*** NOT AT POSTED COORDINATES***
Special note for those of you here attempting to get your
Sophomore
Credentials from the 'Puzzle Academy': The Puzzle Decathlon
competition is long over, but if you finish the first event you'll
get the coords for the cache and can make the find. That's all you
need to do for the smiley for this cache. You are more than welcome
to do the rest of the events for fun, but skip the 3rd event as key
data has changed (and will continue to do so, so I'm not going to
try to continually maintain the puzzle for that event) and for
event 8, just try the alternate version. Happy Puzzling!
As world turned to Vancouver to watch the Winter Olympic Games,
I'm hoping that geocaching will some day be a sport in the Olympics
(winter or summer, doesn't matter to me). The FTF, the multi, the
earth cache... but the most grueling event of all is the puzzle
decathlon! ;)
In hopes of being a demonstration sport in 2012, I've set up a
'test track' here. What's the puzzle decathlon? It's a 10 puzzle
competition. The first puzzle is displayed on this page and will
lead you to the cache (and a FTF Target gift card). The next 9
puzzles will show up in a link in the table below every other day
after this puzzle is published (those 9 do NOT lead to any cache).
Certitude (the geochecker) will be used to keep track of the order
and time each of the 10 events are solved.
Solvers will be awarded 1350 points minus (the number of minutes
it took to solve the puzzle / 2) [no negative scores]
Please use the geochecker with your handle for each puzzle! The top
three finishers in points will get a gold, silver, and bronze
medals respectively. In addition, the gold medalist gets their
choice of a USB missile launcher, USB woot lights, and a woot
screaming monkey. Silver gets the choose of whats remaining. Bronze
gets whats left. As always geocaching.com and the cache reviewer
have not reviewed the links below (and links that will be added
below) and make no representation that they are not harmful. You
are doing so at your own risk.
Here's a link to the
leaderboard which will be updated periodically.
Difficulty level is due to the number of puzzles, each
individual puzzle will be between 2 & 3.5. For questions about
the puzzle decathlon go here
The first event:
A modified Sudoku. Each row and column contains the numbers 1-9
only once. Also each colored background contains the numbers 1-9
only once (only exceptions are the 4 white background squares). The
large boxes are considered to be in two rows and two columns.
N 44 5(A-B).(C-D)E(F+M) W 93 2(G+H).(I-J)KL
You can validate your puzzle solution with certitude.
Congrats to rosebud55112 for coming a LONG way to get the
FTF.