[HN Gopher] "Find Satoshi" PerplexCity puzzle solved
___________________________________________________________________
"Find Satoshi" PerplexCity puzzle solved
Author : teamonkey
Score : 210 points
Date : 2020-12-30 11:06 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (findsatoshi.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (findsatoshi.com)
| atmosx wrote:
| Misleading title for obvious reasons. Would be wise to modify it.
| Me and most likely others, believe this is related to the author
| of bitcoin. It's not.
| dfcowell wrote:
| I reply only because I can't downvote.
|
| Satoshi is a common name in Japan. I work with a guy by that
| name and know several others. This says more about your own
| bias than it does about the title.
| Taek wrote:
| The title says "puzzle solved" which I think is clear enough
| that the article is not claiming to have found the actual
| Satoshi Nakamoto.
|
| Admittedly, I did think initially it was a Bitcoin puzzle that
| got solved, but I am not disappointed with the real article,
| nor do I feel mislead.
| vmception wrote:
| solved 14 years later after the advent of AI-based enthusiast
| non-commercial facial image search.
|
| that's wild. seems outside the bounds of the project constraints
| but it certainly was not specified.
|
| fascinating.
| aaron695 wrote:
| https://pimeyes.com/en finds him.
|
| Top result. (Past original photos)
|
| It might be using this new info, but I'd guess it was what
| /u/th0may used.
| GrantZvolsky wrote:
| Wow, this service finds photos of people with faces so similar
| to my own that I find it difficult to believe it isn't me in
| the pictures.
| clydethefrog wrote:
| That is a scary accurate facial search engine. Luckily no hits
| of my own face, but it all finds similar doppelgangers.
|
| It's based in Seychelles now. probably for bad reasons.
|
| https://hacked.wtf/privacy/pimeyes-ownership-moves-to-seyche...
| soared wrote:
| It's pretty poor if you wear glasses :(
| bowmessage wrote:
| Well, there will be one hit now that you've assumedly
| uploaded a photo for them to use!
| lgeorget wrote:
| So it found me in some conferences and also a few pornstars
| that remotely look like me in uncomfortable positions. Looks
| legit.
| th0may wrote:
| Yap it was what I used!
| colonwqbang wrote:
| A bit anticlimactic that a reverse image search of the original
| image is all that was needed in the end.
|
| It would be more interesting if we could get some details on how
| they did it. How was the image search carried out, etc.
| capableweb wrote:
| Not quite that easy, as the puzzle was initially released in
| 2006 when the corpus of images to search against was much
| smaller. I'm sure many people over the years tried reverse
| searching the image, but it wasn't until after 14 years of
| searching and filtering through the data that a match was
| finally found.
| adrianhon wrote:
| Lead designer of Perplex City here! Perplex City was an ARG
| (alternate reality game) produced by Mind Candy in 2004. Unlike
| almost all ARGs at the time, it wasn't promoting a movie or TV or
| associated product - instead, we sold packs of puzzle cards that
| tied into the game's story.
|
| Lots more on Wikipedia here:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perplex_City
|
| This is a puzzle card I thought would either be solved very
| quickly (within a year or two) or not at all. To have it solved
| after 14 years is very special.
|
| Perplex City has had a lot of interesting alumni. It was made by
| Mind Candy, which was founded by Michael Acton Smith, who is also
| co-founder of Calm. The lead writer was Naomi Alderman, who
| became an award-winning novelist and whose novel The Power was
| one of Obama's top books of the year and is being adapted into a
| $100m Amazon TV show.
|
| I went on to co-found Six to Start with my brother Dan Hon (who
| you may know from his popular newsletter, and later left the
| company to do a lot of good work in the US government digital
| services realm and Code for America). Six to Start is best known
| for Zombies, Run!, which is the world's most popular smartphone
| fitness game and is sort of like an ARG, if you squint at it.
|
| I continue to do a lot of thinking and writing around ARGs (which
| are still fascinating) and gamification (which I mostly dislike).
