Ironic Solution

How It Works

The lengths of the tracks as listed in the booklet were ASCII values that spelled "Apply Ternary". This was the crux of the puzzle—all teams needed to do was figure out how to apply ternary. Oftentimes when applied to puzzles, ternary uses three digits of three bits, which allows exactly the right range to spell out each digit numerically. There were obviously three stories in the booklet, which gave one set of three. The other set of three was hinted at in the track numbers—the track numbers in the booklet, converted to letters, spelled out "Yes No Missing". The stories ended up being digits, and "Yes No Missing" formed the three possible values for each digit.

The common thread between the songs was that each had one or more questions that have a yes or no answer, and teams with passing familiarity with any of these songs hopefully noticed that the stories were stilted such that they seemed to frequently use phrases that were recognizable as being from the songs. What teams needed to do was to determine the right yes/no question in each song, and then determine whether or not that question was answered in each story. If so, they needed to figure out whether the answer was "yes" or "no". If not, that question counted as missing.

Treating "yes" as a 0, "no" as a 1, and "missing" as a 2 (in the order given on the track listing), and story one as the most significant bit would hield a series of ternary numbers. For example, "yes, no, no" converts to 011, or 4, which yields a "D". Doing this for each track yielded the phrase "Ironic Artist".

Solution

The artist that sang Ironic is Alanis Morissette ("Morissette" was also accepted).

Design Notes

One of the complaints that we.ve had for a long time with many CD puzzles that are used in Games is the reliance on identification of the songs. Unlike other trivia or lookups, which are easy to do via mobile Internet or by calling a friend, if a team doesn't recognize a song, it.s extremely difficult to find a way to fill in the blank. Because of this, we tend to try and make CD puzzles self-contained, such that no external data is necessary, something that was done in three different ways for the CD puzzles encountered this year.

The inspiration for this puzzle was actually Andy Rich, who tends to have a very visceral and vocal reaction to particular songs. Every time the song Ironic is played around him, he can't resist yelling out "No, that.s not ironic," though usually with a few more expletives. That lead to trying to see how many songs actually had yes or no questions, and things developed from there.

Originally, the phrase in the track numbers was "Yes No Unknown", but "Unknown" tested poorly because it suggested to some testers that the question needed to be ambiguously answered rather than just missing. Additionally, in what in retrospect would have been extremely evil (as the playtesters correctly pointed out), it used to be that all of the yes/no questions in any song were fair game rather than just choosing a single one and sticking with it.

As a final touch, making the answer be something staring you in the face on the first track seemed suitably ironic, in that not actually ironic way inspired by the song.

GC Notes

During the actual Game, because we were running behind and needed to try and push teams up toward Whatcom Falls, we ended up half-cutting this puzzle, allowing teams to work on it until they reached the staging point and then giving them the specific location and leaving the puzzle for them to solve during later downtimes if they wished.

The key word here, as intended, was "downtimes", and though we hammered on this point over and over, we ended up regretting not telling teams that they should not look at it again until after the Game was over. There were a number of teams that just would not put it down, even after repeated instructions, to the detriment of their times and to the detriment of our ability to make sure they got to certain locations in time. At one point, a team called in working on this puzzle rather than another CD puzzle they'd been given nearly a full day later, and it wasn't until five minutes into the call that we understood why their data didn't make any sense whatsoever.