Puzzix: Puzzles For Everybody! #1: Multiple Images Mystery Cache

“Puzzix: Puzzles For Everybody!” is a series of caches with three main intents.

1: To provide easy puzzles that anybody can solve.

2: To provide an immersion into puzzling to people who really don’t solve puzzles.

3: To teach. Teach about puzzles, and about the information the puzzles are about.

It bothers me (only slightly) that there are so many puzzles around here, and several of them have so few finds. The same group of people solve find all the puzzle caches, and most cachers only focus on Traditionals.

The main set of qualms I have with that is that puzzles have so much to teach. If it weren’t for puzzle caches, I wouldn’t know anything about 128 bit integers, fruit identification, the makeup of colors in computers, C++, Page codes, cryptograms, ASCII-Hex conversion, Jpeg encoding, and much much more. Time for me to give back to the community.

Every Cache in this Series will have three puzzles associated with it. The best part is, all three puzzles give you the same coordinates! You only need to solve one of the three puzzles to find the coordinates. In your log, tell me which puzzle (or puzzles) you solved.

This is the First in the series, and it will focus on multiple images. Every puzzle on this cache page will be composed of a series of pictures. These puzzles are supposed to be easy, and more than anything, teach you. Let’s begin.

A few years ago, Luis Von Ahn and several other students at Carnegie Mellon were confronted with a problem. How to prevent bots from making e-mail accounts and sending spam. The answer was Captcha. It provided a method of identifying humans from robots, by putting up an image with distorted text in it. To make an account or send a message, the user had to identify the text in the image, something a bot could not do.

Later, the creator(s) had a realization. They were wasting millions of man hours of work . Or phrased in the words of Luis, " had unwittingly created a system that was frittering away, in ten-second increments, millions of hours of a most precious resource: human brain cycles."

But being the genious that he is, he created the system, ReCAPTCHA. There are two words in the ReCAPTCHA system. One is to identify that you are human, and the other is a word from an undigitized book. When you type in your Captchas, you are translating ancient documents into digital text. It really is quite amazing. ReCAPTCHA’s website can probably say it better than I can.

ReCAPTCHA is used on several popular sites, Facebook, Craigslist, Yahoo, and even Geocaching.com!

Anyway, it turns out that if you only answer the word that is identifying whether or not you’re a human, but get the other word wrong, your Captcha is still correct, and it goes through. (Although than that word is digitized into a book, so don’t go doing that on purpose.)

But that’s assuming you can differentiate between the CAPTCHA word, and the book word.

In Turtle Bay Exploration Park lies the only GPS Adventures cache so far, but much more important and relevant to this puzzle lies the Sundial Bridge! Sundials have been around since ancient times. In those days, all you needed to tell time was an Astrolabe and what time you wanted to tell.

If you point your arm at the North Star, you get two data points. Which way North is, and your latitude. Those are the only two things you need to know to make a Sundial work. Fit the hand of your Sundial to that latitude, point it north, and voila, you have your own sundial! Ancient civilizations knew how to do this, and thus they could measure the direction of the shadow at one point in the day, and at the same time the next day, the shadow would be pointing the same direction.

The earliest sundials known from the archaeological record are the obelisks (3500 BC) and shadow clocks (1500 BC) from ancient Egyptian astronomy and Babylonian astronomy. Presumably, humans were telling time from shadow-lengths at an even earlier date, but this is hard to verify.

This day, we have constructed a contemporary version of this, a sundial weighing 3500 tons, half the weight of the Eiffel Tower in Redding, CA, in Turtle Bay Exploration Park. The same park where the GPS Adventures Exhibit is!

The following pictures were all taken at Latitude 37.411, on a day in the past when Daylight Savings Time was not a worry, and when the sun rose at 6 AM, and set at 6 PM. See if you can’t figure out what they are telling you.

In 1842, Gustav Faberge opened a Jewelry Firm, “Faberge.” Over the years, the firm grew, and so did its popularity. The jewelers were stationed in St. Petersburg, and a few years later, Faberge had a son, Carl.

In 1885, Tsar Alexander III commissioned the House of Fabergé to make an Easter egg as a gift for his wife, the Empress Maria Fedorovna. The egg was made, and all involved were ecstatic. From then on, the shop Faberge every year followed the tradition of making a Faberge Egg for the current Tsar of Russian, except for in 1904 and 1905 because of the Russo-Japanese War. These yearly Eggs, presented every year on Easter, became known as the Imperial Eggs.

50 Imperial Eggs were made, and today, 42 of their locations are known. The 50th was never finished, but still is in a museum, along with the others. After the Russian Revolution, the House of Faberge was nationalized by force by the Bolsheviks, and no more eggs were made. A few years later in 1920, Carl Faberge died, and the tradition of Faberge Eggs faded into history.

The Imperial Eggs all either have a surprise inside, or a clock. In many eggs, the surprise has been lost and no one will ever know what it was.

The Faberge eggs are some of the most prized things in the world, appraising today at near priceless. Each one is an amazing work of art, and is very beautiful.

In my trip to Russia, I picked up a replica of the generic Red Faberge Egg. It opens up, and is completely hollow, perfect for a cache container. Fits a log and small swag. (Like I’d ever put my Faberge Egg in a bush…)

Just to show you the beauty of the Imperial Eggs, here’s some pictures of them. Perhaps you can assosiate some numbers with them, maybe their order.

Well that’s it for the puzzles. All three contain the same coordinates, which is feet more away from GZ than I would have liked. (Couldn’t get a good reading that day.) I hope if anything you learned something. Something about Captchas, Sundials, Faberge Eggs, or that anyone can solve puzzles, it doesn’t just have to be a single community of people. In your log, put (without spoilers) something you learned, and don’t forget to include which of the puzzles you solved!

You can validate your puzzle solution with certitude.