At last!  The Army Of Zero solution has been published!

The winner will be announced later this week.

Thank you so much to everyone who worked to solve the puzzle over the past year or so, it’s been a thrill to meet all of you, whether in person or online.

I’ll have some more things to say in the next few days.  If there’s anything you don’t understand, drop us an email or leave comments below.

Today’s the deadline for the Army Of Zero competition, and I know you’re eager to have the solution revealed (unless you’ve worked it out already, in which case, clever you)!  I had planned to get the website updates finished today, ready to go online tomorrow.  So I went to turn on my computer this morning and…

Nothing happened.

It was, to all intents and purposes, dead.

I’ve been very happy with my computer, and it’s never let me down once in the three years that I’ve owned it.  It really picked its moment.

I fiddled about with it to the best of my ability, but eventually had to give in and take it to the shop (or “Store”, as they call it).  To my surprise and joy, the young man (or “Genius”, as they call him) behind the counter (or “Bar”) managed to work his mojo and, as you can see, I’m back on-line.

However, long story short, I’m way behind on getting to where I want to be for the big reveal, and, what with it being a bank holiday weekend here in the UK, realistically I’m not going to get the solution online until Tuesday.

I did say I was going to publish the answer tomorrow (Saturday), but there’s no way I’m going to be able to do that now.  I’m very, very sorry.

However, to try and rescue some fun from the situation I will take a slightly different approach (and I hope some of you might enjoy this).  Just after midnight tonight, as the competition deadline expires, I’ll publish a blog post that drops the mother of all clues, one which I think will help you tie up a lot of the loose ends that are you might have.  If you don’t have the solution yet, this clue might just take you there.  Obviously, it’s just for fun, as the competition deadline will have come and gone, but if you’re so inclined, you’ll have the long weekend to piece everything together.

Apologies again.  See you later, maybe.

If you’ve been following along, you’ll know that there are just 22 days left to enter the Army Of Zero competition.  So, just a few things to look out for in the next few weeks…

We’ll be publishing the solution, together with explanations of as many of the clues as we can remember(!), on May 1st.  Probably we’ll put it on the main site, in the Army Of Zero section, together with a blog entry right here so that those of you following the blog via RSS readers will get a notification.  Also, you’ll be able to comment on that blog post, if you want to talk about the solution with us.

Within a couple of days of that, we’ll contact the competition winner, send them their hard-earned prize with our hearty congratulations and, all things being equal, we’ll congratulate them here on the website too.  (If the winner turns out to be a youngster, we’ll only name them with their parents’ permission.)

Good luck!

We’ve just caught up with the outstanding episodes of the final season of Lost, and it looks like the writers are actually going to explain what’s been going on over six seasons of interconnecting characters, events, timelines and realities.  Now, we really like Lost.  It’s full of interconnected characters, linked in unexpected ways, and there’s a mystery at the heart of it that has yet to be unraveled - remind you of anything?  And because we like it so much, we really, really hope they can end the whole thing in a satisfying way.

The cast of Lost

The question, given the enormous amount of continuity baggage that Lost is dragging towards the finish line, is just how satisfying that conclusion can possibly be.  To our way of thinking, it’s entirely unfeasible that anything all the outstanding questions - lostpedia.com lists 170 of them - can be answered in the remaining episodes.

Obfuscation is the natural order of things in Lost.  From the viewpoints of the protagonists, and therefore from our viewpoint, Something Very Weird is going on, but the few characters who appear to know what it is certainly aren’t telling us.  The promise of answers to come leads us on and keeps us watching.  The point of Lost is not that the fun is in getting the answers, it’s that the fun is in not knowing.  The word itself, “Lost”, doesn’t just refer to the characters, it also refers to us, the audience, and our confusion over the events unfolding on the screen.

Once you accept this, realise that the show is yanking your chain, and are prepared to have your chain yanked, there is an awful lot of fun to be had with it.

Frankly, we hope Lost doesn’t try too hard to give us the answers.  Most of the important stuff we’ve already figured out, at least to whatever extent that it matters.  Meanwhile, the troubling suspicion remains that surely, something, somewhere in the six years of the show has no logical explanation: perhaps a plot thread that never got resolved, or something the writers wrote that contradicted something from earlier that they’d forgotten.  In fact, rather than explain everything, I’d rather they went with the “it was all a dream!” ending.  At least that’d be funny.

So our wish for the finale of Lost: don’t give us the answers, we don’t need them.  To remain true to the entire spirit of the show, it needs to leave the major mysteries unanswered.

That, by the way, is not the fate that awaits Army Of Zero. There are answers, and they’ll be revealed on this web site in just over a month!

I haven’t written much recently, but it’s largely because there’s not much to say at this point!  There’s 54 days left before the Army Of Zero competition closes, and I know there’s a few of you who are pretty close to a solution.  So I’m not about to start giving out any more big hints, because it’s not fair on those participants who have put a lot of head-scratching into the puzzles to start chucking out big clue-grenades at this stage.

So just a couple of pointers for new readers. There are clues here in the blog, and on our Twitter account too (particularly in the tweets in our “clue week”, January 11th to January 15th).  That extra information might be useful, and might give you a nudge in the right direction, but you don’t actually need any of it: the puzzles are solvable with just what comes in the game box.

One you realise what the clues are leading up to, the final pieces should start to fall into place more easily.  This turns out to be the hardest part of the whole puzzle, but it’s well worth getting this figured out, because it’s key to the whole thing.  There’s a clue that relates to this amongst the clue posts here on the blog.

