Level 15

... One person mentioned a "bug" in the date calculation.

They did, but I don't know what they were talking about.

Obviously calendar dates are ambiguous when you go back far enough. Is this an issue, such that the calendar assumptions made by the "cal" command might not be compatible?

Even the person who claimed there was a bug said "It doesn't affect the date in question". Why doubt that?

Also, another person mentioned that Wikipedia had the date off by one. Is that right, i.e., this puzzle hinges on a date that may or may not be accurate depending on the source you look at?

Sorry, nobody can answer that unless they've looked at all possible sources. Wikipedia specifically isn't the best way to approach this one, but does agree with the unique date this riddle specifies. You did claim you read the page source, right ?

(what's an obvious difference between 2005 and 2004? there's a clue here that tells you the same about the year you're looking for

The last digit? If so I already did that - I only have years matching 1??6.

The way you're looking for the significance of the date can work, but is much harder than necessary. Try a search engine instead, like a normal person would .

I have! "monday january 26" "tuesday january 27" "january 27" "26 january [my suspected year from stuff mention in previous post]" "27 january [year]" previous 2 with date and month swapped, and th appended.

I can't find it!

(what's an obvious difference between 2005 and 2004? there's a clue here that tells you the same about the year you're looking for

The last digit? If so I already did that - I only have years matching 1??6.

The last digit is one obvious difference, yes. So what's an obvious difference between 2005 and 1996?

The way you're looking for the significance of the date can work, but is much harder than necessary. Try a search engine instead, like a normal person would .

I have! "monday january 26" "tuesday january 27" "january 27" "26 january [my suspected year from stuff mention in previous post]" "27 january [year]" previous 2 with date and month swapped, and th appended.

I can't find it!:wink:

That's probably because you've got the wrong year. Again, you found too many years. Find the right number of years, and everything else you're doing will work fine.

I finally got it. I'll try to post some clues here without spoilers.

As someone pointed out, looking at the spacing you'd probably first guess that only one digit is missing from the date. Two are missing.

The fact that it's an image of a calendar on a computer screen, with "screen" in the file name, is a red herring. It may be the case that on the date in question, it would be impossible for a calendar to have been presented in that format.

There's a date circled on the calendar. Dates are often circled ahead of time, as a reminder about something that is expected in the future. But you could you could imagine someone circling a date when something occurs, the date of which you wouldn't have known in advance. And if you can imagine that, then you can imagine that when something happens on a certain date, you would circle yesterday's date. If you can't imagine this, try harder.

Normally if you make a note to yourself to "buy X for tomorrow" that means you're buying something today for something you know will happen tomorrow, such as an anniversary. Obviously not for an event that you wouldn't normally know in advance will happen tomorrow. Or so you might think. But the shops might be closed, and you might mean it as "for tomorrow" in the sense of doing something not so much "for tomorrow" as "for today, but the shops are closed". Or something like that. Or you wrote "for tomorrow" because you were confused when the event happened, and circled yesterday's date, and then thought today was tomorrow, relative to yesterday. See?

Or you can just combine the circled date with the notion of "tomorrow" and not try to make sense of the story.

You normally think of the pronoun "he" as referring to something male. Normally, in most cases, or so you might think.

There is a good but easy-to-miss clue on the calendar having to do with properties of various years and months.

This is the only lame one so far. Don't look for much internal consistency here, so don't over-think it. Use the rot13/rot5 clue posted before, then go to wikipedia. Enter a year into the search box on wikipedia and you'll see a page with major events and dates from that year. In several categories. Repeat until you find a match. [/img]

I finally got it.

Congratulations!

... so don't over-think it.

Indeed! Most people didn't, so most people found this to be an easy level

Use the rot13/rot5 clue posted before.

Resist that. Most people won't need it -- really.

then go to wikipedia.

Type the right "month day year" into Google, and the answer is in 9 of the 10 top hits today. "day month year" isn't quite as obvious as that, but still good enough.

YES YES YES YES YES!

My clues: get a list of fitting years. you have now done all the work requiring thought, programming and inspiration. using month day year clue above, and tomorrow clues above, google, try name, repeat. break down mentally, petition for replacing this level, repeat initial process. whilst the above clues may be helpful, fully understanding them will require more intelligence than this level.

... My clues: get a list of fitting years. you have now done all the work requiring thought, programming and inspiration. using month day year clue above, and tomorrow clues above, google, try name, repeat ...

If you found and applied all the hints, there's no need to repeat -- the correct year is unambiguous. The correct day may be a bit fuzzier, but follows the common-sense interpretation of the hints.

