Mystery Hunt 2012 Recast: COMPLETE!!!

[Suspence]

This pairs up each of the new answers with each of the right side ticket stubs.

As for the left side ticket stubs, there are 17. These likely match up with the reused answers. There are currently 16 words in the 7 answers we have, with the one-word answer to Zugzwang still missing.
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I hate people who try to write interesting things in their signature.

[Scurra]

And the row on each of those right hand matches is one of the "left over" letters, so they can be removed from the spares as well. And the seat presumably gives a sort order. Thus:

V1 - COSMO SEX QUIZ > BY A GANGPLANK JAN BRADY > FHTW
Z2 - DUCKBILL PLAYTPUS / NOW FOR EXXON GQ OFFER > MV
Y3 - NEVER REMOVED FROM BOX > KLUTZ ITS JUST TWILIGHT > ACPQ
Q4 - EXHAUST VALVES > WIMPY OJ IN MY FIZZY GIN DRINKS > BC
V5 - INFLEXIBLE WILL > AS GAPS MARK A MAJOR QUAGGY HAZARD > CT
Q6 - CRUSHED VELVET > MAKING A BANANA FIG PIZZA > JOWY
J7 - VIDKUN QUIZLING > MAY BECOME TAX EXEMPT > FHRWZ
W8 - ZAPHOD BEEBLEBROX > MUMMIFYING CIVIC JUNK > QST
_________________
_{still Quiz Olympiad champion. Must get a life.
New definitions: COFFEE - someone who is coughed upon}

[Suspence]

Getting things onto this page for ease:

Reused show answers:
KINGS HIGHWAY BRIDGE
PINHEAD
JACK CARDIFF
CHRIST CHURCH REGATTA
JOSH SCHWARTZ
ARIGATO GOZAIMASU
CARDINAL JULES MAZARIN
<<<Zugzwaang answer>>>

LEFT SIDE OF STUBS:
Row O Seat 9 Clay Cup / Row K Seat 3 Mud Cracks
Row R Seat 6 Groom Me
Row S Seat 2 Gumbo / Row Q Seat 7 Up Quick, / Row B Seat 4 V-Chips
Row T Seat 5 Hug Joe / Row R Seat 7 It’s Lit / Row Y Seat 8 Byron, No
Row K Seat 3 I’m So / Row H Seat 2 Why Fall
Row K Seat 1 King Quit / Row L Seat 1 Ah, Now / Row I Seat 6 He Fears
Row T Seat 5 What Fez
Row H Seat 8 YMCA
Row I Seat 4 Gawky Jim

Here is the additional flavortext from the Investigator's Report:

William S. Bergman is the hippest reviewer out there. If a show is experimental and incomprehensible, he’s sure to like it so much he’ll go see it twice, just so he can save both halves of the ticket. But if he doesn’t feel it’s an important work, he’ll only see it once. (We couldn’t say how he feels about shows he doesn’t see.)

Here is Bergman’s collection of ticket stubs.
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I hate people who try to write interesting things in their signature.

[Scurra]

Juggling with the "other halves", there are halves that have all but one of the unused letters.

edit: oh, wait, the full titles actually do seem to make some sense (well, in a bizarro puzzle world, maybe!)

V1 - COSMO SEX QUIZ > WHY FALL / BY A GANGPLANK JAN BRADY > FHTW > FHW - T
Z2 - DUCKBILL PLAYTPUS > GROOM ME / NOW FOR EXXON GQ OFFER > MV > M - V
Y3 - NEVER REMOVED FROM BOX > UP QUICK / KLUTZ ITS JUST TWILIGHT > ACPQ > CPQ - A
Q4 - EXHAUST VALVES > GUMBO WIMPY OJ IN MY FIZZY GIN DRINKS > BC > B - C
V5 - INFLEXIBLE WILL > MUD CRACKS(?) / AS GAPS MARK A MAJOR QUAGGY HAZARD > CT > C - T
Q6 - CRUSHED VELVET > GAWKY JIM / MAKING A BANANA FIG PIZZA > JOWY > JWY - O
J7 - VIDKUN QUIZLING > WHAT FEZ / MAY BECOME TAX EXEMPT > FHRWZ > FHWZ - R
W8 - ZAPHOD BEEBLEBROX > KING QUIT / MUMMIFYING CIVIC JUNK > QST > QT - S

