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.

I mentioned in an earlier post that the flyer we’ve been giving out at various shows has a clue in it, and we’ve been asked about it by people who can’t make the events.  So here it is.

Click either side for a bigger version.

It’s true that there’s a clue here, but it’s not a crucial clue.  You certainly don’t need this to solve the puzzle: everything you need to solve Army Of Zero is in the box.  What you can divine from the flyer doesn’t do much more than confirm something that’s significant.

Gah, sorry to be mysterious. “Isn’t that bizarre? Aren’t you just going, ooo?”

Ciphers, codes, hidden messages and so on are close to my heart, as I’m sure you’ve already realised. Having spent quite a considerable time creating the puzzles in Army Of Zero, you might think I’d have had enough of them. Even now, though, I still come across clever stuff that I would like to make use of, if only I had the chance to publish it somewhere. My copy of Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, by Douglas Hofstadter, for example, still gets flipped through occasionally. I still find some chapters hard work, but it’s great for just dipping into, particularly the cleverly-constructed chapters of dialogue, where Hofstadter is playing games with the reader. Chapter 4 is a case in point. Although on the face of it, it’s simply a conversation between two characters, the dialogue is constructed so as to conceal a message. Look closely, and you’ll see that the first letter of each paragraph spells out a message.

Such constructions are called acrostics. You can find examples in a surprising amount of literature, including such familiar sources as the Bible, Edgar Allan Poe and Lewis Carroll. Many acrostics, as in the Hofstadter example, use the initial letter of each paragraph to spell out the message. But there are alternative constructions as well. Often the first character of each sentence is used. (Lots of acrostic enthusiasts like hiding one letter per sentence rather than a letter per paragraph, because you can hide more letters this way.) Sometimes you might come across an acrostic which uses the last character of each sentence or paragraph, but these are more difficult to construct because the human mind finds it easier to think of words that start with a given character, rather than words that end with it.

Maybe you’re wondering why I’m bringing up the subject of acrostics at all. Are they relevant to solving Army Of Zero’s puzzles in some way? Kind of. Evasive answer, I know, I’m sorry.

All right, let me try to be a bit more helpful, hopefully without giving too much away.

Some of the puzzles are word puzzles, and for those puzzles, as you might expect, using particular letters (or groups of letters) from the game cards is the way to go. Obviously, a significant part of the trick is to uncover what – and where - those particular letters are. Rearranging the cards in an appropriate order should then be possible. (The number of ways in which you reorder the cards might surprise you!)

Oh dear, I hope I haven’t been too obtuse. Really, I’m just trying to give you a bit of a nudge in the right direction. Don’t worry if you get stuck. Everyone does, from time to time, but if you do, a good strategy might be to think about different ways you would set about hiding information in the card designs. Revealing the secrets of Army Of Zero is supposed to be somewhat challenging, but there are hints to be found, if you know where to look!

There’s exactly one year to go until the deadline for the Army Of Zero competition!  It sounds like a long time, doesn’t it?  But if the last 12 months are anything to go by, the time will rocket by and before long we’ll be selecting our winner and awarding the £1,000 prize.

We’ve been having a few people ask recently about the method that we’re going to use to pick a winner, so I thought I’d take the chance to write a blog post on the subject.  It’s potentially tricky to write this post, because although we have a set of criteria for making sure that we pick a winner fairly, stating those criteria would give the answers away.  So instead, I’m going for some general pointers.

First of all, apart from the closing date (30th April 2010), time isn’t a factor.  The first correct solution is not necessarily going to be the winner, and there’s no advantage to getting your solution in early.  A good solution sent to us this month (April 2009) will lose out to a very good solution sent to us in April 2010.

We’re looking for a single answer.  The answer is more than one word, but not enough to fill a postcard.

That said, the “better” solutions are going to indicate how the answer was reached.  It’s possible to get close to the final answer without solving all the puzzles.  If you guess, it’s even possible to get exactly the right answer without solving all the puzzles.  So we’ll be giving credit to contestants who explain where their answer came from.  We’ve got a checklist of all the puzzles, and we’ll be checking each entry against that list.

How many items are on the checklist?  Well, I’m not going to say exactly, partly because I don’t want to give anything away, and partly because a straight answer might actually be a bit confusing.  The number of puzzles in Army Of Zero depends on how you count them: they intersect a bit, you see.  If pushed, I normally tell people that there are “12 or 13″ puzzles to solve, but it’s possible to count them differently.  But you will get credit for any of the items on our checklist as long as they’re included in your competition entry, no matter how you classify or group them.

Puzzle site tweleve.org has a thread going about Army Of Zero, where I’ve posted a couple of messages about solving the riddle.

Toy News Magazine is running a feature article about games and puzzles (on the rise in these difficult times, because staying in is the new going out, apparently) in which Point Zero Games gets a section.  Read it here.