cjb / codex-blackboard

Meteor app for coordinating solving for our MIT Mystery Hunt team
GNU Affero General Public License v3.0
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Bot, decode this string #345

Open Torgen opened 5 years ago

Torgen commented 5 years ago

There are some common encoding patterns (letter weaves, morse without spaces, etc.) that we see in puzzles often but that there aren't efficient extractors for because they're used infrequently in the rest of the world. (Letter weaves can be solved by anagramming, except they tend to be long and anagramming throws away the ordering information that could make them tractable.) We should be able to say, e.g., "Bot, unweave ", perhaps with enumerations or at least a target number of threads, and have it tell us the words that could be woven to get that string. Another example might be morse code without letter or word breaks. Because Meteor's fibers are coroutines, not true threads, this may require us to implement them with manual yields, or as external processes we shell out to.