12) Space Assassin

[scouserob]

schlendrian

I'm not sure I buy your explanation, but I love it, I love it a whole damn lot, nevertheless.  😀
At least it ties back to that pink sky and red moon.  😂

As for the up and down, if we are going into relativity then we could possibly say that up and down is defined purely by whatever forces are acting on us in the moment.
General Relativity tells us that the force due to gravity (which we use to define up an down) is indistinguishable from and equivalent to the force we feel in any accelerating frame of reference.

Up and down, which we naturally align to the direction of the gravitational force we are experiencing, are therefore ghostly/illusory concepts at the best of times, and certainly are so inside a spaceship like the Vandervecken, which obviously somehow generates its own artificial gravity.

Up is aligned the the corridor ceiling purely because the artificial gravity is pulling us down to the floor.
If that artificial gravity field was suddenly inverted then the ceiling would be down and the floor would be up, without anything having moved.

A whole lot of waffle to be sure, but maybe...

[kieran]

Probably worth noting that The Warlock's Way has similar questions where there seems no clear logic to arriving at the right answer beyond having the same mindset as the author. There's also that password you have to guess in Rings of Kether based on absolutely nothing. So maybe these abstract, impossible to solve 'puzzles' were just one of his quirks as a gamebook designer. The spectrum puzzle in Space Assassin also falls under this as while there is a clear logic to solving it, the reader has to guess that this is the logic they need to apply.

Though Chapman did claim that the floor tile puzzle was inserted by an editor so I guess that isn't part of that pattern.

[vastariner]

Which is faster, light or time?

SPOILER: Click to show

Time, because something can happen here at exactly the same time as something happening in the Andromeda Galaxy, but we won't know about that other thing for 2 million years.

If King Charles MMCXXII dies on 61 Cygni B, then William MMCXXX on earth is king instantly, not when news reaches us.

Up/down/real/ghosts?

SPOILER: Click to show

Ghosts, because they are relative. Quoting my niece on Australians: "do they know they're upside down?" There is no absolute up or down.

The other words in the riddles are pure decoration.

[Wizard Slayer]

100% on the Up/Down riddle. I always got this one.

SPOILER: Click to show

It's Space Assassin. And there's no up or down in space.

[schlendrian]

I'm very much convinced that my reasoning concerning the pink sky and red moon is correct. I especially don't think that part is just decorative, otherwise I'd hate that puzzle. A good puzzle should utilise every piece of information it gives you.

The time part, yeah, as I said, probably Chapman wasn't entirely certain where he wanted to go with that either.

vastariner, the Theory of Relativity has basically killed the notion, that two events can happen at the same time, unless they also happen at the same place. So, if any king dies on 61 Cygni B, there simply does not exist an objective fact what "the same time on earth" means - two persons moving relative to each other would disagree about that and therefore about, when William would become king.

The takeaway from that is, that monarchical succession rules are not compatible with the known laws of physics.

[scouserob]

The Tank Battle

Near the end of the adventure, you can accidently play the "Fight to the Finish scenario of the street fighting war game."
So that is a one on one tank battle in a New York style, skyscraper dominated, cityscape within the Vandervecken!

Initially I wasn't too impressed with this whole mini-game until I started mapping it out and realised just how much effort had gone into it.
Now I really like it.
Playing it unmapped involved a lot of tension, wondering where your opponent was whilst hoping he wasn't going to appear behind you or to your side.
(The first you'd know of that was the impact his shot damaging your SHIELDS, and possibly blowing your tank, and you, to smithereens.)

Solving it after mapping was a fun puzzle.

The enemy tank moves in a regular pattern looping after every 16 STATUS rounds.
All of this can be worked out by the status events which correspond, as far as I can tell, perfectly to the relative positions of your tank and the enemy tank.

So, here are the enemy tank positions, along with its line of sight.
You basically want to stay out of these red and orange squares as if you venture into them you will be fired upon.

I've worked out a nice 16 STATUS loop for your tank which I will post in the solution thread for Space Assassin.
You can stay away from that if you wish and try to work out your own solution, perhaps one which gives you more shots per STATUS loop than mine.

One tricky part is the fact that you basically skip forward a STATUS round after every encounter with the enemy tank.
So whether you fire at him, him at you, or you both fire at each other, after your next move you will have skipped a STATUS round.

(My solution gives you 2 shots per every 16 STATUS values without any chance of being shot at.)

[sylas]

I still hate it, but I appreciate the effort you put into solving this.

[schlendrian]

Sept 10, 2023 12:07:43 GMT scouserob said:

4. The Floor Tiles: Step on the wrong tile and it's goodbye.
The numbers of the tiles have nothing to do with providing a solution.

