Hints: Ten Years Later
Getting started:
The puzzle mentions Overtime from the 2018 Galactic Puzzle Hunt which consists of snippets of puzzles from the 2017 Galactic Puzzle Hunt. Given that the title of this puzzle is “10 Years Later,” which hunt should you be looking for and how will you access it?
Hints for subpuzzles:
- Alphabet Soup: You don’t need to worry about how the puzzle was solved in 2009.
- Voter Base: If you look into the source code, there is one piece of information we used that is time-sensitive.
- High Expectations: It’s ten years later, and In the Heights isn’t so new anymore. What is?
- Rage Comics: The correct answer is not the letter “O” - read the full solution page more carefully. You may also find the “Entire Play in one page” link helpful.
- Misplaced Radicals: Try identifying which word was replaced by a radical; you should be able to search for the rest of the quote.
- Primal Force: Factoring big numbers that are products of two primes was part of a famous cryptographic challenge. More help: You should try factordb.com.
- Stationary: These are stations on the Stockholm Metro system. Most of them are on the blue line.
- Meta: You generally won’t need to understand this solution at all (the meta mechanism doesn’t change any single letter answers that you get from the 2019 subpuzzles), but there’s a very subtle, but optional, hint in italics.