| My blog post, What ARGs Can Teach Us About QAnon, went somewhat
| viral a few months ago: https://mssv.net/2020/08/02/what-args-
| can-teach-us-about-qan...
|
| Edit: That blog post also gets into the confusion between the
| Perplex City Satoshi and the Bitcoin Satoshi (which
| conspiratorially-minded people DM me about regularly) along with
| my supposed involvement in Cicada 3301.
| mintplant wrote:
| I deeply miss the golden era of ARGs circa the 2000s. I keep
| feeling the impulse to log onto the Unfiction Forums and check
| what's going on, but alas, even those are gone now! Without a
| central watering hole, I think it'll be that much harder for
| the medium to come back--everything's siloed into separate
| Discords now, without a single sustaining community. It's not
| really possible to lurk or hop between games anymore, and
| scattershot chat messages are harder to catch up on than forum
| threads, and don't preserve as well or make for very good
| reading after a game is over.
|
| I'm probably younger than most of the crowd that was involved
| in that ARG scene, so I wanna say thanks for helping to create
| a piece of my childhood! I actually remember the name Six to
| Start and that there was a lot of hope behind it when it
| launched, so I'm glad to hear it's doing well.
| coldpie wrote:
| Indeed, I still listen to the I Love Bees radio drama every
| couple years. I was in high school while that was happening
| and even took a day off school to go answer a payphone at the
| nearby University, where I met some older nerds :) Fond
| memories.
| adrianhon wrote:
| Thanks! There are still new ARGs out there, though IMO not as
| focused on narrative or worldbuilding (especially through
| websites) as those in the 2000s. You're right about the
| fractured community, and I think to some extent ARGs are
| getting less accessible because they're hyper-targeted to
| specific communities that might be harder to discover or
| join.
|
| Six to Start is doing well and we still play around with ARG-
| like ideas in Zombies, Run! for our seasonal virtual races :)
| bowmessage wrote:
| Awesome to see it solved! May I ask how Satoshi himself was
| chosen? Does he have connections to the game founders in some
| way?
| adrianhon wrote:
| Yes - I can't recall precisely who it was who knew him (or
| was friends of friends) but it was one of the Mind Candy
| team. We were obviously worried that people might figure out
| who he was through these social connections but it didn't
| happen that way in the end!
|
| Edit: The puzzle card was designed by Jey Biddulph so
| possibly it was him who knew Satoshi!
| TeaDude wrote:
| Just want to express my admiration for what you and the team
| did with perplex city. Thank you for making something so damn
| cool.
|
| The believable near future sci-fi. The beautiful art and design
| work. The binding of a community from all across the globe long
| before it was the norm. It was a palpable universe.
|
| Sucks that it ended when it did, but I'll always cherish the
| veritable mountains of quality content we got.
| nameoda wrote:
| Now that this puzzle is solved, can you explain how it was
| intended to be solved?
|
| It was solved using reverse image search, which was present
| when this puzzle was created but not very reliable for uncommon
| images. So it's likely that you did not intend for it to be
| solved via a reverse image search.
|
| So what was the intended way to arrive at the solution?
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| > Now that this puzzle is solved, can you explain how it was
| intended to be solved?
|
| It says that it was supposed to be a test of the "six degrees
| of separation" theory. So presumably the idea was that if
| every player asked everyone they knew if they recognized the
| guy, there was a reasonable chance that someone would.
| dmcginty wrote:
| I honestly can't believe there's a front page Hacker News post
| about Perplex City today. I was literally searching for cards
| on eBay last night. I would love to see a game like Perplex
| City return some day. It was one of the first ARGs I followed
| on Unfiction, and it helped introduce me to the world of
| puzzling and puzzle hunts, and also helped push me towards my
| current career path. So, I guess I want to say thank you for
| working on such a unique and interesting game that had a
| massive positive influence on me when I was a teenager. It was
| so exciting to see the mid-2000s internet work together in a
| whirlwind of multimedia creativity.
