Rogue Signal
Pyramid Scheme was back for a second year at the Bitcoin 2023 conference! If you are unfamiliar with this game, please do take a look at our walk-through of the first iteration of the game from last year. We won’t be covering all of the details of the theme or how the game works here, but rather walking through some of the more interesting puzzles and challenges from this year.
Many types of puzzles have visual elements to them. From literal jigsaw puzzles that display an image when completed to marketing campaigns with hidden meaning through iconography and subtle placement of visual elements, embedding puzzles into artwork is a natural fit for Artists.
This guide is intended to provide Artists with an introduction to puzzle-integrated art and provide some examples and brainstorming prompts to get the creative juices flowing.
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.
Wednesday, the new Tim Burton detective mystery thriller on Netflix centering around Wednesday Addams (yes, from the Addams Family) being sent to boarding school, is chock-full of Edgar Allen Poe references, both overt and some more subtle.
For the Pacific Bitcoin 2022 conference we created a short game that followed a surfing narrative, as surfing was also a central theme of the Santa Monica, California based conference.
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!!!