Official Retraction

As many of you know from our previous Great America Race, we have always had the impression that there were small bugs or typoes in just about every puzzle, and to some extent it had colored our impression of their quality control.   This seemed to especially happen on every Vigenere cipher we faced - there would always be one or two characters that just seemed wrong.

For instance, on day one of this race, we got a message that started with "THE FINAL LOGATION OF GAY ONE...", and then today, we got one that led us to "NATIONTL MECHANITS".  This has been frustrating, but has never prevented us from being able to figure out the intended message.

Several times, in fact, we had mentioned this to the folks running the events (Chris and Lisa in GAR 1, and Josh this time), and each time, they graciously owned these "mistakes", playing along that they may have actually been *intentional* to lead us astray.  We had many many conversations about this aspect as a puzzle aesthetic, and convinced ourselves even that in some ways it made sense - I mean, after all, authentic codes from colonial times often had mistakes, and this seemed to be consistent with the look and feel for Ravenchase puzzles.

But today this all changed.  I forgot to bring my laptop (containing the Vigenere solving spreadsheet I always use) to a clue site when we needed to decode a Vigenere, so Dan decided to seize that opportunity and create his own solving spreadsheet.  No big deal, but this meant we could easily both work on code cracking in parallel from now on.

So when we decoded the final puzzle today, Dan's message was error-free, but mine still had those two "trademark" typoes.  Hmmm..  We dug a little deeper and found the issue.  Two of the cells in my spreadsheet had hard-coded references rather than relative references, and thus never gave the right letters.  Which means all those Vigenere typoes we'd seen were OUR FAULT.  I've been using that sheet for almost 10 years now, and I have no idea how long that bug has been present.  I know it is at least 5 plus, since that's when we did the last GAR.

So that was certainly some humble pie with a side of egg on the face.  I can't help but wonder if we'd been able to recruit more people for the hunt this year if the lack of attention to detail wasn't something we'd mentioned as a potential pitfall.  While there were certainly some other issues that made the first GAR a little short of all it could have been, I have to say that I'm the one feeling a little "crack-brained" over this one now.

Sorry Josh. :(