This appears to give TV ACTORS as a plausible reading.
_________________
_{still Quiz Olympiad champion. Must get a life.
New definitions: COFFEE - someone who is coughed upon}

[Suspence]

Reused show answers:
KINGS HIGHWAY BRIDGE
PINHEAD
JACK CARDIFF
CHRIST CHURCH REGATTA
JOSH SCHWARTZ
ARIGATO GOZAIMASU
CARDINAL JULES MAZARIN
<<<Zugzwaang answer>>>

UNUSED LEFT SIDE OF STUBS:
Row O Seat 9 Clay Cup
Row B Seat 4 V-Chips
Row T Seat 5 Hug Joe
Row R Seat 7 It’s Lit
Row Y Seat 8 Byron, No
Row K Seat 3 I’m So
Row L Seat 1 Ah, Now
Row I Seat 6 He Fears
Row H Seat 8 YMCA
_________________
I hate people who try to write interesting things in their signature.

[novice]

Combine reused answers with unused stubs, anagram missing letters to TV actors?

[Suspence]

8 recycled answers, including the one we don't have. 9 unused stubs, if I tracked them correctly.
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I hate people who try to write interesting things in their signature.

[gftt*]

a) why not try calling in TV ACTORS? As I recall CORNY CLUES was another critic meta answer, this seems about on par.

b) We had choices for some of the left stubs... BYRON NO fits (if I understand what Scurra is doing) and makes more sense than GUMBO, yes?

c) What to do with the row/seat number of the used left stubs?

d) I can't believe nobody has solved Zugzwaang yet. (I've peeked so I can't help.)

[LordKinbote]

[Suspence]

[gftt*]

Back to the crossword... could "Evil Influence" be referring to the moon? The black and white circles could represent new and full moons respectively. Not sure where to go from there, though.

[gftt*]

Make the O's into black circles and white circles and play Masyu. The loop created turns at letters THEFINALANSWERISDRUNKTANK (not counting black circles).

Call in DRUNK TANK

Very impressed that you can construct a crossword to that constraint!

[gftt*]

What is the meaning of "evil influence", though?

[gftt*]

Never mind, I see it.

[LordKinbote]

Thank you. It certainly wasn't easy, which is why the number of three-letter words is higher than I'd like.

"Evil Influence" is the literal meaning of "Masyu" and actually, it's a way into the puzzle if you google "evil influence puzzle" or something like that.

Next: Why, it's another puzzle by me! Two in a row! Yeah!

Itinerant People of America by by Scott Handelman and Emily Morgan, with artwork by Danielle Sucher

Note (invizzed for very slight spoilerness): The final part of this puzzle, while not technically time sensitive, was MUCH easier to find six months ago than it is now. If you guys are having trouble finding what you need to find (and you'll know what you need to find), I'll step in and give some guidance.

[Zag]

I had been pretty pleased with my own crossword that I made for the GL Collaborative puzzle, since it had a pretty limited word list that I had to use. But this is a level of constraint far beyond anything I've done, and I'm very impressed. Nice work!

[Scurra]

[gftt*]

"Itinerant People of America" sounded acronymish, so googling IPA gave me International Phonetic Alphabet. Oral tradition indeed.

Also, many of the symbols seem to be variations of each other, perhaps signaling for diacritical marks. EG, there's a target symbol and then a target symbol with a caret underneath; there's a square and then a square with a caret underneath.

[novice]

Maybe it's a substitution cipher between those symbols and english phonemes.

[Scurra]

Reverting to the meta for a second: would our esteemed host be prepared to say if the answer to Zugzwaang is a single word?
I want to take the leap of semi-random deduction that it is, because then we end up with seventeen words in total in the answers, and seventeen "half titles" (one set of nine, not yet used, and one set of eight, also used for the pangram part.)
Indeed, I'd even go so far as to suggest that the answer to Zugzwaang is in fact a seven-letter word, given that the lengths of the individual words match the lengths of the "half titles", except for one of length 7.

