with him wearing a bib from a half marathon through the results I found the name and it was Satoshi.

>Q: What was the password that Satoshi was supposed to share?

>A: It was a question in Japanese that he would have spoken to whoever found him. The answer to the question was the puzzle’s answer. The creator of the puzzle, Jey Biddulph, has posted an audio clip of the question on Twitter. Can you solve it?

( Direct link to the clip: https://soundcloud.com/user-650898069-942959925/speech-20201... )

"炎を生んで死んだのはだれ？ Who gave birth to a fire and died?"

Was the answer "Izanami" ? (Shinto creation myth - Izanami burned to death while giving birth to Kagutsuchi, the god of fire and blacksmiths.)

Edit: Yes, confirmed in the Twitter thread.

https://pimeyes.com/en finds him.