There's always another secret [Potential IFComp 2024 Spoilers]

Competitions IFComp
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Hello players and reviewers!

IFComp is underway, and the competition is fierce. However, the competition is not just between the authors, designers, and programmers this time. There is an additional puzzle somewhere in the comp, waiting to be found.

This brooch is a prize for the first player, reviewer, or judge to solve the puzzle within the puzzles, with similar prizes for anyone else who contributes to an intermediate step before the final solution.

So good luck, and we hope you all enjoy this challenge! We eagerly await your success.

brooch
brooch2148Ă—1444 436 KB

[This mysterious individual inquired privately and was given permission to post anonymously and MyStErIoUsLy under this account - Mods]

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Gawd I love this community.

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If it has anything to do with The Name of the Rose… :sob:

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Well, so much for my plans of doing anything else in between playing IFComp games this weekend.

This is awesome.

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Does the solution have anything to do with that grey/black cloth? You know, that which is under the rose ?

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Hey! the cloth has also a rose pattern! like the brooch(?)

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Doing a quick google search, the brooch looks similar to Cerrito Rose brooches.

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Maybe it’s a nudge to The RoseBush website?

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:thinking:
That is a pretty sensible guess!

Recent articles list:

A game in the ZIL machine? or related to Cento?

@anon2398 are we even on the right path :joy:
can we use >HELP? :joy:

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Is the puzzle hidden in the actual IFComp website or is it in one of the games somewhere? I’m inclined to think the former, maybe look at the source code for the IFComp website and go from there, but I dunno, I might be barking up the wrong tree…

Edit: The Rosebush mag might be connected too. I’m not really sure. I assumed it was something on the IFComp website because that’s what “There is an additional puzzle somewhere in the comp, waiting to be found” implies to me.

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Not a bad idea! This inspired me to look at the source code of the entries page, and there’s a weird gap just above the list of entries, consisting of 500 lines of whitespace in an interesting pattern. (You can see it with Ctrl-A or “Select all.”) Might or might not be related, but the entry lists from previous years don’t have it.

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500…

500 is used as a limit of words in the Neo-Twiny Jam, which is mentioned in an article in the Rosebush… and we’re back to that point :joy:
(big /jk I have 0 idea)

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Interpreting the whitespace as Morse Code, we get

LF1O2EJKGIF1KFCCE01K2GJRCJEMNGRZKI1OYCGIS

according to ChatGPT (because I wasn’t going to decode it myself).

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I wouldn’t trust ChatGPT on Morse code, since it tends to be unreliable on anything smaller than a word. (Ask it how many R’s are in “strawberry”, for example.)

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fair enough. It probably says “You are on the right track, keep going.”

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Is the whitespace both tabs and spaces…?

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Looks to me like it’s all spaces. It could be some sort of binary encoding (space = 0 and linebreak = 1 or vice versa), but the regularity of the triangle pattern makes me suspect we should look at a higher level. Assuming it’s relevant and has any meaning at all, which is far from certain.

Also, spaces always appear in groups of four.

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There’s a programming language called whitespace that just uses tabs and spaces; maybe it runs in that?

Is the code in part of a game or in the website itself? Because only a very few people have access to the IFComp website itself (basically one person, who might have helped others on request).

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Could the “2398” in the username be relevant? :thinking:

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was born March 2nd 1998 or Feb 3rd 1998?