Discuss Bloody Will here

[Mackay]

Link to puzzle

[mathgrant]

Does this have to do with a game of Clue(do)?
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[Lucky Wizard]

Yeah, that bloody Will, always ranting about... huh? Oh.

Despite items ranging from 0 to 6, the difference between consecutive items horizontally and vertically is never more than 2.

http://www.glpics.com/luckywizard/Bloody%20Will.xls

Hmmm... There are five possible values for the horizontal differences. There are two horizontal differences on each line. That's 25 possible lines. Perhaps these encode the alphabet (obviously omitting one letter)? Though that still leaves the issue of the vertical differences, and what forces them to synchronize with the horizontal differences so that it all adds up properly.

[Guest]

Minesweeper? That fits with the numerical data.

[ralphmerridew]

Well, working on that assumption gives:

[ralphmerridew]

Also, the second row is not unique, but all the other bloodstains pointed out mines, so I assumed that the last one did, too.

[Lucky Wizard]

Of course! Minesweeper guarantees vertical differences of 2 or less, and makes the maximum horizontal difference of 3 quite unlikely.

So. We now have a 16-row, 4-column grid of two-state cells. Powers of two. So perhaps hex, binary, or ASCII is involved. Interpreting each row as a hex number returns 35BDEB14BCFEDE48. Not particularly sensible. I then interpreted every two rows as an 8-bit ASCII character. This returned:

5,½,ë,DC4,¼,þ,Þ,H

DC4 is one of those control characters which have nothing to do with human communication; it appears to be used to throttle data flow to slow devices, according to the Wikipedia article on ASCII. This is the biggest reason I doubt this has to do with the answer. It amuses me, however, that this eight-character set includes both the capital thorn and the lowercase thorn.

I considered representing each four rows as a unicode character. However, EB14 is in the private-use area, and therefore does not have an assigned character.

What if we read hex downward, four hex digits to a column? We get 3CFD597EACB4F6A8. Again, not too much sense I can make of it. Eight-bit ASCII again, two characters to a column?

<,ý,Y,~,¬,´,ö,¨ is the result. Can't see much meaning here. Unicode, one character to a column? F6A8 is, again, in the private-use area.

Of course, I could be going down the wrong track, but part of this could inspire someone.

But, thinking about it again: Four columns. Four questions: "Who? Where? Why? Who?" One column for each question, maybe?

[ralphmerridew]

Only three questions. "Who?" is asked twice.

[Lucky Wizard]

I noticed that, but I was thinking maybe there were two murderers, hence the repetition, and that each had a column to himself.

*shrugs*

[Tahnan]

My thought, given a set of numbers from 1 to 16, was to treat them as letters (A = 1, etc.) Sadly, that gives CEKMNKADKLONMNDH, and it's no better if the columns are "1 2 4 8" instead of "8 4 2 1".

[Termital]

My thought, as someone who has never played a game of Cluedo in his life, is that this paper needs be overlapped on some game accessory, like the board, cards, note sheet, or whatever it is the game uses.
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[ralphmerridew]

Well, the clue note sheets have four columns, but have 6 suspects, 6 weapons, and 9 rooms. And the row of four X's is in the wrong spot to be the break between rooms & suspects.

[Tony Gardner]

Maybe there are some clues hidden in the text accompanying the puzzle. Consider:

After a tricky test, foul revenge made some of his former students secretly happy

Does this 'tricky test' refer to the minesweeper transformation already implemented above? If so, we need to add some 'foul revenge' to make some of the students 'secretly happy'.
Hmm maybe this is too much of a stretch.

Still though the body text has to convey some kind of message right?

[Termital]

On a completely different note, it was posted pretty close to April's fools, and it is titled Bloody WILL. so maybe it just is another (damnation - has will's hat puzzle been removed from the archive?)
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[Tony Gardner]

[Termital]

I was just joking about the possibility of this being a joke. This site features an adorable pet troll named Will. Just for fun, on a past april's Fool day the site "featured" a mangled up chestnut of a hat problem featuring Will's worry-free attitude about spelling, grammar, syntax and punctuation. Oh, and a assorted MSPaint illustration of hat-wearing stick figures.