(p.s. doing this also proved that BYRON NO was the correct choice, and GUMBO wasn't, because then we end up with two clear sort orders from the rows)

Anyway, for the record, here's the data I think we are using at this point:


UNUSED LEFT SIDE OF STUBS: 
Row L Seat 1 Ah, Now  5
Row S Seat 2 Gumbo 5
Row K Seat 3 I’m So  4
Row B Seat 4 V-Chips  6
Row T Seat 5 Hug Joe  6
Row I Seat 6 He Fears  7
Row R Seat 7 It’s Lit  6
Row H Seat 8 YMCA 4
Row O Seat 9 Clay Cup  7

USED LEFT SIDE OF STUBS:
Row K Seat 1 King Quit 8
Row H Seat 2 Why Fall 7
Row K Seat 3 Mud Cracks 9
Row I Seat 4 Gawky Jim 8
Row T Seat 5 What Fez 7
Row R Seat 6 Groom Me 7
Row Q Seat 7 Up Quick 7
Row Y Seat 8 Byron, No 7

JACK
JOSH

JULES
KINGS

BRIDGE
CHRIST
CHURCH

ARIGATO
CARDIFF
HIGHWAY
MAZARIN
PINHEAD
REGATTA
? <<<Zugzwaang answer>>> ?

CARDINAL
SCHWARTZ

GOZAIMASU
_________________
_{still Quiz Olympiad champion. Must get a life.
New definitions: COFFEE - someone who is coughed upon}

[Scurra]

Aha. I think I've got it. The row letters provide a substitution cipher on an individual answer basis.

UNUSED LEFT SIDE OF STUBS:
Row L Seat 1 Ah, Now maps to JULES L = N
Row S Seat 2 Gumbo maps to KINGS S = O
Row K Seat 3 I’m So maps to JACK K = O
Row B Seat 4 V-Chips maps to BRIDGE B = V
Row T Seat 5 Hug Joe maps to CHRIST T = E
Row I Seat 6 He Fears maps to MAZARIN I = R
Row R Seat 7 It’s Lit maps to CHURCH R = L
Row H Seat 8 YMCA maps to JOSH H = A
Row O Seat 9 Clay Cup maps to ARIGATO O = P

USED LEFT SIDE OF STUBS:
Row K Seat 1 King Quit maps to CARDINAL K = C
Row H Seat 2 Why Fall maps to CARDIFF H = A
Row K Seat 3 Mud Cracks maps to GOZAIMASU K = S
Row I Seat 4 Gawky Jim maps to SCHWARTZ I = T
Row T Seat 5 What Fez maps to PINHEAD T = H
Row R Seat 6 Groom Me maps to ??????? ? = U
Row Q Seat 7 Up Quick maps to HIGHWAY Q = G
Row Y Seat 8 Byron, No maps to REGATTA Y = E

not sure what the first bit is about (NO OVERLAP) but the second bit clearly gives the other half of the thing that will annoy Bergman.

Call in CAST HUGE TV ACTORS
_________________
_{still Quiz Olympiad champion. Must get a life.
New definitions: COFFEE - someone who is coughed upon}

[LordKinbote]

CAST HUGE TV ACTORS is correct, and would of course annoy a hipster like William S. Bergman.

[Suspence]

Back to the IPA puzzle...

36 different characters appear. If I did everything correctly, here are the breakdowns of how many times we see each one:

24
7
19
5
19
13
8
2
11
3
37
6
39
7
6
12
31
8
6
21
15
41
43
2
7
61
8
37
8
2
6
21
18
24
6
1
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I hate people who try to write interesting things in their signature.

[novice]

Hmm.. Are there 36 sounds in the english language?

[Suspence]

I think there are 44. I'm working on the most popular groupings at the moment.
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I hate people who try to write interesting things in their signature.

[novice]

[Suspence]

Once again, if I did everything correctly, these are the two most popular pairings

19
12

This triplet appears the most, at 5 times:

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[novice]

You seem to be on top of things. Anyway, here are some phoneme frequency lists:
http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/wordscape/wordlist/phonfreq.html
http://keithbriggs.info/text_to_phonemes.html (pairs)

Edit: I would try /I T/ for your most frequent pair.

