Simon blogs

[Simon]

Cryptic Puzzles

On September 5th, geoo and I participated in PaderPuzzle 2026. This was an outdoor puzzle hunt: You got 9 hours to travel the city of Paderborn in teams of 1-5 players, find pre-placed puzzle sheets with cryptic information, and enter solution phrases for each in an online system.

After solving a puzzle, you scored 4 points and learned the whereabouts of the next sheet in the city. You had the option to phone for hints (at cost of 1 point each) or skip (scoring 0 but learning the location of the next puzzle).

Example puzzle and solution

One puzzle was a poem of Japanese-sounding nonsense words, spelled in latin letters.

The solution: Transliterate each line into katakana; the standard katankana table a-ka-sa-ta-na-ha-..., i-ki-shi-chi-ni-hi-... was provided by the organizers to all teams in a general knowledge booklet. Color the location of these katakana in the standard table. See what the colored picture (pixel art) represents. Each picture (one picture per poem line) formed a kyrillic letter; transliterate the kyrillic back to German for the solution.

Example puzzle and solution

One puzzle was a sequence of colorful men (silhouettes of butlers).

The solution: Look around where you are the city. 50 meters from you, there was a store called BUTLER'S with its name printed in differently-colored letters. Replace each man on the sheet with the correspondingly-colored letter from the store logo. Easy once you see it, right?

But made the mistake of attacking this puzzle sitting a quiet corner for 20 minutes, websearching, thinking about color hex codes, ..., and nothing worked. Other teams sat down in better spots and solved it in 3 minutes.

Example puzzle and solution

One puzzle was a cryptic crossword. Each solution was either an animal or a plant. I got many clues right on this one:

Q: An einem zugefrorenen See stehend, gefragt wo er denn hier stehe, antwortete Goethe ganz poetisch: ...
A: Ameise ("am Eise")

Q: Reptil, das vor Gericht niemals lügen würde: ...
A: Eidechse

Q: Wenn ich mich nicht entscheiden kann, in welchem Topf ich mein Erdnusscurry erhitze, dann stehe ich vor einer ...
A: Pottwal

geoo asked me how this was even possible for me, given that I like to rant against ambiguous instructions and ill-defined gameplay!

geoo and I named the team Suicidal Rodents, in honor of the team name from 12 years ago that the Lemmings Forums team used for online puzzle competitions. We accepted one external student who didn't have a team yet, and ran as a team of 3.

PaderPuzzle 2026 statistics, we (Suicidal Rodents) placed 12th out of 32 teams. We scored 38 points. We bought a hint for puzzle 9; you can tell because we scored 3 points there instead of the usual 4 points. We solved bonus puzzle Z1 but failed Z2.

Several teams got the full score of 42 points. Some contestants were regular solvers and finished way earlier than the bunch. geoo and I were happy to do well as nonregulars, still, and I got to spend a day outside, away from the computer.

-- Simon

[Simon]

exp(−(x − μ)² / 2σ²)

There is a curious pattern with getting good at a skill.

The skill can be anything: Playing strength in a certain game, playing an instrument, typing fast, getting good at drawing, playing a sport, finding good designs to engineering problems, ...

When you start learning, you know that you suck, and your output varies between absolutely terrible and pretty lousy. Maybe it's good for small examples that you've practiced in detail, but for a real-world application of the skill to a new random real-world case, your output will be be terrible to lousy.

You get better, and you increase both your mean and your standard deviation. Now, your output is mediocre, sometimes bad, sometimes all right.

Eventually, you'll get even better, and you nail an outstanding piece of workmanship. Congratulations! You're in the spotlight! Maybe you'll appear on the front page of some website, maybe you'll get a strong rank for your game account.

The problem is: The very first time you're in the spotlight, you've probably increased your mean during your recent practice, but you haven't shrunken your standard deviation yet. That means that your outstanding piece of workmanship is exactly that: An outlier in the positive direction. You'll have a hard time reproducing this quality. It takes months of hard work to prune old bad habits and stabilize the skill (= shrink the standard deviation) all while maintaining the same or an even higher mean.

Do not fear the subsequent garbage output. It's sad, but it's natural. It may feel like getting bad again, but it's regression to the mean after the lucky shot.

The spotlight can only show single pieces of craftsmanship output because it can't show the craftsmanship itself.

-- Simon