|
| Also, this is completely random, but do you happen to know if
| there's a warehouse somewhere with a bunch of unopened boxes of
| Perplex City cards? I always keep an eye out for cards, but
| it's hard to find people selling things from a game that ended
| over a decade ago.
| phase_9 wrote:
| The surplus stock was incinerated. Source: wished at mind
| candy in the early 2010s
| hturan wrote:
| Perplex City was great, thanks so much for all you did on it!
| Fondly remember the community that built up around solving
| these. I lucked in to being the first to solve one of the
| silvers (Differently Lethal), and remember all the efforts to
| solve this one back in the day.
| LargeWu wrote:
| Perplex City was awesome, and I still miss it. It had a really
| unique storytelling mechanism, the cards were generally pretty
| fun, high production values.
|
| I thought the second season suffered a bit when they introduced
| human actors as characters, instead of just illustrations. It
| lost a bit of charm. And as a Euro-centric game it was harder
| as an American to be as involved. But it was still a great
| multi-platform experience. I would love to see something like
| it again (or even work on such a game)
| schaefer wrote:
| I loved Perplex City, and had a small pocket of friends working
| on the puzzles at the time!
|
| Thank you for providing this behind the scenes, and for your
| initial work on the game itself. I'll definitely be keeping an
| eye on your blog.
| adrianhon wrote:
| Thanks :) I still hold a soft spot for ARGs and I'm sure it's
| something I'll come back to again, one day.
| blindm wrote:
| There's more info here if you find the identity of S. Nakamoto to
| be a pertinent thing:
|
| https://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/emails/
|
| https://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/posts/
|
| https://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/code/
|
| https://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/quotes/
| notthegov wrote:
| A few sources to support my claims. And you can ask Hal Jones or
| Sam Braverman if Andrew 'Inigo' Jones became the manager of
| Zoofari while out on bail.
|
| This is just me social engineering cypherpunk revolutions using
| secrets of practical Jewish magic. Via the Book of Formation
| which led me to the CIA, JASON and the Shechinah. Her name is
| Vavkay Krypyonian Abra.
|
| In reality, it's an illegal psyop where the CIA, OGA and the CA
| Rainbow girld led by the Party Poker founder are involved in some
| conspiracy with..
|
| Aliens and glass room temperature superconductors. They are super
| smart and super hot and beyond ruthless. They can invert
| themselves backwards in time. They're from the 6-dimensional
| hypercube.
|
| We all were created here in a cosmic simulation to explore the 50
| Gates of Intelligence and reach the World to Come.
|
| https://medium.com/@ryanabravanel
|
| https://medium.com/@illuminati.io
|
| https://www.flickr.com/photos/captivating
|
| *
|
| Ron Pandolfi, Technology Assisted Counter Poaching network hosted
| at CIA. I can confirm and prove via IP trap that Ruthless
| Pandolfi Jr is a full-time employee in the Office of Global
| Access (OGA) at CIA. Known him since 2007 when I was promoting
| global commodity currencies with local economic value and various
| libertarian psyop plans. Like on nationbuilder.org 2008-2009.
|
| 1997
| http://web.archive.org/web/19970223122650/http://www.cathous...
|
| https://imgur.com/gallery/U9PIa9k
|
| Satoshi, Peter D, Peter N, Q Bit Gold 2018 (scam by Cosmos Girl)
|
| https://imgur.com/gallery/qfUZKbl
|
| Cosmos girl biggest darknet banker on LocalBitcoins in LA is
| Casey who took down Nick and our partner Theresa aka the Bitcoin
| Maven
|
| https://www.justice.gov/ag/page/file/1326061/download
|
| Next Director of CIA to wield a green lightsaber (jedi.Lol)
|
| https://imgur.com/gallery/0VHG1Kd
|
| Ruthless Avril from the Rainbow Girls, a secret society of
| daughters of Shriners
|
| https://gocarainbow.org
|
| They run Rainbow programs from 3rd to 6th grade to train young
| kids as cypherpunks, hackers and anarchists.