Today is National Puzzle Day! (At least, it is in the United States, where they have a surfeit of such things.)  Why not mark the day by dusting of one of those jigsaws you’ve got stashed in the garage, or getting a free puzzle game for your iPhone/iPod/iPad, or, y’know, treating yourself to a copy of Army Of Zero?

But they do seem to have an awful lot of these days in the US, which started me wondering how something like this starts.  What needs to happen before a day gets widely recognised as what is correctly called a “commemorative day”?

Well, sometimes you don’t need to do anything official.  Some commemoratives, like National Puzzle Day or the more famous International Talk Like A Pirate Day have no “official” standing.  One day, someone just had an interesting idea and somebody else heard about it and mentioned it to someone else, and before long it was adopted as a de facto National Day.  It’s a lot easier to get support for an unofficial day like these nowadays, of course, because we’re all a lot more connected than we were even 10 years ago.

Greetings card companies take the blame for some of these days.  Faced with a blank square on the calendar, they do love to create a special day to drum up some extra business.  In practical terms, the existence of many of these special days can be seen as being due to an alliance between (a) the greetings card industry, (b) special interest groups looking for a bit of love and (c) the unlucky congressperson who doesn’t want to be dismissive of a particular under-appreciated demographic.  (See Administrative Professionals’ Day and Grandparents Day).

To have a day officially recognised in the US requires an act of Congress.  Typically the process begins with an interested person or interest group contacting their congressperson, and convincing them that a national day in favour of their particular cause would be a good idea.  The congressperson then attempts to get it onto the agenda for debate in Congress itself.  If they’re lucky, the day may become reality in a few years.

You probably won’t be surprised to hear that there are a lot of attempts to get particular people or ideas marked in this way.  This, combined with the fact that, unlike other bills, commemorative days tend to get passed without much in the way of opposition, meant that in the 1980’s and 1990’s, 30% of ALL PUBLIC LAWS signed by the President were for commemoratives!  There’s more on the subject at CNN’s site.

The hardest part of putting Army Of Zero together was building the puzzles.  There are a number of interactions between the various puzzle elements, and indeed between the puzzles and the game, which meant that different parts of the card designs had to link together without disrupting other relationships.  At times it felt like I was compiling a five-dimensional crossword (that’s not a clue, by the way).

All in all, it took about five months to decide exactly how it was all going to fit together, and to build the prototypes and test them.

I am a total lightweight.

Just go and read about the effort put in by Jason Smith at Puzzle Forge to build his own Petaminx. Designed by Andrew Cormier, the Petaminx is like a Rubik’s Cube in the same way that the Space Shuttle is like a Sopwith Camel.

So there’s six months left until the closing date for the Army Of Zero prize competition -  30th April 2010.  Plenty of time yet to solve the riddle and send it into us for a chance to win £1000.

So far - as far as we know - no-one’s cracked the whole thing, but we are in touch with a number of enthusiasts, some via email, some on the web, and it’s very rewarding to see how you’re getting on.

The components that are proving to be the most awkward to people seem to be the three lower shields.  In addition, I haven’t heard from anyone who’s figured out the overall objective.  The various sub-puzzles are coming together quite nicely, but figuring out where it all leads to seems to be evading people so far.  If you can deduce that, it might just let you approach the remaining items from a different angle.

Do please remember when you submit your entry to include the competition entry card, which you’ll find in the box.

More about very difficult puzzles, following on from last week’s post…

As far as jigsaw puzzles are concerned, you might remember that about his time last year, jigsaw manufacturer Ravensburger was getting a lot of publicity for its Jungle Scenes puzzle, which had just been completed by a British man in about 3 months.  It had 18,200 pieces, and apparently it is known as “The Everest” amongst jigsaw fans.

But hey! there’s a larger one called “Life”, which has the Guinness Book Of Records entry for the world’s largest commercial jigsaw puzzle, with a massive 24,000 pieces.

Of course it’s not all about the number of pieces.  Some experts say that the hardest jigsaw ever is a version of Jackson Pollock’s painting “Convergence“, by Springbok, which dates back to the 1960’s.  Only 340 pieces, but the image makes it a challenge that few people have the patience to successfully complete.

And you can also get jigsaws where the picture is a single solid colour.  Here’s an online version that you can try, but to me, these don’t really count because they’re just wilfully difficult, and being able to build up a picture is a fundamental part of a jigsaw.

If you’re finding yourself getting stuck on the Army Of Zero puzzles, here’s a bit of light relief, in the guise of a series of blog posts about the hardest, most fiendish puzzles in the world! After these, you’re going to be glad to come back to Army Of Zero…

This week I’m going to point you towards the hardest logic puzzle ever, according to philosopher George Boolos. I’ll add more posts at future dates about other kinds of puzzles.

OK, here we go, hold on tight to something.  This is what is reputed to be the hardest logic puzzle:

Three gods A, B, and C are called, in some order, True, False, and Random. True always speaks truly, False always speaks falsely, but whether Random speaks truly or falsely is a completely random matter. Your task is to determine the identities of A, B, and C by asking three yes-no questions; each question must be put to exactly one god. The gods understand English, but will answer all questions in their own language, in which the words for yes and no are ‘da’ and ‘ja’, in some order. You do not know which word means which.

So it’s similar to what’s known as the knight/knave puzzle, in which you’re asked to imagine yourself on an island where some of the population always lie and the rest always tell the truth, you don’t know which is which, and you have to find a reliable way of getting the truth out of someone.  Only in this version, it’s way, way harder because (a) you might be talking to someone who lies or tells the truth at random, and (b) you don’t know whether their answer means “yes” or “no”.

My brain is melting out of my ears.  If you want to read more - and see the solution - go and have a look on Wikipedia.