Rogue Signal
Easter eggs are hidden and often gamified surprises found in all kinds of media and technology, intended for consumers of the media or technology to discover through regular, accidental, or otherwise unconventional methods of interacting with the media or technology.
There’s been a lot of hype around AI systems in the past year or so, and rightly so. Some of these AI systems, such as the ones creating amazing digital art like DALL-E 2 and the more recently released conversational AI, ChatGPT, both from OpenAI, are downright astounding in their capability.
Puzzlecraft, or, the art of creating mind-teasers like riddles, ciphers, and puzzles, is a discipline spanning diverse and eclectic subjects. Many of us who practice this art may not be well versed in all of them. I, for example, am horrible at coming up with riddles, while I excel at creating ciphers. For those of us lacking in one subject or another, we now can utilize the power of AI to pick up our slack. In this article, we’ll explore a few examples of using AI to assist in puzzlecraft.
I)ruid has been bringing challenges and puzzles to DEF CON himself for over two decades, and under the Rogue Signal brand for nearly half of that time. This year, for DEF CON 30, we significantly upped our game by building and branding a custom Scramble! game interface that we’ve dubbed “Hac-Man“.
After Dustin D. Trammell‘s little puzzle for the Bitcoin 2021 conference was so well received (albeit by a small number of players), Dustin decided to build a much larger, more in-depth and complicated puzzle and challenge game for the following year, Bitcoin 2022. What resulted was absolutely epic in both size and scope… We called it Pyramid Scheme (because LOL fiat money visual design).
After ariving late in the evening the day before the Bitcoin 2021 conference, I was unable to sleep, so I decided to create and host a puzzle for the conference with a Bitcoin prize. I utilized my Twitter account to announce and post clues to the puzzle.
This is a walk-through of the puzzle and its solution. Spoilers below!!!