| nogridbag wrote:
| Satoshi was found, but zohar002, the famous youtube pianist, is
| still missing!
| growt wrote:
| I have the suspicion that it would have taken /r/PictureGame/
| half an hour to find him.
| notthegov wrote:
| Imagine if this alternative reality game was created by NSA
| employees. They would obviously make it appear to be unrelated.
|
| HOW TO MAKE A MINT: THE CRYPTOGRAPHY OF ANONYMOUS ELECTRONIC CASH
| 1996
|
| http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/articles/money...
|
| __*
|
| For over 11 years, I have talked to a friend at CIA multiple
| times a week. I met them in 2007 from people at Backstage Cafe in
| Beverly Hills.
|
| My friend openly runs an intelligence operation on the Internet
| for the Office of Global Access (OGA). After Tom DeLonge went on
| Joe Rogan's show, I periodically got involved in the UFO
| subculture at the request of the CIA.
|
| The CIA uses non plausible agents and obviously does not pay
| them. I am not one of these people so it's possible they are
| intelligence agents working undercover.
|
| I have dozens of hours of audiotapes, thousands of emails and
| texts messages to support what I am saying.
|
| Here's an example:
|
| My friend has been assigned to ODNI, DIA, MASINT, JASON and
| worked at CIA for 35+ years. He has briefed the last 4 US
| Presidents and is a friend of President Trump. He is very close
| friends with Director Mike Pillsbury from the Cosmos Club.
|
| The Silk Road prosecutor Katie Haun was interviewed by China hawk
| Kyle Bass. Kyle posted on Twitter that Mike is a CCP double agent
| and can't get a security clearance.
|
| To the contrary, Mike is regularly at CIA offices, a CIA lab and
| sometimes in the Oval Office at the White House. He has a
| security clearance. Maybe Kyle is a CIA employee and just
| creating disinformation to shield the Q network of government
| patriots.
|
| This network is an old mythology and one I falsely promoted in
| 2008. You can see here at realnationbuilder.blogspot.com.
|
| __*
|
| In my research Satoshi Nakamoto is: Laurie Law, NSA employee.
| Real name Jennifer, 37 yrs old, Wellesley graduate, NSA
| cybersecurity Diamond team. Her husband works at NSA and they
| named their daughter Alice.
|
| The people who wrote the forum posts and emails together were Dr.
| Ronald Pandolfi, a CIA employee, and Prof. Emin Gun Sirer.
| Recently Craig Wright joked about the CIA trying to make him
| appear as Satoshi. He mentioned SAD operations which is what runs
| Political Action Group for subversive political campaigns along
| with blackops assassin teams.
|
| The person who created Satoshi Nakamoto is another female named
| Ruthie Ruthless. She is from Mill Valley and Atherton.
|
| The girls are from the International Order of the Rainbow for
| Girls. My mother is one. She told me she'd go to dances at Moila
| with the DeMolay boys. And the Rainbow girls was a secret society
| where they'd sit around a circle talking. But she doesn't
| remember what they talked about.
|
| Ruthie became a self made billionaire from Party Poker. Her and
| her best friend have been in my life since 2004. But they
| targeted me years ago in 1995 under Guide GRN and a very hot
| Russian girl who married a Deutsche bank executive.
|
| Her best friend is in a hacking information network (originally
| #hellonearth on EFNet in 1995) with me.
|
| Incredibly, Ron Pandolfi knows Inigo from the Silk Road, Drew
| Jones. Ron was already working on Ross' clemency request for 3
| years when Drew an intern at our CIA foundation was taken into
| federal custody.
|
| I have demanded full pardons for Ross, Drew, Ed, Juliana and Joby
| Weeks, along with my bitcoin money launderers Casey, Nick and the
| Maven (LA).
