wheee

This blog isn't sad!

Grats. What was the competition, out of curiosity?

Hah! Congratulations.

Well.... can we see the entry?

Please?

CONGRATS

WRONG WRONG
THAT IS NOT A PUZZLE
ELATION REPLACED BY FURY

Basically, you know that puzzle where you have a piece of paper, you draw three houses and three utility stations and you have to supply all the houses with electricity, water and gas by drawing pipes/cables between them? But the lines can't cross?

Well, I did that. Firstly I made it a bit more computer-y by replacing the house and station elements with graphics cards and input ports. Also, learned people among you may know that that the above puzzle is impossible. I fixed that by introducing a 3D element.

Basically, my entry consisted of lots of little cute cartoony cardboard computer components - C-C-COMBO. There was a base board - the 'motherboard' with lots of holes in it, three little 'graphics cards' with pins to fasten them to the board, and three 'ports' with the same. The cards each had three wires tied into them.

You had to stick the cards and ports anywhere on the motherboard. You then had to use the wires to connect each card to all three ports. The wires were not allowed to cross, but must remain in contact with the motherboard at all times. So far, so impossible.

BUT, once the puzzlee had flailed around for a while, I had also included a 'Hint' envelope. This hint consisted of a small piece of card with question marks on it. There was a short piece of wire that went in one side, went along the other side and then went back through again.

That was the trick to solving it. The wires have to always stay on the board, but I never specified which side of the board.

It's still fiendishly hard though, even once you've cracked the secret. So hard that I didn't actually manage to complete it myself. And therefore wasn't able to include a solution. Evidently they didn't mind.

Also I included some background information, including a page that looked like it was torn from a computer manual - except it was all blurred out apart from the simple rules I set (it was my way of getting around the fact that real computers are nowhere near this simple), and a bullshit 'Letter from the Distant Future', explaining that the year is 2013, all computers have three graphics cards now, motherboards are now modular, and Adam Oxford, their tech editor who would be able to fix any computer issue, is off sick with recently discovered Adam Oxford syndrome.

I'll send in some scans when the next issue of PCGamer comes out.

Ah, so that wasn't the entry? My bad.

Thank God, I thought I must have been really dumb to not even see what the puzzle was.

Congrats. Pretty cool stuff.

Congrats, dude. Good work.

Congratulations.

I like that this blog contains hapi.

nice going, man.