If you found and applied all the hints, there's no need to repeat -- the correct year is unambiguous. The correct day may be a bit fuzzier, but follows the common-sense interpretation of the hints.

I think that's misleading, and it would have helped me not to have had that advice.

There are a few criteria you can glean from the calendar itself. Apply those to find a list of suitable years. Depending on the tool you use, and whether you find one particular subtle clue, your list may have 14 years, or 10, or 8, or 5, or maybe some other number.

It's "unique" in the sense that if you find the more subtle clue, then interpret your list of years according to another clue in a particular way (interpreting "**" to mean a year not a person, and "*******" in a way that applies to years, not people, and counting from the right end), then you'll have a unique year.

IMO the day of the month interpretation is "common sense" only if you don't think about what the clues actually say, and that's not what I think of as "common sense". You'd have to believe someone circled the previous day on the calendar when the event in question occurred, then wrote "tomorrow" to mean "today" or something. It doesn't work. Just take the word "tomorrow" as meaning "increment the date", and don't try to use common sense about the wording.

From the comments so far, most people who have found this one easy didn't try to interpret all the clues. It's easy when you ignore the clues and just treat it as a test of your google/wikipedia ability. Just narrow it down to the list of 14 or 10 or whatever you come up with, and look at the wikipedia year-summary pages for each of those years. As long as you've applied the most obvious clue correctly, you'll get it.

Also, when you do this search on wikipedia, look at all categories on each year summary page. The "common sense" interpretation of some of the clues might steer you away from events for which the date wouldn't be known until it happened, and that would be steering you wrong. You have to imagine that when this event occurred, someone circled the *previous* day on the calendar, for some reason.

Can someone who has solved this puzzle give us a clear hint as to how the solution can be found, once the correct year has been determined?

Eg:

See Wikipedia Year Page "1xx6"
Google for "January 2x, 1xx6"; it's on the first page

or even, if the clues point to the word "Herbivore"...

Google for "h********" "2x Jan 1xx6"

etc? Because there's so many possibilities of date-encodings to search for...

Dave

Really, all you need is the portions of the date you already know, taking into account mjpeter's 4th post on the first page, and/or the "todo" hint in the source..

It's a really hard one. I think I got the good year, I used hint1 when choosing it.
If it's an anniversary the what does the year matter?
The year only matters if the thing that we look for happened in that year.

I don't know why we need to use google in a programming riddle though. Level 14 was way better than this.

I've finally moved on past #15, but I found this to be one of the two most frustrating puzzles so far (finding the name of whom to call on the phone was the other). I think that the common obstacle with these challenges was that these puzzles aren't self-contained: you have to get some information from outside of the puzzle to solve it.

Reading through the hints in this forum when I was stuck, I found that many of the hints made this puzzle MORE confusing, not less. If you happen to think like me, here are the clues that (I think) would have gotten me back on track:

Warning: potential partial spoilers below!

(#1) The calendar you are seeing is from a year 1??6, despite that it looks awfully like it's missing a single digit between the 1 and the 6. I came up with exactly five years that meet the criterion 1??6, given the days of the week and the length of February. I would not be surprised if using non-Python libraries gave you different values, since calendar algorithms tend to be inconsistent with each other when you go back beyond this Unix epoch.

(#2) Yes, you could sort the five years from (#1) chronologically, but given those years, it would also be fair to order them "youngest" (the one closest to today) to "oldest" (the one most remote in the past). See the HTML comment for details.

(#3) Perhaps it's a cultural bias on my part, but given the circled date in question, "buying flowers for tomorrow" is terribly misleading because it seems logically impossible...the person keeping the calendar couldn't know that the event was going to happen tomorrow. Since this step involves offsite data mining, this is a frustrating place to put a logically impossible clue. (This is the clue that stumped me and, it seems, many of the other posters in the #15 forum.) However, I think that a simple way to fix the puzzle scenario would be to circle a different day on the calendar and have the todo clue read "send flowers for yesterday."

Despite my frurtrations with this aspect of the puzzle, this was another positive experience for me: I had fun solving it and learned about a new python module in the process.

Kudos to the pythonchallenge author(s)!

Ah, I didn't look at the February part... My fault...
By the way I don't think it was a good challenge.
It's not logical. Not logical at all.
So do not think in it in depth. If you do, you won't find the answer.

This level was sweet music to my ears!

-RB

I was looking for right name for about an hour, so:

Be Aware: the url is key sensative