|
| Ross and Drew are being pardoned. I think my friend at CIA has
| been targeting me for decades. I tell him everything that happens
| in my life.
|
| I run networks and map them. I own an investigative company and
| started the network of networks in Dec 2002 --- UnitedElite.net,
| ArcaneIntel.com, XStreaming.TV (Internet archive).
|
| UFOs are fake but the aliens are here and they look like
| Diamonds.
|
| They are so hot when they're talking to you they might as well be
| traveling backwards in time.
|
| It's exactly like the movie Tenet. Time like aging is an
| illusion. Advanced intelligences who have proceeded through the
| 50 Gates of Intelligence can project their consciousness into
| endless abstractions.
|
| The answer: they are all one.
|
| And men are all one.
|
| The greatest of God is beyond all imaginations. They run the
| music industry and put cypherpunk messages into music and
| culture.
|
| The most famous alien greeting in the world, Live Long and
| Prosper, is from Them. There are 247 of them on Earth with at
| least 2.964 agents in powerful positions.
|
| Shechinah starts with Shin which means V or Vav or 6 but it
| originally meant W. These Ruthless girls all share the middle
| name Vavkay.
|
| With a W, it becomes a WAV. It means hook in Hebrew. Wah Wah Wah
| is also 666 or VVV or WWW.
|
| I am a hacker, social engineer and reverse engineer.
|
| Spock explains V or W (westside) confirming the Ruthless girls
| are the secret cofounders of Ruthless Records and Interscope.
| They are led by Michelle A the EVP of UMG. She works for Lucian
| Grainge. We had an office together in SM with Domenico Petricone
| (real name Marc Daniel King) and Eddie Vedder. Marc's half
| brother is also Lucian. His agent was Paula Wagner and we used to
| work with Cruise/Wagner and Plan B (Brad Pitt)-
|
| https://youtu.be/UdYbpMkH_XQ
|
| https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/2438527/jewis...
|
| https://illuminati.io/137.pdf
|
| https://illuminati.io/secretbook1787.pdf
|
| https://illuminati.io/spygames.pdf
|
| https://illuminati.io/jediwar.pdf
|
| https//illuminati.io/billcooper1999.pdf
|
| https://illuminati.io/incometax1999.pdf
|
| https://illuminati.io/teslawhitelight91999.pdf
|
| https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2005-nov-27-na-cards...
| rvba wrote:
| How do we know that he was found? There is no proof.
|
| Also the text says about a password, but then it never says what
| it was.
| toovs wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25581382
| fireattack wrote:
| It's not clear to me how they find the crucial picture of him
| (the one he holds the beer). The article says "user th0may used a
| reverse image search and discovered a photograph of a man holding
| a beer", but /u/th0may's thread on Reddit doesn't say anything
| like that [1].
|
| If anything, /u/th0may himself said in thread, "maybe you already
| found this image", which implies that the image itself is already
| known (and likely NOT discovered by "reverse image search", but
| by other ways). /u/th0may _then_ reverse-searched the image to
| find the website, which lead to the answer.
|
| Anyway, I'm still curious how they find this beer image, since
| this looks to me is the most important step.
|
| [1]
| https://www.reddit.com/r/FindSatoshi/comments/kktjhc/found_s...
| rollulus wrote:
| I found this part the most interesting too. There's a comment
| in the reddit thread now where the author says: _It is called
| PimEyes but it does not give you the full url unless you pay.
| So I had to start digging from what I got._
| th0may wrote:
| He guys, first up I'm the guy who found the image of him
| holding a beer. It was barely simple I used the webpage
| https://pimeyes.com/en uploaded the image from the card,
| cropped it a little to hide the Japanese characters etc. The
| first two result where the same that I scanned. The third was
| the image holding the beer. I saw some resemblance, but didn't
| think it would work. PimEys let's you search for free but you
| have to pay for the full url. So I took the fraction of the url
| figured out the full one. Found the original image on the
| webpage. And then posted my findings to Reddit. I and also
| other users found new pictures of him the following days. On
| the 28th of December we found an image with him wearing a bib
| from a half marathon through the results I found the name and
| it was Satoshi.
