**FIRST EMAIL**/FRC Game Hint #2

[jerry w]

please
it has been 24 hours.
has no one in that area got a gps unit?
google is not accurate within about 50 feet.
i would like to know what is on the ground at the suspected coordinates.

please, will someone go make the measurement?

jerry w

[Leav]

from my experience with excel it won't find any meaning in this (can't blame it really... ) and will just copy the first cell into the fourth cell, the second to the fifth and so on....

if Google sets can't find anything... I mean... what can????

http://labs.google.com/sets?hl=en&q1...ms+or+fewer%29

-Leav

[ZachKahn]

This is from one of our team's mentors from the LAPD bomb squad.

Zach, you need to go to the attached address. It will take you to program code. I found this before and did not think much about. I then revisited it and scrolled to the bottom to find those addition numbers in the clue. I believe this is what you are looking for. This may be GAPS related and are using an on-line map. Let me know what you think.

Roy

http://off.net/diary/kmls/20070918.kml

- A few minutes later

Zach, here is another key piece. You need to get your Internet guys and girls involved. When you go to this site I think you will see how things are starting to come together.

Roy

http://code.google.com/apis/kml/documentation/

Any ideas?

[andrew418]

I don't think it's necessary to actually verify the coordinates with a GPS. FIRST would have assumed that everyone would access the coordinates with Google Earth or Maps, so they would have checked the location on the Google software itself.

Also, I'm not sure that the object at the coordinate location is the statue. From the pictures of the square I have looked at, the statue is further away from the church, in the direction of the Boston Public Library. The only thing near where the object should be is a large, antique lamp-post, with four globes. When you zoom in as far as Google Earth will let you, you can make out four roundish white objects around a middle dark area, which looks like the lamp post should from above.

So if the coordinates are pointing to the lamppost, the game might have to deal with round, globe shaped scoring objects, or posts like in the FTC this year.

About the third number. The two most plausible explanations that I have seen are that it is a bearing (possibly towards Manchester) and that it is the number of hours from when the email was sent until FIRST kickoff. I calculated that the bearing towards Manchester was approx 338 degrees, which is only slightly off. However, given the precision of the decimal, it would not make sense that FIRST would be so far off. Similarly, some posts have said that a bearing of 342 degrees from the lamppost leads to the Globe Bar and Grill. If that is so, such precision is unnecessary to simply point towards a large object several hundred yards away. The idea about the time to kickoff also seemed close, but I calculated that 342.242026 hours from when the email was sent (16:47:12 -0500 GMT) gave a time of Jan 4th, 11:01 and 43 seconds PM, about 10 hours before kickoff. I may be wrong, but I think that none of the ideas that have been presented for the third number are correct.

It is reasonably certain that the first two numbers are GPS coordinates (the chances of arbitrarily arriving at the coordinates of a lamppost in Boston at that level of precision are almost negligable). But we still need to come up with an explanation for the third number.

The only thing I can think of is that it is an angle above the horizon, or that it is a bearing towards something further away, which lies more directly on the path of 342.242026 degrees.

ANy other suggestions?

[DonRotolo]

Originally Posted by andrew418

I don't think it's necessary to actually verify the coordinates with a GPS. FIRST would have assumed that everyone would access the coordinates with Google Earth or Maps, so they would have checked the location on the Google software itself.

That assumes Google displays the exactly correct coordinates and does not 'fudge' the views in any way. Neither is true, so there goes that theory....

What do we do when we assume?

[T3_1565]

has anyone, tried go further out than Manchester and see anything important out there??? (at 342.... degrees)

[Madison]

Can someone point out again from where you've all decided these coordinates land on a lamp post?

Google Maps suggests there's something there, but upon viewing pictures of the area on Flickr and other aerial photography from local.live.com, I think what we're seeing are some unfortunate people that don't even realize the amount of time and effort people are spending trying to figure out what they have in common with a FIRST game.

[billbo911]

While you are answering Madison's question, can you answer mine?
Why are you convinced the clue is actually pointing to more information. Maybe the clue is the answer.
We received GPS coordinates, correct?
Maybe it is just telling us we will be receiving GPS coordinates during the game.

