Puzzle #5: An Internet Puzzle Hunt (2020)

The fifth puzzle was a return to the armchair-style puzzle. The solution was deemed to be a one-word answer, and all puzzlers who got it right, entered in a drawing for two $50 cash prizes. It began with a YouTube video that dropped on August 28th, 2020.

For reasons I will explain in more detail soon, there are actually TWO videos to Puzzle #5, although the original intent was for there to just be one video. One was basically a roadblock that wasn't of my design, and the other was the actual puzzle video, which WAS of my design.

So, to help keep this somewhat organized, this summary is split up into two parts:
Part One is The Roadblock, and Part Two is The Machine.

I’m not going to go through the entirety of both videos here, so in the right column are links to both. Watch them in their entirety FIRST, then come back here… then I promise that everything I explain from here on out will make a little more sense.

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Part One: The Roadblock

Puzzle #5 Trailhead Video - Part 1 - The Roadblock

Firstly, I want to thank the players on this puzzle who clued me in to what they all ended up dealing with here on this part, the handful of people I spoke with, all of their stories pretty much played out the same way.

If you’ve been watching my puzzle videos to this point, you know that an ouside party named Ken, or KT, has been showing up at the treasure hunt sites and physically leaving other information behind.

In this case, there is no doubt that my original Puzzle #5 video was also hijacked somehow. I don’t know if it was KT this time, but in this case after what looks like a pirate signal overrides my video, we are being treated to Future Truck and Future Amanda taking a drive on what appears to be a beautiful mid-October afternoon. It's two months into the future from when this video's been released.

Fortunately, if you’re patient, it appears we’re given a way out, as a DJ known as The Ghost appears to recognize that we are not supposed to be on this timeline, and cleverly offers us a detour by way of a radio advertisement.

"At 1:43 of the audio clip: This Big Ticket Weekend brought to you by The Hive and Truck Puzzles: If you get stuck, better call Truck. (628) 212-0600. He'll get you solved, and on your way."

Astute puzzlers may recognize this number as the same one from Puzzle #3. Calling this number brings us to an automated message from the “Truck Puzzles Hotline”:

"Thank you for calling the Truck Puzzle hotline. There is a disruption in the timeline, we apologize for the inconvenience. Please listen carefully to the following instructions: Send an email to our Tech Support Team at OVERTHINKING628 at GMAIL dot COM with “Puzzle #5 Request” in the subject line, and one of our staff will respond with your ticket number and the correct link to the puzzle. Have a wonderful day."

Following these instructions and sending the requested email gets you a near-instant response from “Truck Puzzles Tech Support” at that same email address:

With even more questions to put aside (like, who is Stinger?!?) The link provided in the email finally gets us to the place I wanted to send you in the first place, before all of this unasked for interference: The Machine.

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Part Two: The Machine

Puzzle #5 Video - Part 2 - The Machine

So alas, here we are, at The Machine. I was asked by several players what this is—and I can tell you it is an IBM 705, an early data processing computer that saw its heyday in the mid-to-late 1950’s. This was state of the art at that time.

The puzzle is an exploration of pattern recognition, along with several different forms of cipher solving and code breaking, so you may learn a thing or two about some of that by the time we’re done. I can also tell you that all of these things I am about to reveal to you can be disciphered and decoded from a quick google search… there are many tools at your disposal!

As is frequently the case with these puzzles, what you see and what you hear can be equally important. There are quite a bit of odd noises and blinking lights to parse through, so let’s see if we can figure out any structure.

A sound is played, an array of lights blink on and off, and the same sound is played, ending the sequence. Thru the entire puzzle, this pattern holds, seven times: a sound to open the sequence, a bunch of lights, then that same sound to close the sequence.

The red and green lights seem to also change with each sequence, with the red lights counting upwards in a bank of seven lights called “message counter”. So in all, there are seven sequences. What are they?

Sequence 1 starts with a bell ring. The lights that flash seem to come in pairs, with pauses in between, with the numbers 0-9, and the letters A thru F in a grid pattern. The bell rings again, ending the sequence. These alphanumeric pairs are in a numerical system known as Hexadecimal, or Hex for short. (There’s also a label for that at the bottom of the light grid, if you look closely enough.) Primarily used in computing, Hex is what is known as a Base16 numeral system, where instead of how our system of counting goes from 0 to 9, this system counts from 0 to 15, where 0-9 is 0-9, but A represents 10, B represents 11, C 12, and so on and so forth. If you convert these numerals from hex to decimal, you get the word HELIUM.

