Cow Facts! Solution

The @CowFacts bot starts out by sending you some numbered cow images with simple facts. Each person who signs up will receive the exact same images in a random order. It just continually sends images.

Stomachs with four parts! whaaaat 1/8 Every minute, I chew 50 times 2/8 Newborn calvesweigh 60-100 lbs 3/8 We can drivk 40 liters of water per day 4/8 Grazing is my favorite pastime 5/8 Only takes 20 minutes to milk me 6/8 Like to socialize? I Love It! 7/8 Walk Down the stairs? i can't do that 8/8

Each image has a single capital letter. Extracting the letters and ordering by the image number gives the phrase SEND GOLD.

Sending "GOLD" (or "SEND GOLD") to the @CowFacts bot gives you an invite code to refer your friends to your CowFacts Gold team. Sharing the invite code with others (and having them send that code to @CowFacts) adds them to your team. Once you have enough team members (at least 3), you can send GO to activate CowFacts Gold.

The CowFacts bot then starts sending facts to your team. Every 5-10 seconds a team member receives a fact like:

  • Cow Fact #19:        A cows body temperature is 101.5°F.        Sent: 5:18:28 PM UTC
  • Cow Fact #18:        Cows are red-green colorblind.        Sent: 5:18:34 PM UTC
  • Cow Fact #9:        While grazing, a cow eats an average of twenty-five to thirty pounds of grass in a day.        Sent: 5:18:39 PM UTC

Teams will eventually realize that they are seeing the same fact with different numbers, and the same number with different facts. Every once in a while the bot will send a message letting them know that they can send PAUSE to temporarily stop CowFacts as well as telling you that facts should be shared with others and all grouped together.

Taking any subset of the facts from all the team members and ordering them according to the timestamp, and then indexing into the fact (ignoring spaces and punctuation) by the fact number will give the phrase COW MEMES PLZ.

The teams should then realize they need to send a Cow Meme to the CowFacts bot. CowFacts will analyze the meme (this part is actually done manually by a staff member) and if they determine it's a valid cow meme, it will respond with the final answer STAHP PLZ!

Solution

STAHPPLZ

Partial Answers

SUBSCRIBE: Send that to @Cowfacts

UNSUBSCRIBE: Send that to @Cowfacts

PAUSE: Send that to @Cowfacts

RESUME: Send that to @Cowfacts

SENDGOLD: You should send that to @CowFacts

GOLD: You should send that to @CowFacts

COWMEMESPLZ: Send that to @Cowfacts

Hinting

Lots of the facts have numbers (e.g. 36lbs, 104.4 degrees). The numbers in the facts are not important, that's just a side effect of how facts work.

GC Notes

Cow Facts! is a blatant re-theme of 2018's Camp Facts!. It was pulled in as an extra puzzle that would be relatively easy to make virtual and wouldn't require a bunch of playtesting. Camp Facts! was built using NodeJS and interaction with Teams was done with Text Messages (via Twilio). Cow Facts! was re-written in C# in order to be able to make it easier to integrate into the Teams Bot SDKs which were used for interaction with Teams instead.

Camp Facts!! expected teams to send a cat meme as the final answer, whereas Cow Facts! expected a cow meme (obviously). One unexpected hiccup was that the automated image recognition we were using (a Google images API) was really good at detecting cat memes (even custom ones), but not nearly as good at detecting cow memes. We had to hack on a manual approval component towards the end that posted the uploaded meme to a Team's channel and allowed staff to approve or deny the image on the fly. Mechanical Turks work great when they need to!