Sorry for bringing this up again, as I don't have a solution, just an aspect of the puzzle that I think has not been considered. The first line of the puzzle specifically does not talk about a wrong path, rather a wrong tile. Your efforts,scouserob as you laid out have been in considering what differs the true path from the wrong path, but it could just be that most of the tiles on the wrong paths are totally fine and the puzzle asks you to find out what constitutes a wrong tile and then pick the only path that does not have a single wrong tile.

As I said, regrettably that is all I got and really, I'm basically convinced that I'm not onto something with this, I just found it interesting.

[scouserob]

Sept 17, 2023 16:47:16 GMT schlendrian said:

The first line of the puzzle specifically does not talk about a wrong path, rather a wrong tile... it could just be that most of the tiles on the wrong paths are totally fine and the puzzle asks you to find out what constitutes a wrong tile and then pick the only path that does not have a single wrong tile.

I didn't consider that.  I like your thinking.
That would mean there would be a wrong tile in each of the following sets:
{6, 33}
{16, 17, 38, 42, 90, 104}
{61, 78}
{9, 16, 104}

And no wrong tiles in the set:
{2, 8, 12, 15, 22, 49, 54, 81}

I can't see much in the way of a pattern at first glance.  Especially looking at those two sets with just two elements.
The digit six is in all the bad sets but it doesn't exactly tally with the italic nothing in the text.
(The digit zero being bad would be perfect.)

I'm leaning towards the cynical view that this was just a random path choice and the numbers having nothing to do with the puzzle was literal and not a clue.
Which would be rubbish.
That answer of 255 sticking out like a sore thumb amongst the possibilities does give me some hope that it is otherwise.

[schlendrian]

That's what I meant, and yeah, I've until now been unable to find any pattern either, and yeah, I'm tending towards the cynical view either.

[vastariner]

"Step on the wrong tile" does not mean there is only one wrong tile...after all, otherwise, if there is one wrong tile, and it is (say) 6, then you could just go from 32 to 8...

[schlendrian]

As I don't have the book: What does happen on the wrong paths?

[a moderator]

Sept 17, 2023 20:41:07 GMT schlendrian said:

What does happen on the wrong paths?

As the book puts it:

you have been blasted into your constituent atoms and will have to start the adventure again.

[schlendrian]

Ah yes, while that's delightfully laconic, it doesn't further understanding of the puzzle.

vastariner, you are correct that you should be able to step over single tiles, though if you weren't, that wouldn't be the first case where gamebook logic and real world logic are not compatible.

[IoannesKantakouzenos]

Sept 10, 2023 12:07:43 GMT scouserob said:

4. The Floor Tiles: Step on the wrong tile and it's goodbye.
The numbers of the tiles have nothing to do with providing a solution.



Answer:

SPOILER: Click to show

Go on the centre path half way and then the left path in the second half.

First I found the totals for each of the nine routes:


The 255 jumped straight out as being one less than a power of 2, and being involved in colours (RGB was the combination for the the earlier Gravity Bomb safe.)

255 is 11111111 in binary.  The opposite of nothing!?!?

In 8 bit colour 255 is white, which kind of looks like nothing on the page, though it is, again, more like everything.

In ASCII 255 is a non-breaking space, use it and you'll see nothing.

That'll do me.  Kind of. 😬
[Alright, that explanation it is almost beyond tenuous.]

So, assuming you don't loop around or jump over tiles, there are nine paths.
You can go left, centrally or right in both the first and second halves of the route.
A one in 9 chance is a bit ridiculous for a random guess so there must be more to it... surely.
(OK, so two paths total more than 400 so that makes 7 options.)

First time through I just went down the middle, always the middle, like that poor tentacle armed victim of Cyrus' experimentation said.
Wrong!

On my second attempt I focussed on that italicised nothing and came to the correct path.
(Possibly through luck more than judgement, though there was still only a 1 in 6 chance for a pure guess to be right.)

I'm not 100% convinced of my solution but it makes some sort of sense and is in the spoiler box.

I always assumed you could step on any number of tiles regardless of path (which, of course, makes for an even more impossibly difficult puzzle); nevertheless, since I started from that assumption (and since I cheated to know the correct result and worked from the other way round), I arrived at this solution:

[IoannesKantakouzenos]

May 2, 2023 19:35:14 GMT a moderator said:

The original English text definitely has an option for having done neither, so that's either a translation issue or a mistaken memory.

Translating it (almost word by word), it reads "Did you become friends with the boats' robot (turn to 171) or did you shoot against the board computer (turn to 38)?", so I most definitively say it's a translation issue.