So, a little bit of a different flavour of challenge. Rather than a competition, this is a collaborative challenge. I have devised a series of rules, and y’all are gonna guess them. Yep, it’s Guess The Rules, what did you expect?
So, here’s how it’s gonna work:
The submission period runs from about midnight UTC to midnight UTC, give or take. This first one will be shortened, obviously.
In each submission period, you can send in one .car file and/or one guess for what a rule is. This has been changed - originally it was only one, now it’s both.
I will gather the submissions up, and give a writeup of whether each car passes/fails. For some, I may provide information on a metric related to the rule. For others, just pass/fail.
I will provide the text if people guess close enough to the rules.
The period ends at 8 AM my time. If I sleep in or have a busy morning, y’all will just have to wait.
Name each car “GTR - YourForumName - the current UTC date in DD/MM”. For instance, GTR - AMuteCrypt - 01/11. I’ll be a little lenient here.
Write guesses up as “GUESS: Whatever you guess”. For instance, “GUESS: Rule 11 is ‘must be a car’.”
I have written down each rule, and saved it on my computer. To keep me honest, I have provided the SHA-3 224 checksum for each rule’s text down below - UTF-8, no leading/trailing whitespace. Each rule’s text has been padded out to at least 60 characters, so don’t bother guessing.
The rules to guess can be seen here. You can comment to coordinate some of your guesses there, if you want.
Some FAQs:
Do I only get one guess?
– No. You get a new guess every day, with each new day beginning at midnight UTC.
How do I guess?
– Submit your .car file or your rules guess here in the thread for all to see.
Can I decode those hashes?
– Nope. There’s a massive amount of potential strings that map to those hashes, and it’s basically impossible to find out what the original string was. Online decoders can sometimes reverse hashes, but those rely on lookups of short hashes that are available publicly. Each rule is at least 60 characters long. Do not try to decode the hashes.
I’ve gotten 3 .cars, but none were posted here in the thread. For clarity, I want you to post your .cars here in the thread so that others can look over them and try to spot similarities. @moroza posted in the discord publicly, while @mart1n2005 sent a DM. Just want to check, are you all okay with me posting your .cars here in the thread? I also got a guess from @AndiD - I’ll handle that with the .cars.
I have to head off for some work stuff this morning, sadly. I’ll look over the entries when I can.
Everyone’s submissions have refreshed, by the way, feel free to submit something else - you get 1 per day, after all.
I’m waiting on approval to release .car files, but the results are up on the sheet. If an entry has anything other than pass in a cell on the sheet, it has failed that rule. I’ll edit the files into this message when I get approval from the submitters…
Rule 11 does indirectly mean something to that effect, but not quite - it’s possible for a car to break it, or for something that’s not a car to pass it.
OK, I’ll prolly submit a .car today. However, for the sake of coordination…
I’m pretty certain that rule 11 prohibits shitposts, low effort memes, or similiar shithousery. We might want to submit .cars that are on the serious-vs-shitpost spectrum to see where the exact delineation is.
Rule 15. “head” in the text kinda invokes the image of a cylinder head. And the “4” in its hint text kinda suggests a 4-valve-per-cyl valvetrain. Coincidentally, the only .car to pass rule 15 so far seems to also the only submitted .car with a 4-valve-per-cyl valvetrain. I think it’s a pattern worth investigating.