I hesitate to think this has anything to do with the problem at hand, but I felt it it was much too good a coincidence not to attempt an (in-)joke. I apologise for leading you astray.
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[ZutAlors!]

[Tahnan]

...well, this has come to a crashing halt.

[Nixed42]

Based on Termital's suggestion about this being Clue (the game) related, I checked into the rules (not knowing the game myself). What if the numbers relate to die rolls/moves (since the numbers only go as high as 6) and that zero in the bottom right corner is using the secret passage, which, as I understand, doesn't need a die roll to use. Then, from there, we can assume each column represents a who, why and where. How to solve that, I have no idea, but maybe someone more versed in Clue can figure it out. Anyway, that's all I've got for now...I hope it at least spurs some new lines of thinking about the problem since, yes, it has come to a crashing halt.

[Zytheran]

Assuming Minesweeper is one level of coding and fleshing out a previous post into binary we have:

0011
0101
1011
1101
1110
1011
0001
0100
1011
1100
1111
1110
1101
1110
0100
1000

1=mine
0= no mine
(or is it visa-versa?)

I'm pretty sure this is the correct coding as I have a suspicion the original file was called 'minespuzzle.jpg'

A 16x4 grid of binary.
Some ideas:
This could also represent an 8x8 grid. (I do believe MVA is a chess player?? But there are 38 1's used but only 32 pieces in chess )
If there is ASCII coding of an alphabetic name then bear in mind that all the uppercase letters start with 0100 or 0101. Lowercase with 0110 and 0111. I'm assuming it's ASCII encoding for a moment and not EBDIC. So if the above 16x4 data is ASCII it should show repeated patterns with probably 1/3 of 4 bit patterns being the same. But this isn't the case unless the 4 bit patterns are 2 bit patterns that firstly need (serious) re-arranging.
If 4 bit patterns (nibble), only 10 out of the 16 combinations are used. 2 of the nibbles are used 3 times.
If 2 bit pairs then the count is 00=6, 01=7, 10=7 and 11=12. This shows the loading for 11 patterns in the data being quite a bit higher than the expected 8 if the data was random or heavily encrypted.
There also appears to be diagonal banding in the data? Does this indicate some sort of shift up or down of the columns, depending on which column it is?

I've looked at the board of the game and can't see how the moves would correspond to a destination. Bear in mind the game has the killer in a random room/board location each time it is played! The only fixed board/name places are the suspects starting squares. BTW, the people in the game are:Proffessor Plum, Mr. Green, Mrs. Peacock, Miss Scarlett, Mrs. White and Colonel Mustard. I would assume the killer is one of the other five.

[The Cheshire Man]

The puzzle states that Plum's body was found in the Courtyard. That room doesn't exist in the original game...but it does exist in Super Cluedo, known as Clue: Master Detective in the States. Ten suspects, eight weapons, twelve rooms (13 if you count the Cloak Room, the board's universal start space and only non-murder location room). Check out BoardGameGeek for a picture of the board.
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[MatthewV]

Knowledge of the game of clue is not required for this puzzle.

[Guest]

mEEP

[Protected@univ]

Sorry, was just checking if this thing was working. My university for some reason blocks forum posting 4 out of 5 days.

Here is a bunch of statistics which may or may not help.

The numbers between (parenthesis) are the original numbers in the bloody will. The others are the difference between the two original numbers that are either above and below them, or on the sides. Outside the frame there are also totals for the lines and columns, and the overal total of the values (see below for a count of the amount of numbers). On the right hand side you can also see the relationship between the three numbers in the row (greater, smaller or equal).

The +++ are the spots of blood.

[deneb79]

I have a tottaly different idea.

I don't see how this numerical board minesweeper translation can lead to the solution of the problem.
In the beggining of the story, there is a "tricky test" mentioned and some of the student seem to be quite unhappy from their results. Is it possible that these could be the marks of the test and the bloddy spots could reveal some information about the possible murderers?
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Deneb a.k.a. Stratos

Knowledge Is Power

[Foggy]

I can see how.