[pafwl]

One of our mentors and his son, who is a member of our, team came up with this...
================================================== ===
Me and my dad did a little research and this is what we did and how we
came up with it.

1. I ran the 1st 2 numbers as latitude and longitude in Google Earth,
and it zoomed in directly on the statue of John Singleton Copley in
Copley Square in Boston.

2. We put the third number into Excel and changed the format into a
date. It gave us December 7, 1900, which on that date, according to
Wikipedia, said that "Max Planck, in his house at Grunewald, on the
outskirts of Berlin, discovers the law of black body emission." A black
body is "an object that absorbs all electromagnetic radiation that
falls onto it." This goes right along with the first clue & absorbing
infrared material.

[amethyst23s]

Originally Posted by billbo911

Why are you convinced the clue is actually pointing to more information. Maybe the clue is the answer.

I definitely agree with this statement... the clue is the answer. I'm not so convinced as everyone else that they are GPS coordianates, but I bet these three numbers will be critical to the game somehow. They look a lot like measurements of some sort, althought the negative in the second number kinda throws that theory off a little.... but anway, my point is that while everyone seems to think that these clues are pointing to more clues about the game, I think the connection will be a little more direct.

[Richard Wallace]

Originally Posted by M. Krass

Can someone point out again from where you've all decided these coordinates land on a lamp post?

Google Maps suggests there's something there, but upon viewing pictures of the area on Flickr and other aerial photography from local.live.com, I think what we're seeing are some unfortunate people that don't even realize the amount of time and effort people are spending trying to figure out what they have in common with a FIRST game.

Madison makes an excellent point. We should not assume that any precision, short of the best possible from the given data, will be 'close enough' to correctly interpret this clue. In all likelihood this clue comes from the mind of a person who is concerned with the precise location (to the nearest centimeter or so) of an 8'L x 5'W x 5'H machine that is currently about 55 million miles from Earth -- and most of the time it is not that close! Angles measured to the millionth a degree are just dry routine for a person like that.

[njamietech]

Here is the values given by excel using the forecast function:

1	42.349905
2	-71.076072
3	342.242026
4	404.3974073
5	462.9245268
6	403.1879867
7	424.1080173
8	468.8900198
9	333.5089583
10	590.033783
11	161.2848456
12	878.2815337
13	-465.6670734
14	2699.107445
15	-7156.475964
16	31813.03259
17	-151008.0336
18	820992.1869
19	-4895732.107
20	31804485.87
21	-223132953.9
22	1680489708
23	-13517437308
24	1.15629E+11
25	-1.04791E+12
26	1.00287E+13
27	-1.01055E+14

someone asked for this but I cannot remember who.

[pafwl]

We looked up Singleton....

In software engineering, the singleton pattern is a design pattern that is used to restrict instantiation of a class to one object. This is useful when exactly one object is needed to coordinate actions across the system. Sometimes it is generalized to systems that operate more efficiently when only one or a few objects exist. It is also considered an anti-pattern since it is often used as a euphemism for global variable.

Will one robot be the guide for the others? Just because they gave us the receiver does not mean we will not get the transmitter in the kit....

[Dmentor]

Just a random thought...

Latitude (42.349905) and Longitude (-71.076072) are angles in a spherical coordinate system. Bearing (342.242026) would be another angle.

Three angles... Tri-angle... Triangle!

I know this is nothing new in terms of concepts but it is a simple and more direct association.

I figure since this got entirely missed by most of the folks here, who haven't read the whole thread, I'll post it again. I did a little graphing, and found that from the Google Coordinates (knowing the GDC, they would write this clue around what we all have, which is Google Maps/Earth) are directly on the statue of Copley. At the heading of the third number given, from the statue of copley, you are looking in a clear path through two obelisks, at the Globe Cafe. In this setup, we have the three shapes of FIRST: Triangles, Circles, and Squares.

My earlier post has an attached drawing with the satellite photo and the lines drawn to show the heading.