Discuss Bloody Will here

[Protected (univ)]

[ZutAlors!]

And here's another possible result:

[master]

mswhitekitchen....?

comon.... why and the second who?

[fadeblue]

Are you sure about kitchen? I can only see 'kitche.'

[MatthewV]

*realizes that people read into the flavor text too much*

(But the text is commonly more important in other puzzle, true.)

[Foggy]

If you read the columns in left-to-right order, btw, you can get "ms. white, kitchen, taunting..." but I can't get the last part.

[fadeblue]

Ah, ok, I was still reading the columns right-to-left... (MatthewV did mention Japanese style, right?)

[ZutAlors!]

Also could be Ms White, kitchen, candy...

But I'm stuck there also; the best I can get is sex-eco.

[GH]

"candy"? You can't engineer "candlestick"?

[Foggy]

You can engineer CANDYESTICK (which leaves --, M or TT at the end). L and Y are inverses of each other, and that's too coincidental to assume that it was just there. (And note that is still assuming left to right order)

[Tahnan]

To confirm what Foggy said,

[MatthewV]

Yes it is.

[Tahnan]

'k, then, is anyone surprised that I have opinions? ;-)

I'd said, a number of posts ago, that I didn't think this would be solved without hints. I think that, not only was I right, but I'll make the stronger (and of course utterly unproveable) statement that this wouldn't have been solved without hints. It's an interesting idea; but there are so many ways to read a four-by-sixteen grid of 1's and 0's that "Read down, not across; concatenate; and use Morse code" seems to me to be nowhere near the most obvious thing to try.

Also: the character from the game Clue(do) is Mrs. White, not Ms. White. Call it a technicality, but it was, I think, an unnecessary flaw.

[MatthewV]

I have grown up never calling people with "Mr.", "Mrs.", or "Ms." and hardly know the difference. As far as I know, "Ms." is the right one to use if you are unsure.

I think the solution would have been clearer if the people reporting the minesweeper answer with more distinct columns (as if solved on graph paper). There was also a great sidetracking away from codes that are based on binary. I also thought that Morse was more commonly used in puzzle.

[Tahnan]

[GH]

I like the idea. I think that if the (undelimited) Morse code and top-down-left-to-right jumps had been clued in the flavortext, they would have been completely fair. This reminded me of some of the MIT puzzles.

[Zytheran]

A few thoughts about this puzzle, please don't take this as a flame, it's just some feedback to help make future puzzles more enjoyable to the readers.
Don't get this wrong, the puzzle was quite clever , but considering the number of people on this website, the time taken to solve it shows is was a bit too obscure.

The problem I had with this puzzle, and many of the symbol puzzles on another thread, is that the plaintext gives no clue as to how to decode the cypher. Ignoring the implausible fact the killer would most likely not know his killer, nor the location or weapon of choice, it seems unlikely he would have prepared a code with these details.
As far as I could see there was no reason to decide on minesweeper, or morse code as clues to the murderer. It could easily have been another encypherment method and the story wouldn't have changed. What this puzzle required was that rare flash of random enlightenment. I'm not too sure experience in puzzles nor time working on it would have helped.
IMHO, the puzzle could have been improved by having a longer introduction giving some background into Prof. Plum. This would have given us some vague hints that could offer some sort of link.
Like in cryptic crosswords, the final words can be seen to be related to the clue.
But in this case, and with hindsite, I can see no reason why Prof. Plum would use Minesweeper nor Morse Code to tell the world his killer. Maybe something like mention of a previous life in the navy?
At some point someone sugested the blood marks could indicate the significance information to identify the killer. This would have made more sense. A prepared note with all the potential killers, etc. and then with his dying strength the Prof. marks the note with blood smears. I guess I'm dissapointed it wasn't something like this.

Anyway, thanks for the puzzle, and please don't take this the wrong way, it just seemed a bit too obscure.
(And a hint was needed to get a solution as mentioned by another post.)

[Tony Gardner]

In all fairness to the creators, a link towards minesweeper was included (though I didn't find it either until it was mentioned in one of the posts). The filename of the picture was:

http://www.greylabyrinth.com/puzzles/img/minespuzzle.jpg

It's just a question of remembering to look at the filename (I'm trying to teach myself to do that everytime). I guess the leap from here towards morse is harder to make.

[MatthewV]

I thought the data was enough for people to understand that the first step of solving might be in minesweeper. This happened before the poorly named picture was seen. I'll agree the morse was too much of a leap. I learned to name files like bloody_will.jpg now though :)

[fadeblue]

I'm of the same opinion as GH; if it had been indicated that the data was to be read downwards and that the data was undelimited, Morse code should not have been much of a leap after that.

I do think that the phrasing of the questions was slightly misleading. Up until the puzzle was solved, I was confused because the game of Clue uses the format of "Who? Where? With what?" while the questions indicated we were looking for something else. I had already stopped trying to decipher a weapon from the Morse code.

[Guest]

I did think of Morse code fairly soon, but I expected the letters to be separated by a third characters and looked at the lengths of blocks of ones in the columns (1,2,4,6).

The problem with Morse code is that there are so many starting possibilities that it is hard to decide whether a certain column is a good place to start.