It's possible that the odd phrasing in the flavortext do in fact clue an overall set of 16 four letter words (e.g., Bloody=Rare down to "cry out"=Yell.) But it'd be difficult to tell exactly how to figure out the actual clues.

Place the 16 four-letter words in the grid, and take the letters marked by X. Ending with COPS and YELL gives OY as the end, but I can't think of a four-letter word for reporters.

[fadeblue]

reporters = cubs? But then that would leave "...cu boy," and I can't imagine how to complete that "cu" part.

[Arkive]

I went to all of the trouble of coming to all of Zytheran's conclusions, only to realize he had already posted it , guess I should read the whole thread first from now on. So I deleted my post and will just expand a little on what he said. I think the wording of the question is very important. "Who, where, why, and most importantly, who." The minesweeaper grid, if broken down into 4x4 matrices (or 4 lines of binary) is:

"Who"
0011
0101
1011
1101

"Where"
1110
1011
0001
0100

"Why"
1011
1100
1111
1110

"Who"
1101
1110
0100
1000

I believe the first and last sections form together to either make a longer first name, or perhaps first/last, or two names (i.e. COL Mustard), or maybe even two individuals.

[Tahnan]

In contrast, I believe this puzzle won't be solved without hints. :-)

[MatthewV]

If you listen, this puzzle can be solved without hints.

[yuethomas]

"Listen"? Maybe the HEX numbers can be transformed into notes - A,B,C,D,E,F? But we're missing G. Hmm...
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Tom Yue

[esme]

The text below the crumpled paper seems to have 63 characters.

[Guest]

1) Remember the facts. Although the solutions to these sorts of problems are not strictly realistic, they should have some plausible explanation. As such, it seems unlikely that Plum would be carrying a slip of paper that served no purpose other than to cryptically record who was going to kill him, why, etc. (Nor does it seem likely that Plum's killers dropped such a piece of paper at the scene.) What seems likely at the moment is that Plum was carrying the paper for some other purpose, was attacked, and was able to make marks that implicated the killers.

In other words, rather than interpretting the entire paper as an encoded answer to the problem, we should probably view the blood spots as highlighting aspects of a paper that was created for some other purpose.


2) Everyone not in Plum's class was shocked by the murder; so, the murder was presumably done by someone in his class. But the text is ambiguous: was everyone who was not currently in Plum's class shocked, or only those who had never been in Plum's class? Note that it was FORMER students who were secretly happy about "foul revenge."

3) Others have already noted the odd wording of the text. It could be that there are clues encoded in the text; but it might also be that the text is trying to force us to think along the wrong lines by implying things that aren't true.

The test needn't have been a final exam or anything of the sort. The text does not even say the test was administered by Plum. Could it have been a lie detector test? A DNA test? A hearing or vision test? Etc.

The "foul revenge" hinted at is not necessarily the murder of Plum. Nor is it stated that those who were made happy by the revenge were those who accomplished it.


4) "[E]vidence suggested that the murder was done elsewhere. But no clue beyond the scrap of paper lying crumpled at his side was to be found."

Any evidence that the murder was done elsewhere would in itself be a clue. Since the only clue was the paper, the paper must somehow indicate that the murder was done elsewhere.

5) Plum died in a courtyard. Could this be literally the yard of a courthouse? Not sure where to go with that yet...

[Tahnan]

I think I stand by post #28. :-)

[MatthewV]

The hints have been cryptic, a code that seems to have gone out of style.

[Tahnan]

[MatthewV]

When a puzzle is down to the wire, I fear I cannot say "oh try this!"

hint: read like a Janpanese person

hint: Read a string of characters downwards There should be four strings and they run together to form one big string

[huh]

"Listen", "wire", and "code that's gone out of style" all clearly suggest morse code, don't they?

[Guest]

I'd believe Morse code. Also, minesweeper sort of suggests it. It looks like -=blank and .=X, so now all we need to do is translate the morse cose. Any volunteers?

[Guest]

If it's morse, then there's something that's missing: The separation between characters. When doing morse, just like you have the short and long beeps, there are also short and long breaks - short to divide each beep in a character, long to divide each character. There are a number of different ways to decode this in its current state, ie, with all the breaks having the same length...