Transcription
All right, the past and future box. Welcome to word search. Who is Dr. Krypton?
Um, as a child, every summer when school was out, my mom would take my brother and I, usually against my brother's will, to these long road trips to look for, uh, this. We were basically in search of the golden horse.
This was a book written in 1984 called "Treasure in Search of the Golden Horse." If you found the golden horse before a certain deadline, you also got $500,000 in cash. The horse, I think at the time, was valued at $25,000. I'm sure that's probably a lot more now. I haven't looked at the value of gold from 1984, but I think it was like 200 bucks.
So maybe 10 times as much, $250,000 is probably the value of the horse in today's dollars. The puzzle itself was designed by Paul Hoffman under the pseudonym Dr. Krypton. I know it's a cheesy name for this day and age, but it's sort of my way of showing respect for that period of my life.
So anyways, that's where Dr. Krypton comes from. As cheesy as it may sound to most people, that's where it originated.
Now, let's move on. What you're about to do is go on a bit of an adventure with me, and we are going to go ahead and solve this word search. The only way that I've been able to figure out how to solve it is through a story.
As we go through this, you are going to be hunting for an evil queen. You'll be equipped with a joust, and you will battle a dragon in your search for the key. It will open the doorway with the keyhole, but you must find the queen in her castle.
This story will play out as I find the pieces to the puzzle and the location of the treasure. So this is basically part one. I don't know how many parts this is going to be, but this is the beginning.
Let's go ahead and take a look at our raw start here. We have basically the word search. A lot of people have gone over this, so I'm not going to spend a lot of time on it. You find words.
There's been a lot of discussion about why you choose the words you choose because there are a ton of words left over. When we do find the words that we need to find, we are ignoring words like "dose," "comes," "here," "to," "diagonal," the word "less" up here, "solo," "up," "Ohio," "Rams" coming down this way.
Oh, let's see here. "Nine's" tucked away in here. If you go backwards and "sore," it's kind of part of "zero," "eons." There's a lot of theories behind this. I didn't really want to spend a lot of time on it because I don't know at this stage it was too important to me.
I mean, obviously, it's important to be able to get the anagram. Once you got that, you're kind of like, okay, put a pin in it. If we would need to come back and sort of look at why the word "19's" in here, we happen to have 19 horizontal words, which include 12 reverse, which is 12's in here as well.
Um, no seven in here, but we do have two threes, which include the three downwards and the three diagonal words. We have a Z4 up.
Leaving off was five and 11. That does kind of come into play. I've always thought that the 11 came into play when you're solving the anagram.
Um, again, back to this. Those of you that are just getting started on this, you'll grab the letters that are left over, and you'll sort of anagram some words in here, and it'll spell out our next clue.
Let's see here. So basically, I was back to where the 11, so I thought the 11 was important because as you started to break this out, everyone was really quick to solve the first half. There are five clues in this word search, but do not tell anyone. That was pretty much agreed upon.
Then you jump down here, and you've got "remain steady to complete the mission." All agreed upon. Everybody saw gibberish down here, so we couldn't make anything out of it.
It was the middle section that caused a lot of ruckus. I mean, people were coming up with all sorts of things because you had them up there. There was nothing you could really come up with anagram-wise than them up or somehow shuffling letters around, and that just didn't seem right.
And then three are on special bends or three. No, so there were a lot of little things that people were trying to do.
Um, but what I found is that if you count 11 words from the upper left, work your way down, basically 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, you get to 11. And that's when you're like, hey, we need to use "line."
It also made sense. It read really well: "line them up." There are no special bends or turns just for me, say.
So for me, I'm like looking for what are we going to do. A lot of people thought, oh, I was L up the O's and all that, and that sent me down a rabbit hole.
But there was some conversation about, well, you still have to do something with the numbers. So briefly, I kind of jumped over.
Um, let's see here. Went back and started running through the numbers through Excel. You enter some equations.
Um, if you put some formulas in Excel, like "count 11," it'll count the cells. So you say "count," and then you pick the cells from A8 to A13, and it'll count the cells. So it'll be 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. You'll have six.
"Count three" will have 1, 2, 3, you know, 4, 5. Round 19. A lot of people thought that was rounding to 20, but if you do put it in Excel and you round 19, it just rounds to a whole number.
So it was like 19.3; it would still round to 19. If it was 19.7, it would in fact round up to 20. But because it is 19, round 19 is still 19.
You get down to 12 because it's in reverse. We're going to go and subtract it. And three square, a lot of people felt that should be nine.
And since it's backwards, since three is backwards, we're going to subtract as well. And five was used in the anagram message for five clues, so we just cut that out. Didn't even use it. I don't know, seemed like it made sense.
Let's kind of just solve this and move on. Here you kind of have the equations. Like I said before, when you count 11, it returns a value of six because there's six cells.
"Count three" returns a value of five. Add your 19. Round 19 is still 19. Subtract 12 since 12 is reversed. Subtract square three since three is reversed, and square three is obviously nine.
Your end result is nine. So now that I had this nine, it was like, what do you do with it, right?
One of the first things I did is I did go back and I looked at all the kept all the O's. Sort of like they seem prominent, obviously important, and I kept them in the word search.
Went back to the original word search without the anagram spelled out, and I went to column 9. I noticed there was kind of something going on there, and my mind kind of just quickly saw "e i e on."
Then this is sort of like breaking out the letters. "Zg" didn't make a lot of sense at the time, but I liked how there was no O. There was really none of these spacers that were used in the anagram in the way.
I was like, oh, what other areas can we put? So I started to look and see how I could kind of weave through these areas, and that kind of drew my attention back to the, um, see if we can find it here.
Yeah, we'll go back to the word search. Where is it? The anagram. Back to the, so back to the nine.
Um, the nine, I looked at column 9, and that was interesting. I also thought, do we break up this word search into like nine quadrants? We do have 3x3 there, so is there like a 3x3 kind of grid?
I was kind of pondering that. That's probably what we're supposed to do. Also, when I did kind of look at that column 9, I noticed it weaved through the O's.
Could I get another row or another column that did that? Sure enough, I could. And it reminded me of the book. There are two parts where it does say he's talking about RPO, R player one, and he's saying if you read the book, you know that Ernest Klein smartly weaves a tapestry of 1980s references into the clues.
Then another time, the way Ernest Klein wove his favorite childhood games in pop. I mean, that's just making it obvious.
So what we do is we kind of come up here, and we quickly see about getting our lines in place, and boom, there we go, nice and big so that everyone can see that.
It looks like this is the next one here. So I did this, and I presented it to B. I didn't even see this. It's a little embarrassing at this point, but he was working on something with the word "waterfall" over here.
He saw the word "draw" and things like that, and he's like, dude, you did it. I'm like, what exactly did I do? He's like, that's the war games solve right there.
In "War Games," as everyone knows, it's famous for the computer playing tic-tac-toe so that it no longer tries to start World War III.
And then we highlight the word "drop" here, and that's sort of confirmation that we're kind of along the right path. So I'm like, okay, great, we've got this thing. Now what do we do?
A lot of people started flipping the boards and stuff and reading other things, and I didn't think that we were quite ready to do that yet. I feel like there's now we have something, so let's start solving it.
This is pretty much we're all in part one. But I will tell you, if you want to take off from here, you can start to anagram out these sections here, and they will reveal clues.
So we'll get into that in part two. Thanks.