The Ralis Conundrum

**Important**:

Please give your thoughts on a proposal I had:

School has started up again, and that means it's time to get your brain back in shape!

Every Wednesday, at some varying point of the day, I'll be posting some sort of weekly challenge for you to figure out. Each week brings a new puzzle: it may be a math problem, a riddle or something else entirely. Whatever it may be, you'll have to use a little (or a lot of) brain power to figure it out.

These puzzles may require knowledge outside of Ragnarok! Anyone is capable of finding the answer, but I cannot guarantee you will always know what to do if you have little to no understanding of Ragnarok, computers, math, science, etc.

The competition is open to both servers! Chaos Renewal and Classic Loki players may both enter their answers. It may help you to know, then, that the answer to each challenge will be something that can be found by players of both servers.

Correct answers may win a prize at the end of the week. However, only a certain number of prizes can be given out and all correct answers are entered into the prize pool. Please do not try and use multiple accounts to get better odds! We check account connections. If you're caught doing this, you will be automatically disqualified from present and future competitions... Including OTHER events on the forums as well.

Please keep in mind that the theme for each week is not always a factor in figuring out the puzzle. This does not mean that it will never have an impact, but rather that you should not assume that you must travel to a location or that the answer must fit the theme given in that week's conundrum.

Please do not post or PM your answers. Use the link below the challenge to submit answers!

You may freely adjust your entry until each week's deadline.

Helpful links:

iRO Wiki

iRO Wiki Renewal Database

iRO Wiki Classic Database

Google

I don't consider search engines cheating. You will never find the answer directly, but always use your resources!

Please do not ask questions related to this week's challenge on the forums. Questions regarding the competition as a whole are fine, but we want to avoid any hints or answers being posted directly on the forums!

This Week's Challenge

Week 8: Scavenger Hunt [ 10/8 - 10/14 ]

Flagpost                                              Bench                                               Tree

                                                   Vendor Carts & Stands                             Guard Station                                        Lamppost

The Committee for the Rehabilitation and Advancement of Prontera (C.R.A.P. for short) has determined that the city of Prontera is not receiving enough tourism lately. In an effort to draw visitors to the city and quite literally force them to walk every square inch of the castle's town, they've created a scavenger hunt using various things you can find around the city.

Multiply the number of Flagposts by the number of Benches.
Subtract the number of Trees.
Multiply by the number of Vendor Carts & Stands.
Divide by the number of Guard Stations.
Add the number of Lampposts.

Once you know how many of each item are located on the entire Prontera map, solve the math problem above and submit the answer to (possibly) win a faaaaaaaaaaabulous prize*!

*This week's prize partially sponsored by C.R.A.P.

Click Here To Submit Your Answer

This week's prize:

Party Hard Pack

The competition ends Tuesday, October 14th at 11:59 PM PST! Good luck!

Edited by Ralis, 11 October 2014 - 10:01 PM.

Last Week's Challenge

Week 7: Pyramid Scheme [ 10/1 - 10/7 ]

Somewhere in the Morroc Desert is a magical pyramid. Resting atop its peak is a beautiful gemstone, said to be worth billions of zeny. Members of the Rogue Guild have been trying to plunder the artifact for years, but always fall short... For you see, the pyramid grows larger and larger every few days. Through various failed attempts to find an entrance into the pyramid, the Rogue Guild knows that the pyramid is completely solid with no hollow areas or missing brick. The tip of the pyramid has 1 brick, the supporting layer under that has 4 bricks, under that 9, etc.. Eventually, it was discovered that each brick of the four-sided pyramid corresponds to a post on the official WarpPortal forums, and, as adventurers post on the forums and enough bricks are created to form a complete layer, the pyramid rises up from the sand and grows by exactly 45 centimeters. What causes this amazing occurrence? Who in their right mind would use forum posts to create bricks for a magical pyramid? Who cares! There's treasure!

Anyway, the Rogue Guild has commissioned your help in finding out the height of the pyramid so that they can build a ladder to reach the top and steal the gem. Of course, Rogues are also very thrifty people and they don't want to make the ladder any taller than it needs to be.