[Suspence]

I see a few places where it says the number of "unblended" phonemes in English is 36.

http://odel.wikispaces.com/The+IPA

“Counting the number of phonemes is like counting the number of colors in a rainbow,” writes linguist Steve Bett, adding, “When we try to break up a continuous spectrum into discrete units, we move to the realm of fuzzy logic.” Despite the controversy and inability of linguists to agree on a precise number, Bett states that it is generally agreed that, “the minimum number of unblended phonemes in all varieties of English is 36,
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[gftt*]

Hmm... where did everyone go?

PS. Now that there are two solved metas in which Zugzwaang's answer is the only one missing, there is no excuse not to solve it.

[Suspence]

If I understand what Scurra did correctly, the Zugzwaang answer should be in the format

aUbbccd

Decrypto yields SUCCEED, PUTTEES, BUFFOON and PUCCOON.
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I hate people who try to write interesting things in their signature.

[Suspence]

So, this might be cheating but, for Zugzwaang:

Call in SUCCEED

Call in BUFFOON

I'll try the other two next, but these seem more likely

EDIT: The other meta with the Zugzwaang answer was the "Elementary" one, where all the letters come from one row of the periodic table, except for one. We need the U from the Zugzwaang answer for the U in for "corny clUes", so all the other letters must be elements from the same row, but in a different row than U.

B F O and N are all in Row 2, while U is not. So BUFFOON must be the answer.
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I hate people who try to write interesting things in their signature.

[LordKinbote]

BUFFOON is correct.

[LordKinbote]

A minor hint about the newest puzzle, because it really can be a toughie.

First of all, you're on the right track.

Second: Editors were VERY doubtful that this puzzle could be solved. However, we set two teams to test it. One team managed to break the code purely on the merits of the code. The other team managed to figure out what the decrypted data was before tackling the code, and then decrypted it easily afterwards.

So it's definitely a puzzle that you can attack from either side.

[novice]

There are 36 symbols and 37 phrases to decipher. Many symbols occur twice in a row, which I would think does not happen in a phonetic transcription except in word boundaries. So 37 multi-word phrases.

Side thought: 36 symbols also correspond to 26 letters and 10 digits.

[novice]

Naming the symbols, for easier collaboration:

A 24
B 7
C 19
D 5
E 19
F 13
G 8
H 2
I 11
J 3
K 37
L 6
M 39
N 7
O 6
P 12
Q 31
R 8
S 6
T 21
U 15
V 41
W 43
X 2
Y 7
Z 61
0 8
1 37
2 8
3 2
4 6
5 21
6 18
7 24
8 6
9 1

[novice]

Phrases:

1: 1 K Y 6 7 Q C Z W C U V 7 1
2: V 0 5 B 7 O 2 U 7 Q C
3:

[novice]

Symbol classification:

Base shapes:
s = square
t = triangle
d = vertical diamond
h = horizontal diamond
c = circle

Modifiers:
* = central dot
v = v shape on top
^ = ^ shape underneath
/ = / shape on top
, = / shape underneath
- = line on top

Symbols by base shape:

K = c
C = c*
A = cv
I = c^
S = cv*
6 = c^*
J = ct
4 = ct/
L = ct/*
9 = c-

W = d*
N = dv*
B = dv^*

Q = h*

Z = *

V = s*
D = sv*
5 = s^*

1 = t
8 = t*
G = t^
2 = tv
3 = t^*
X = t/
O = t,
R = t,*
(also listed under circles):
J = ct
4 = ct/
L = ct*

Other shapes:
E = ~
M = <
Y = >
P = @' - cw spiral
T = @ - ccw spiral
U = & - pig's tail
H = &' - pig's tail (inverted)
0 = (
F = )
7 = }

[Suspence]

I tried to read the IPA information on Wikipedia to better understand what is going on. My mind is now officially boggled.

It's seems clear enough to see what is going on in the puzzle, each shape represents a sound that will form into words. How to actually figure that out, I've absolutely no clue.

The only thing I'm wondering is about the different base shapes - perhaps the represent different types of sounds - vowels vs. different types of consonants.

Is there any way, based on the patterns in the images, to make a guess at which images represent vowel sounds?
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[novice]

A lot of symbols occur in pairs, e.g. mirrored. I was thinking maybe they represent voiced and unvoiced consonants, or closed and open vowels.