On Sat, May 2, 2009 at 8:14 AM, Alex Smith <ais...@bham.ac.uk> wrote:
> On Fri, 2009-05-01 at 20:19 -0400, Sgeo wrote:
>> On Fri, May 1, 2009 at 7:53 PM, Ian Kelly <ian.g.ke...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> > Zing! Vext cwm fly jabs Kurd qoph
>>
>> Will we all get to learn what the Clues were?
>
> The Secret Answer no longer exists (now the Medal's been given away), so
> the restriction on revealing information about it is lifted. I'll now
> publically post all the Clues that anyone was given.
>
> {{{
> G1:
> The secret answer consists of seven words.
> The secret answer consists of two sentences.
>
> S1:
> The fourth word of the secret answer is the common English
> name for a type of small flying insect.
>
> G2:
> A recent Google search for the secret answer, without
> quotes, produced "about 174" results. It produced "about
> 407" when quotes were used (yes, more than without, for
> some reason).
>
> S2:
> The fifth word of the secret answer is a common slang word
> for "injections".
>
> G3:
> If all letters were removed from the secret answer, leaving
> only non-letter characters, it would be "! ." (without
> the quotes). It does not end with a newline.
>
> S3:
> The first word of the secret answer is an interjection that
> is arguably onomatopoeic, referring to a short high-pitched
> humming noise.
>
> G4:
> No word of the Secret Answer is longer than four letters
> long. No word of the Secret Answer is shorter than three
> letters long.
>
> S4:
> The second word of the secret answer is an archaic word
> which means "distressed" or "agitated".
>
> G5:
> The Secret Answer is, technically speaking, gramatically
> correct English. However, it contains at least one proper
> noun, and at least one archaic word; therefore it is not
> the sort of utterance likely to be encountered in practice,
> and might confuse an automated spelling or grammar checker.
>
> S5:
> The seventh word of the Secret Answer is a letter of the
> Hebrew alphabet.
>
> G6:
> There are exactly three capital letters in the Secret
> Answer. They are K, V, and Z, although not necessarily in
> that order.
>
> S6:
> The sixth word of the Secret Answer refers to a member of
> an ethnolinguistic group who mostly live in Iran, Iraq,
> Syria, or Turkey.
> }}}
>
> I'd be interested to hear from root as to how e solved it, or indeed
> from anyone else who made progress solving the puzzle. I'm also curious
> as to how much back-room dealing was going on; the only evidence of it I
> saw was root buying Clues in the PF, but of course there could be a lot
> more I don't know about.
Through trading, I had all the clues except G2 and G5. I managed to
figure out the words "Zing", "Vext", "jabs" and "Kurd" from the clues.
I googled those words, and the first result contained the answer. I
thought the fourth word was probably "bee" but wasn't sure, so I
didn't use it in the search.
-root
