Chapter 4 Winner
Dear Questors,
We are so happy that we have a winner for Chapter 4!! Annika Wolff from the UK has correctly submitted the winning sequence.
We had a bit of fun with Annika when we phoned her to tell her she had won Chapter 4. Take a look:
I’m sure you are all wanting to know the final sequence so Annika is telling you exactly what it is and how she came up with it.
From Annika:
The ’solving’
I’ve been treasure-hunting for years and am part of a great community at The Armchair Treasure Hunt club. As soon as the World’s Greatest Treasure Hunt was starting it was advertised all over the club forum, and so I placed my order just as soon as I could. When the book arrived I was excited to get stuck in, but life got busy and I suppose I didn’t really believe I could win such a worldwide hunt. I could barely believe it when Chapter 1 was won by my friend Roger, from the club. I didn’t know the chapter 2 winner, Gisela, but she also joined our club and from there became a good friend of mine. As a result of knowing two Eagle winners I have seen – and touched and held – their eagles at a couple of treasure hunting events and so I began to think ‘these eagles are amazing, and they are REAL and if my friends can do this, then so can I’. But Heather just pipped me to chapter 3 and that’s when my real determination kicked in for chapter 4.
Chapter 4 seemed simple to begin with. There were really clear pointers in the chapter to ’start at the Needle’, or at least ’start at the N’. Numbers were obviously very important. There were a lot of numbers in the chapter, more than were needed for the narrative. The father’s map was notes and numbers. But what threw me for a long time was the narrative also contained an idea of weaving and ‘three’. Starting at various Needles, or various N’s, I began weaving my way around that chapter in skips of 2’s and 3’s and I also tried applying skipping caesar to the text, it seemed quite logical, but my submissions were all rejected.
As the facebook clues came in, I was categorising them, they told me:
14 was important – valentines day clue, canadian thanksgiving/’twice as lucky’ (2 x lucky 7) clue. I took this to mean that N was important because 14 = N and I was still obsessed by needles.
Questions were important – riddle me this, judge a man by his questions, the Kryptos clue, the dichotomy is found by looking at two questions. I took this to mean the questions in the chapter for the longest time (more on that later!)
Two - we are told ‘two is important’ and that it took the Peralta family two times to figure out the stones. I didn’t really understand this until I realised where the sequences lay.
A cipher – there were many clues to the cipher: to take the answer from the book, to use all of the alphabet, to ‘clip’. At first I was just baffled – but there was really only one interpretation. I have to give credit to my brother, who is my regular treasure-hunting sounding board over the years, for mentioning this to me. He said perhaps you just use 1-20 like normal and then when you get to U you start at 1 again, so U becomes 1, V becomes 2 etc. Then some letters have a mapping to two numbers. It was so logical and fit the clues so I stopped considering it could be anything else, which I think helped me a lot.
There were other clues that I couldn’t categorise so easily, but each gave me some ideas, some of which have turned out to be correct. For example, ‘backwards in its own way’ said to me there was something funny about how the solution was found, like instead of turning letters into numbers we did it the other way round, which did sort of turn out to be the case at least in some sense! There were also a lot of key placements. As more of these came I actually stopped submitting solutions, as I couldn’t find anything that fit all the keys. I didn’t stop working on the hunt – each time a clue came I pounced on it and tried something new – but for a long time I was just really, really stuck.
Until…. 2 weeks ago. Two weeks ago a clue came out which pointed us to ‘turquoise’. This is the answer to a question in the book. Question 14. It all became crashingly obvious! My cipher - applied without any skipping or needles – to Question 14 gave a sequence that fit the key placements and the clues perfectly. So ‘Questions’ and ‘fourteen’ and my cipher method could have given me this so long ago if I had really thought.
What was interesting was that you could almost fit the key placements just by carrying on in Question 14. But then there were the ‘two additional numbers on a hunt of their own’. I had thought there might be two Caesar ciphers to apply at one point (these being ‘additional’ numbers). But in fact, it fit the notion better of two question numbers. The ‘this’ that happened five times could only be the cipher questions at the end of the chapter. Also this being chapter 4, FOUR was important. Using a cipher question meant that there were really two layers of text for each question. This made sense of the ‘two’ clues. Already one cipher question was used – so I needed another. The race was really on because from the Facebook postings I knew several people had a first ten, so if mine were right I had stiff competition.
For the last two weeks I was obsessively submitting sequence after sequence based on going forwards and backwards on both cipher text and plain text for questions 3, 6, 8 and 20, or putting plaintext and cipher text above and below each other and alternating. This was difficult for Question 8, where there wasn’t a direct mapping. But I kept coming back to question 8 because there were clues about ‘code-talkers’ and this was the code-talkers question.
I favoured sequences where key placements were ‘mostly’ right. I couldn’t really find ones where they were totally correct but we had been told that there were a couple of things throwing us off, so I kept submitting anyway. I favoured sequences where there were three leftovers at the end, because this is what a Joy clue had told us, about three stragglers. We already had possible keys for position 18 and most solutions I came up with meant two were used and there was only one candidate, so I could just try the remaining two in both orders as instructed by the clue.
The solution
In the end, the solution was so straightforward and logical! Using the cipher method, read first from Question 14 – as it is in the book. Then read from Question 8 – as it is in the book. This solution fit every single clue given, except to my thinking it had a funny key placement in position 15. Now I realise my possible mistake – the clue says ‘the 15th letter in the answer you seek’. So maybe it wasn’t a key placement after all, but a clue to locate the right piece of text. The 15th letter of the deciphered question 8 could fit the bill. The winning sequence is:
3,8,1,20,2,12,5,19,13,9,
14,10,4,6,7,15,11,17,18,16
I was so shocked to get the call. It was a Friday and the latest clue had just come out and I was panicking that this clue fit my thinking – but I had thought of another possible approach. To read first the Q8 plain text and then continue into the code-talkers. It was another pretty viable solution. I convinced myself that since I hadn’t had a phone call and since there was a new clue, my previous attempts were wrong. I was literally ‘in the middle of the hunt’ when the phone call came. I nearly fell off my chair in shock!!
We are excited to fly Annika over to Phoenix to claim her Eagle! We will be taking Annika on a treasure hunt through the Phoenix area on November the 19th. If you would like to join us please contact us for information on where to meet. (greatesthunt@yahoo.com) We’d love to see you!
We’d also like to congratulate Brian Hollenbeck from Kansas USA for submitting the correct answer 2 l/2 hours after Annika! The coolest part was that he only bought the book two months ago and was doing it with his kids. Way to go Brian!!
