Puzzle In xkcd Book Finally Cracked 90
An anonymous reader writes "After a little over five months of pondering, xkcd fans have cracked a puzzle hidden inside Randall Munroe's recent book xkcd: volume 0. Here is the start of the thread on the xkcd forums; and here is the post revealing the final message (a latitude and longitude plus a date and time)."
Google maps link (Score:5, Interesting)
FYI, a google maps link to the location:
http://maps.google.com.au/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=37.769573+-122.483123&ie=UTF8&t=h&z=16 [google.com.au]
time and date: 2010-06-26 14:28:57
Re:The problem is that there's no article. (Score:5, Interesting)
Indeed. Having read the thread, I suspect I've just witnessed a mathematical game of Mornington Crescent. [wikipedia.org]
Solving the XKCD puzzle... (Score:5, Interesting)
As I suggested in the linked XKCD forum, now that the puzzle is solved, it would be really nice to have a full write-up of the entire thing, including the unsolved puzzles themselves and a little more detail and background about the whole thing. That would have made for a much more interesting story to the general public.
Direct linking to an unorganized web-forum thread isn't really much of a story. Oh well.
For what it's worth, the puzzles in the XKCD book were really fun. They ranged from pretty simple (ROT-13, etc) to fiendishly clever. Even though every comic is available online for free, I'm glad I spent the money on the book.
I was lucky enough to solve the final puzzle myself, and therefore happened to be the first person to have all eight keys and decrypt the message. As lame as this might sound, it was pretty thrilling.