Zen Master (87381): After winning a round of Zendo, the player was given a slip with the number 87381 written on it! Administrative Assistant (54935) Each string is a number of related words with one letter missing from each word (missing letters in lowercase): BRoWN BlUE oRANGE GrEEN BLaCK REd YELLoW HOMaN BAIlEY CaNOSA kWON RaJ PERl PYTHoN rUBY LiSP AdA JAVa LiON GnU LEOPARd TiGER SnAKE ZEBRa tHYME SAGe BaY BAsIL The missing letters spell OLORADO, ALAKA, LORIDA, INDINA, TEAS. Those are U.S. states missing the letters C, S, F, A, X. The number of the main CS department fax (calling from on campus) is 5-4935. Cryptographer (34350) The "four-letter alphabet" is RNA. If you treat brown as A, black as U, pink as C and blue as G, the meeples spell out AUG ACC AUU ACG AUA AAC UCU CUG GAG AAU GGG ACA CAC UAA which, converted to proteins, creates the amino acids TITINSLENGTH (both a start and stop codon are also given, to hopefully help with decryption). Titin, the longest known protein, is a chain of 34350 amino acids. Mailroom Guy (93066) Each addressee's name has the same first four letters as their town. All 24 permutations of the first four letters are represented exactly once in the set, with the last initial ordering the permutations (so Sylvia A matches Sylvester with order 1234, Brian B. matches Braidwood with order 1243, and so on - this info is not strictly needed to solve though). The missing permutation is to swap the second and fourth letters, so Simon F. must be from a city in CA starting with Somi, and there is only one, Somis CA 93066. Code Monkey (1152): The given "code" is written in the language Ook, and written in a spiral. Once un-spiraled and executed, it prints out a program in the language Brainf*** (which happens to be isomorphic to Ook). This is also written in a spiral. When un-spiraled and executed, it prints "Number of Ooks". The number of "Ook"s appearing in the original program is 1152. Number Theorist (57081): The answers to the trivia questions by group are: 1, 1, 2, 2, 4, 4, 8, 10 2, 22, 164, 1030, 5868 1, 1, 2, 3, 7, 13, 31, 66 2, 8, 32, 54, 114, 414 As indicated by the first letters of the questions, you should look up each group in Sloane's Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences. These are the initial terms in the sequences 13, 184, 3120 and 6552. Those four numbers are in turn the initial terms of the sequence 57801. Due to an error in the original construction of the puzzle, the intended answer was in fact 57081, and this error was communicated to teams during the hunt. Math Teacher (6559) Most of the decryption (color -> number) can be done early on, for example the upper right box must total 45, this only works if red is 2 and light blue and yellow are 1 and 4 in some order. Light blue must be 1 to make the region in the lower left totaling 11 rather than 44. Final color code is: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 LightBlue Red Grey Yellow Green Pink Orange Purple Black Lime Killer Sudoku solved grid is: 743196852 962538714 518472936 356924187 174685293 289317465 697843521 431259678 825761349 The arithmetic computation at the bottom is 23*19*(7+8)+4 = 6559. Matchmaker (42173): Running the applet gives the solver a series of Numberlink puzzles (see nikoli.com for more) except that for some "numbers" (colors here) more than two points are given. For each non-practice puzzle, the top of the applet has a different color background. The set of meeples in that particular color for each puzzle will form the shape of a numeral. These numerals are, in order, 4 2 1 7 3. Crossword Constructor (421386): This puzzle has two noteworthy features. One is the long (theme) answers, which spell out CONVERTCOLORS/TONUMBERS/OUTSIDEOF/STROUTSOFFICE. The other is that six of the squares need to contain a whole color word. From top down (as indicated in the flavor text), these colors are red, orange, blue, black, white and green. Outside Prof. Strout's office is a set of meeples, in the order: Blu Org Blk Red Yel Grn Pnk Wht Gray with a 1 written under the blue and a 9 written under the gray. Thus, your six colors convert to the digits 4 2 1 3 8 6. Photographer (907200): Each meeple in each photo is covering a single letter. Putting the covered letters in order by rainbow (red/org/yel/grn/blu/purple) and within each color by number of dots, spells out BUILDING NUM PRODUCT. The six photos were taken in (or near) buildings 9, 4, 70, 8, 9 and 5, which have the product 907200. Jeweler (538): Each clue leads to a seven-letter word. For each "red" word, a yellow and blue word can be found so that the three can be interwoven in the fashion indicated by the photo, one letter per meeple, where the secondary colors are letters common to two words. For example, with the first red, PADDLES, the LE match with the yellow RELEARN going the other way, and the AR of that match with the RA of blue CRAWDAD going up (which also matches DA/AD with PADDLES). The eight matches, ordered by red word clue (note that this set is not in alphabetical order!) are: paddles/relearn/crawdad sidearm/prayers/freddie benecol/toccata/stained isomers/greater/getlost uniform/trooper/reprint enamels/eleanor/tongans sooners/treerat/cartoon trainee/sensing/unimart Reading the central three letters of each set, as indicated by the arrow, you get DEW/EYD/ECI/MAL/FOR/MAG/NET/ISM - which is 538. META: There is a unique mapping of answer to Greek letter. Specifically: a = 538 (Jeweler) b = 93066 (Mailroom Guy) g = 1152 (Code Monkey) d = 54935 (Admin Asst) eps = 907200 (Photo) z = 57081 (Number Theorist) eta = 34350 (Crypto) th = 6559 (Math Teacher) i = 87381 (Zen Master) k = 421386 (Crossword) l = 42173 (Matchmaker) Reading the indicated digit of each answer (1-indexed), the Where comes to 74-1961 and the how 19-36-05. Going to 74-1961 (a stairwell that is not labeled locally but is on floorplans) locates a padlocked box. The combination to the padlock is 19-36-05.