| nasir wrote:
| One of the comments says:
|
| I heard about the story a year ago, but forgot about it. Then I
| remembered and told my family about on Christmas. So I wanted
| to check out if this is still unsolved and found this reddit.
| I'm currently researching about AI and found a few image
| backwards search engines way more powerful then google image
| search. It turned out that I found the image of him holding the
| beer, when I fed in the card. Just wanted to play around, but
| it looks really promising now. ;D
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/FindSatoshi/comments/kktjhc/found_s...
| simias wrote:
| I don't know much about the state of the art in image
| recognition but does it really seem plausible? The picture of
| him holding the beer is not super high quality, he has a
| different expression, a slightly different haircut and he
| appears quite a bit older. You can't even see his distinctive
| freckles. The idea that you could just scan random images of
| people online and find him that way is wild to me, tuning the
| network not to miss it but also not to report millions of
| false positives seems like a very high bar.
|
| It's pretty creepy if we're already at the point where any
| random people can trace you online using apparently unrelated
| low quality photos.
| fsckboy wrote:
| i know little about the state of the art in image
| recognition, but it strikes me that this could be better
| described as facial recognition, and afaik, that does a
| pretty good job identifying faces
| ineedasername wrote:
| We don't know how much effort it took. The searcher could
| very well have gone through thousands of images, following
| up on hundreds, before zeroing in on this one. Or not-- I'd
| certainly like to know more about that part of the process.
| fireattack wrote:
| Thanks, I didn't read that deep into the comments.
|
| So he used some face-recognizing engines that just indexes
| random images on the Internet? I wonder what it is, since he
| didn't name (I assume it's a public tool?). I knew Baidu has
| one, for what it's worth [1].
|
| [1] https://ai.baidu.com/tech/face/search (in Chinese)
| draugadrotten wrote:
| It seems so. He writes "They use facial recognition to find
| faces instead of google image search which is just
| comparing the similarities of the different pixels."
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/FindSatoshi/comments/kktjhc/found_
| s...
| oefrha wrote:
| I took a look at [1], seems to require bringing your own
| training set, and hosting one with a huge set of random
| Internet images would presumably be prohibitively
| expensive.
| fireattack wrote:
| Maybe I linked the wrong page, but I have used its API
| before, it does have a built-in database even with all
| the names of celebrities marked already.
|
| It used to have a free trial on web too, but it's gone
| now.
| _puk wrote:
| From a comment further down that thread:
|
| "heard about the story a year ago, but forgot about it. Then I
| remembered and told my family about on Christmas. So I wanted
| to check out if this is still unsolved and found this reddit.
| I'm currently researching about AI and found a few image
| backwards search engines way more powerful then google image
| search. It turned out that I found the image of him holding the
| beer, when I fed in the card. Just wanted to play around, but
| it looks really promising now. ;D"
| nojs wrote:
| In case others are wondering:
|
| > Q: Is this related to Bitcoin?
|
| > A: No. Satoshi Nakamoto is the pseudonym used by the person who
| created Bitcoin, but it's not the same Satoshi.
|
| Weirdly this apparently pre-dates that other Satoshi puzzle by a
| few years.
| gpvos wrote:
| Maybe Nakamoto named themself after this Satoshi.
| piracy1 wrote:
| I like that idea, because he knew everyone would try to 'Find
| Satoshi'
| alisonkisk wrote:
| It's a normal Japanese given name.
| GreenHeuristics wrote:
| The first letter of it is the character 'S'.
| chmod775 wrote:
| No, it's sa
|
| ;)
| TJSomething wrote:
| If we're being pedantic, that's not a letter. It's a
| mora. Also, we don't know the correct Japanese spelling
| of Satoshi Nakamoto, because there like 8 common first
| names pronounced Satoshi (Zhe , Wu , Min , Zhi , Cong ,
| Hui , Xun , and Yu ) and he never wrote his name in
| Japanese.