Sequence 2 begins with two buzzes, the red and green lights shift position, and what appear to be letters begin to flash on a bank of lights labeled “Multipurpose Display 1”. The letters by themselves make no sense, but this is what is called a Caesar Cipher. A Caesar Cipher is one whose letters all shift in one way by the same number of letters. For example, with a word like “BME”, we can keep shifting the letters of the word over one until we have an answer, in this case “DOG”. The trick is figuring out how many letters to move. In this case, the two buzzers tell us to move two letters up, so when decoded, the word for Sequence 2 is LITHIUM.

Sequence 3 begins with a telephone ringing, the red and green lights move, followed by what looks like braille flashing on a 2 by 3 panel, with the label “no-eye vision”. These are indeed letters in the Braille alpahabet, and translate directly to the word BORON, another element.

Sequence 4 is a combination of two sounds we have already heard: The bell ring, followed by four buzzes, and the red and green lights move. The lights in the hexadecimal light bank flash again. We know for sure now the bell must be associated with the hex numerals. The letters this translate to make little sense, but the four buzzes are telling you to shift these letters four places in the alphabet, giving you the word NITROGEN, yet another element. We can now also deduce that if there are buzzes, the number of buzzes is telling us how many letters to shift for a Caesar Cipher. So four sequences into this puzzle, it is obvious we are dealing with elements here.

Sequence 5 starts with an old phone tone. The red & green lights change position once again. Multipurpose Displays 1 thru 3 are flashing a series of dashes and dots. Ahh yes, morse code. These letters translate directly to the word SODIUM, adding another to our roster of elements.

Sequence 6 is another combination of sounds, the phone ringing, followed by six buzzes. The phone ringing is tied to the braille lights. The letters, of course, are gibberish, until they are shifted six times, forming the word ALUMINUM.

Sequence 7 is a new sound: a series of high pitched beeps, followed by lights flashing on the same panel where the green lights have been all along. This one takes a little bit of thinking. You don’t need to focus on the green light’s meaning to solve this sequence (remember you didn’t need it for the other six), so ignore that.

With five rows of four lights, what if we numbered these lights from 1 to 20? If we write down what numbered light flashes, we can very easily translate this group of numbers directly into letters with the help of our simple A1Z26 cipher, where 1 = A, 2 = B, and so on. Using this method, we come up with the word CHLORINE.

So, with our seven sequences all solved… what is our answer? It’s going to take a little more work, but we’re getting closer.

Let’s turn our focus to the red and green lights on this puzzle. We know they shift position with each puzzle sequence, but what do they mean? The red lights are simple—it says right on the machine that this is a “Message Counter”. It goes from 1 to 7, in order, simple. No hidden meaning there, it’s just a counter, another way to guide you from one sequence to another. But what are the green lights, and what do they mean?

We don’t really learn anything about that particular bank of lights called “Multipurpose Display 4” until the very last sequence, when we learn that these lights represent the numbers 1 thru 20. What if we use this same idea for the green lights? What is that telling us?

If we do that, we are given, in order, the numbers 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, and 17. Do you recognize the pattern? For those who don’t and for those who willingly forgot everything they learned about math in school…. These are prime numbers. Prime numbers, to refresh your memory, are those numbers that are divisible only by themselves and one.

It’s also worth noting that these are prime numbers in sequence, not skipping any.

By this point you’re doing yourself a huge disservice if you haven’t referenced a Periodic Table of Elements. If you scan over this table, you can see that these prime numbers correspond exactly to that element’s atomic number. Helum’s is 2, Nitrogen’s is 7, Chlorine’s is 17, etc.

The answer to the puzzle literally comes down the question of…. “what comes next”? If we follow the sequence of prime numbers, 19 is the one that follows.

The element with atomic number 19? POTASSIUM.

Eleven of you got the answer correct, great job! Some of you came very close but just didn’t quite finish the sequence. Two $50 prizes went out to Johannes and Tamara in a campfire random prize draw last weekend. Wish I could have given you all $50, but a man’s gotta eat, y’know?