Historical Clue Histeria
 

Ok, this thread is to discuss the clues of the past. NOT to start clues of the future.

The idea is simple: Every year, there is a clue that comes out and of course none of us can resist a challenge. We pull in resources from a pop trivia to photo shop to what Lavery wore to a competition and numerous other things to try and solve an unsolvable puzzle.

In doing this we create 50+ pages worth of thread in a very short time period. The hours that go into researching a sentence or a single picture is impressive. In this thread, let's post some of the most dedicated discoveries/interesting things from previous clues.

One of my personal favorites:

They gave us a picture of a fish with obscured text, and not only did we manage to decipher the text. We managed to crash every site that had that phrase on it.

Re: Historical Clue Histeria
 

Uh oh. I have a feeling that Dave will be tormenting us pretty soon by posting a new "clue"...

Re: Historical Clue Histeria
 

Who says he hasn't already?



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Re: Historical Clue Histeria
 

I have to say the 2006 season.

To start out, the official hint was:

..........five 'bots tangling with pasta
a game piece obsessed with a shovel's show
.....and seeing Montana's green heights

Dave's "hints" included comments about a fox being in the henhouse and hovercrafts and the English Channel.

"shovel's show" was a reference to "Just Shoot Me", starring David Spade. But a lot of people went after "seeing Montana's green heights" and researched Joe Montana, the state of Montana, and anything related. (Montana was just a placeholder, IIRC. Something had to go between "seeing" and "green heights".) Oh, yeah--some people tried the haiku angle. They hadn't seen the shape.

2007 was pretty good too. Had lots of people playing with photoshop. One even pulled a fake by inserting a banana. The game piece was, however, correctly guessed.

Re: Historical Clue Histeria
 

I haven't experienced many clues, but I really enjoyed this year's clue and the fact that we guessed an ice game was amazing. I'm still awed that we can guess the game so accurately.

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2004's clue was a quote from Stairway to Heaven. And that game had stairs even though they were the smallest stairs ever...

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2008. They gave us three pretty obvious numbers, and we even got the location correct. Yet we kept looking out 100's of feet from a statue when the clue was only a few feet away. Tortoise and Hare ftw.

Re: Historical Clue Histeria
 

If we guess 5000 things and one happens to be right, is that really accurate?

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or how about the fact that if you guess it right you'll never know until the game is released anyway...

Re: Historical Clue Hysteria
 

Now, how cool is that?

Even if the exact game, and all its details, were to be guessed in the very first post ...... who would know?

What's truly amazing is how close we get in the first twenty or thirty posts. And how it continues for hundreds more... It's fun, it occupies otherwise anxious minds, and shows just how awesome a tool the Internet is.

Re: Historical Clue Histeria
 

I'd have to agree with Eric. 2006 was my favorite. I guess my favorite part was when it got revealed and everyone had that "Aha!" moment. It's the only game so far (I don't think) where any post was correct about any part of the game. I wish dave would go back to riddles. They're fun! :)

Re: Historical Clue Histeria
 

Yes...100% Yes. I can't photo shop at all and am pretty well left out of picture fun. However, most everyone can take apart a riddle and find something in it.

Re: Historical Clue Histeria
 

Like I said in 2004 the riddle was a quote for "Stairway to Heaven". We guessed that there would be stairs and there was, so i would have to say that 2006 wasn't the first year that someone got it right.

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Yes, I apologize. Since 2006 was my first kickoff, I wasn't aware of the 2004 one (until now). It was the only one in "my highschool first generation".

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Its all good, i think that the person who got it right in 2006 had a harder job of getting it right, so i give that person more credit. Also what that person got right had a bigger impact in the game did than the "stairs" did in 2004. Shooting the ball was the main way to score while the stairs where just a small obstacle that you could ignore and it wouldn't effect how well you played the game at all.

Re: Historical Clue Histeria
 

Wasn't this year's (09) clue a moonfish?

I haven't really paid much attention to the clues in the past, but I probably will start paying more attention next year.

Re: Historical Clue Histeria
 

Yep.

2003: I'm not sure if this one was the official one or not, but y=ax^2+bx+c.
2004: lines from "Stairway to Heaven"
2005: riddle about amethyst glasses, two baseball players who'd made unassisted triple plays, and pi. I don't remember the exact wording; search for the thread discussing it.
2006: See my earlier post here
2007: still from the game animation, zoomed in
2008: chain going to statues, among other things
2009: Moonfish picture and a riddle

The game has been figured out once or twice, and elements have been found, but never the entire thing.

Re: Historical Clue Histeria
 

Can you explain this clue? I searched and found no real answers.

Re: Historical Clue Histeria
 

The best I remember was that it was the scoring formula, or a relative thereof. Or the field shape (due to the massive ramp in the middle).

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I thought it might be the ramp, but I can't figure out why they would have the formula for a parabola. Unless the ramp was parabolic? Oh well, they often don't make sense. Guess I'll just have to let this one go.

Re: Historical Clue Histeria
 

I believe the lines on the ground was a parabala.

Re: Historical Clue Histeria
 

Nope, sorry. Semicircle bordered by straight lines. Centered at the edge of the ramp. Not that my team ever used that; we preferred to drive out, tweak our angle, and come straight back into the bins...

Re: Historical Clue Histeria
 

Wasn't it the shape of the bins as set up atop the platform?

Re: Historical Clue Histeria
 

I had always heard that it was the scoring formula, but that's not strictly correct.

If that were the case, the clue should have been something like:

y = a(x-1)+b
or
y = ax - a + b

Where:
y = score
a = height of tallest stack
x = number of bins in zone, including those in the stack
b = bonus points from ramp

(The -1 is because the bins making up the stack did not count towards the total, e.g. if there were 6 bins in the zone but 3 of them were in a stack the score would be 3*3=9 instead of 6*3=18)

Re: Historical Clue Histeria
 

Nope, it WAS the scoring. Doing a little searching, I found some old threads, which took me to this post, which lead me to http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...ht=quadrat ic

Search for "clue" for as old as you can go, by start date, and look for the threads started in late 2002. One of them has a list of 4 threads, the last of which is the first link above.

It's how you optimize your score.

Re: Historical Clue Histeria
 

Re: Historical Clue Histeria
 

I remember about two weeks before kickoff this year, a couple friends and I were trying to figure out what in the world the challenge would be, based on the numbers they gave us and the moonfish clue. We put the numbers into Google Earth, and after a little work ended up getting some weird result off the coast of Australia. For the moonfish, we jokingly claimed we would have to go the either Mars or the moon, I forget which. We came somewhat close about the second one, I guess.

Re: Historical Clue Histeria
 

I think the parabola is officially the coolest clue ever. It makes this thread fully worthwhile to me. Thanks to all for the information.