13 Archetypes: Visionary - Wrong Answers Only!
RTLQuietuS
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I'm trying to make a blog post, that covers this entire series.
I would love to know techniques that people tried, that led no where, or worse(better!) led somewhere that seemed promising, but wasn't.
So please, reply with how you attempted to solve Visionary, Wrong answers only.
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I completely failed to solve the lower right corner, until after I had completed the main puzzle. I had to take a leap of faith on the method, and several that I tried first failed.
Should I have solved the lower right, it would have been extremely straight forward for me.
The only real "issue" with Visionary was the use of such an esoteric encoding/decoding algorithm, and with no indication in the initial challenge what that algorithm might be if you didn't already know about it.
I think this: https://community.ingress.com/en/discussion/comment/56288/#Comment_56288 adequately sums up the confusion I had with this (even though the comment isn't mine).
I didn't solve the lower right until a long time after solving the actual puzzle. If I had done so, I'm not sure how much it would have helped, although by the time I decoded it I understood what it meant. I had Googled an online calculator to give the results I wanted without knowing the precise name I was looking for (because I used enough computer-sciencey terms to define what I wanted).
I vaguely remembered something about the difference between words being represented as a delta, or "distance", from my CS background. I didn't solve either the bottom-right hint, or know the name of the algorithm, so I figured out the rules for generating suitable numbers to give the suffix.
Where I went wrong was in using the transcription that another user had helpfully posted. Unfortunately, they'd mistyped one word, producing two wrong distances and making the keyword unrecognizable. I floundered around there until enough hints had turned up that I did see the name of the algorithm -- which meant I could now calculate the distances much more quickly and reliably, and still get the wrong answer.
Publishing the puzzle as a PDF (like with Explorer, or parts of Alchemist) would have avoided all that. People post pictures of text, instead of the actual text, far too often :p
This was also the first appearance of a format "hint" that's only relevant for a later puzzle.
Super stupid mistake: I thought about levenshtein distance, but made some mistake in copy-and-paste, and what's worse, I initially used an online tool where (space), \n and \t are calculated into the distance. Therefore, when I get a series of numbers, it was totally messed up and I cannot link it to any possible format of the code.
BTW I still have no idea how the right corner helps even if I got the media. Days later I came back to the post and only with other agents' post can I realize how it serves as a hint.
So often when something weird was going on, it was my tools, not my approach.
I have it the other way around.. I thought that the passcode is the lower right (I02NMAEE60GIMHE) but jumbled and need to be rearranged. Put the strings into the ingress regex keyword finder and find 'enigma" as possible keyword.. Then I use an old method where you make a 3x5 or 5x3 grid then subtitutes some of the columns or rows. somehow, at that time, i am able to rearrange the columns and row and it become like this.
you can read it from lower right and become M0HIE0ENIGMAE26. Well, of course, it is wrong since it doesn't contain the 13AR suffix. But, at that time, I have only decoded 1 challenge (stuck on Dreamer at that time) and haven't see the pattern ( <6 alphanumeric><keyword>13AR ). It really shocked me when the "Wrong Passcode" showed.
To be honest, I forgot how i am able to arrange the strings into that picture above.. well, maybe I dived too deep into the rabbit hole in Visionary.