Hacker News Reader

Comment by ziddoap | Hacker News Reader

If you use an acronym/initialism, spend the 4 extra seconds to type out the full thing the first time, I beg.

MUMS = Melbourne University Maths + Stats Society.

AGM = Annual General Meeting

Anyways, there is almost nothing about Cicada 3301 in this article, and certainly no connections made between the people behind Cicada 3301 and the people who made the puzzle hunt at Melbourne Uni.

In fact, the word Cicada only appears 3 times in the article: once in the title, and then twice when referring to the insect and not the group.

View on HN

I think, the connection is Julian Assange. And I think, he was a main organizer of the Cicada 3301. But his teams were definetly not the same for both projects. If you know something about Cicada 3301 games (especially 2012 game), than you can find a lot of similarities between them and 2004 Puzzle Hunt. So, I think, there is no need to mention the name of the cummunity a lot of times.

I'm assuming that you're the author of the article? If so...

>If you know something about Cicada 3301 games (especially 2012 game), than you can find a lot of similarities between them and 2004 Puzzle Hunt

It's your job, as the author of the article making the bold claim, to explain these similarities. The only similarity I see is the fact that they are both open-world puzzles.

This article is a brief history of a puzzle hunt at Melbourne Univeristy, and that's it! You make no connections, you don't explain what similarities you see.

Probably the worst of all, you assume the reader has intimate knowledge of the Cicada 3301 puzzle from over a decade ago -- and expect the reader to draw the same conclusions as you do!

I have no idea whether Julian Assange helped organize Cicada 3301. What I do know is that this article has not convinced me in the slightest.

It's certainly an interesting theory, but you need to at least help the reader connect the dots about what you're thinking.

It is just an article, not a book. And there exist a kind of balance between length of an article and amount of details. More details means, that article will be lengthy and harder to read. Ok, the most bold similaryty between both events is factoring a large number into perimes. You can find such task in every Cicada 3301 game. And you also can find it in puzzle, made by Julian Assange for 2004 Puzzle Hunt (Disc). It is obvious, that not everyone will find this a fun challenge. I doubt, that you can find such tusk in every other Melbourne Uni Puzzle Hunt, except for 2004. And I also think, that it is very rare task in every other similar quest in general. In "Puzzle solving guide", writen for the 2004 Puzzle Hant, you can find the following: "If you are struggling for ideas to solve a code, try the following: Caesar shifts, Rot 13, converting letters to numbers, converting numbers to letters, Beale ciphers, look for letters with unusually high frequencies, see if the letters themselves are perhaps irrelevant, and the message is in their arrangement, try the Enigma code... If you don't know what these things are, try reading The Code Book by Simon Singh -- It may help, and if not, it is a very entertaining read!", - and Cicada 3301 game in 2012 started from Caesar shift. Also, obviously, that this guide was written by Assange. It is also obviously, that Assange also read another book by Simon Singh - Fermat's Last Theorem. And he should know about connection between cicadas and primes from that book, that told specifically about two species of cicadas with lifespan about 13 and 17 years. In 2013 game by Cicada 3301 that two numbers play big role, becouse they are primes and they are related to cicadas. For 2004 Puzlle Hunt assange made a puzzle (Score) about extracting message from a musical notation. And you also can find similar tasks in Cicada 3301 games. In his puzzle Caesar Cipher Assange used additional spacing between words to place a message in text. You can also find similar method in many Cicada 3301 puzzles. One of his puzzles was named Platonic and was related to geometric shape. You can find similar things in one of the 2014 puzzles by Cicada 3301. His puzzle Surstromming is about different interpretation of a word. You can also find such method many times in Cicada 3301 games (for example, Shalot is a name of a character of a literary work and also name of the computer program). Puzzles in Puzzle Hunt have no instuctions for them: they are parts of a mystic plot. And puzzles in Cicada 3301 games mostly have no instructions - they are part of a mystic plot. Every act of 2004 Puzzle Hunt started with a mystic quote (it is not tipical for subsequent MUMS Puzzle Hunt events). And Cicada 3301 games contain a lot of mystic quotes.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com