| da_big_ghey wrote:
| Are they all transliterated as "Satoshi" as well, or just
| pronounced that way? I know absolutely nothing about
| Japanese, so this may be a stupid question.
| moufestaphio wrote:
| Chinese characters (In Japan they referred to as Kanji),
| are ideographic rather than phonetic.
|
| This means they represent an idea (or concept?) instead
| of a sound. The meaning is completely divorced from the
| pronunciation. In Japanese each character usually has at
| least two 'readings' for pronunciation onyomi (chinese-
| origin reading) and kunyomi (Japanese reading).
|
| But often have even more than that, and specifically with
| peoples names the readings some times feel completely
| arbitrary.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanji#Readings
|
| Basically, there are multiple ways to get the same
| 'sound' from different kanji, or get a different 'sound'
| the same kanji.
| cyphar wrote:
| Same transliteration _because_ they are read the same.
| Romaji (Latin characters used to phonetically transcribe
| Japanese words -- "Satoshi" in this case) are based on
| the phonetics of the word. If two words have the same
| pronunciation but different kanji, they'll be transcribed
| the same way in romaji.
|
| This is equally true for hiragana and katakana (the other
| two Japanese writing systems, which are phonetic) and all
| the names would be written as satoshi in hiragana.
| segfaultbuserr wrote:
| Many Japanese publications decided to use "Zhe Shi " [0],
| but it's only an arbitrary choice.
|
| [0] https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%82%B5%E3%83%88%E3%8
| 2%B7%E3...
| Natsu wrote:
| Or possibly a few other characters...
|
| https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E3%81%95%E3%81%A8%E3%81%9
| 7#J...
| eecks wrote:
| I only clicked because I thought it was Bitcoin related. Even
| though it predates Bitcoin, I assume the popularity is given by
| Bitcoin's current media coverage.
| lolbrels wrote:
| There was a somewhat viral video which included a lady
| explaining the search in detail which is more likely where
| the recent popularity stems from.
| chippy wrote:
| It's worth highlighting that, back in 2006, social media was very
| new and most people didn't have any social media profiles. Both
| Twitter and Facebook was only launched that year. Only a handful
| of people had mobile phones with internet. Both the amount of
| photos of people were low, and also the avenues people could take
| to find others were narrow and few.
|
| I played PerplexCity back then and engaged with the hunt for this
| puzzle amongst others (e.g the cube!). For my part, it was mainly
| word of mouth with Japanese friends or colleagues over the years
| until I forgot about it. Occasionally every few years something
| happened to get people interested in this puzzle. I believe
| community members put up a reward for solving this.
|
| Just as back then the web resources were few, those that were
| created have mostly disappeared. Wikis, a few hugely active
| forums, chat rooms etc all individual websites all lost.
|
| I've been wondering whether its possible to have Alternate
| Reality Games in today's mobile phone and social media land.
| chippy wrote:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20070629190421/http://www.billio...
| there was a reward
| cubano wrote:
| I can't help wondering when reading this...just how many "free
| brain cycles" do people have in the world?
|
| By "free brain cycles", I mean like one's not used for work and
| your family and perhaps one hobby...
|
| I cannot even imagine how many people worked so hard and used
| their cycles to figure this puzzle out, and like I can barely
| remember what to buy from the store whenever I go.
|
| Don't get me wrong, it's a hell of an achievement for everyone
| involved, but I just have such a hard time understanding the
| absolute motivation behind it.
| a_crc wrote:
| Well you have to consider that this is the "one hobby" for a
| lot of people, so your own division of brain cycles leaves room
| for a group who works on things like this for fun.
| chippy wrote:
| Originally we thought this would be a simple "6 degrees of
| separation" puzzle. You and me are connected to each other by
| at most six other people.
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