If the angle between the ground and the pyramid's face is 40°, how tall does the ladder need to be to reach the pyramid's tip if it is leaned against the side of the pyramid? Round to the nearest whole centimeter.

Assume that the ladder will not sink into the sand (even though I bet it totally will) and that the Rogue Guild will be placing the ladder exactly in the middle of one of the four sides of the pyramid.

(Please keep in mind that you may need to edit your answer if that pesky pyramid grows sometime during the course of this week's puzzle)

Disclaimer: Edits for 10/1:

Edited a few lines for clarification: it doesn't matter that the bricks are square / identical, and in fact I guess it makes it more confusing. Instead I gave you the number of bricks in the top three layers of the pyramid: 1, 4 and 9. I also removed the perpendicular to the base part because it's redundant if the ladder is already in the center of one of the four sides.

Here's a (hopefully) helpful diagram for those of you that are still confused by the wording:

Last week's prize:

Mystical Card Album

The Solution

The answer is 11831 cm.

The first thing we need to do is find out how many layers are in that pyramid. If you look at the forum index and scroll to the bottom, you can find the statistics for the forums. At the time of writing this solution, there are 1,634,337 total posts on the forums. Since we know that the pyramid is 4 sides and we're already given the number of bricks in the first few layers (1, 4, 9) we know that the number of bricks in each layer is going to be equal to width x height. I suppose you could work out the number of layers for yourself by hand, but I'm lazy and decided to easy mode things by letting a spreadsheet do it for me.

As we can see, 169 layers can be completely filled with the number of bricks we have so far. For another layer to pop up, we'd need to get to 1,652,145 posts, and we're still about 18,000 posts away from that!

Now that we know how many layers are in the pyramid, we can get down to business. Each layer of the pyramid is 45 centimeters tall, so:

169 x 45 cm = 7605 cm

Now to find out the height of the ladder, we need to make a right triangle. To do this, we can cut the pyramid in half and draw a straight line down the center. We already know that it is 7,605 cm tall and that the angle between the ground and the face is 40°, so we can now calculate the other two sides using the Law of Cosines.

Since we are trying to find the Hypotenuse (h) side of the triangle using the Opposite side, we need to use Sine. I won't go into a lengthy trigonometry lesson, but here is the problem hashed out:

sin 40° = 7605 / h

h x (sin 40°) = h

h = 7605 / (sin 40°)

h = 7605 / .6427...

h = 11831.28

If we round to the nearest whole centimeter, the ladder would need to be 11831 cm tall (I didn't ask for units, so if you included it or didn't include it, don't worry, I still counted your answer correct).

As I had hoped, this week's proved to be a little more difficult for a lot of you; there were 29 correct answers this week. The winners, chosen randomly by survey number, were:

spikexp, byliew2, neko1231, bunnywunny and Anonymous!

Congratulations!

Please check your mail or inventory on the character you listed on the answer page for your prize. Please give Oda until next week's maintenance to deliver prizes!

Edited by Ralis, 07 October 2014 - 10:19 PM.

This Week's Birthdays

Happy Birthday to the Following Players:

Archives

Week 7: Pyramid Scheme [ 10/1 - 10/7 ]

Week 6: Where in the World [ 9/24 - 9/30 ]

Week 5: Trouble With Tiles [ 9/17 - 9/23 ]

Week 4: A Colorful Conundrum [ 9/10 - 9/16 ]

Week 3: Unlock the Safe [ 9/3 - 9/9 ]

Week 2: As The Kasa Flies [ 8/27 - 9/2 ]

Week 1: Mystery Picture [ 8/20 - 8/26 ]

Edited by Ralis, 07 October 2014 - 10:07 PM.

Good luck everyone~ Happy hunting!

There shouldn't be any questions on this one... Pretty straight forward.

If you took basic Math and programming class, say C/C++/Java, last week's question is quite easy and solvable within 15mins. And most importantly, SOH-CAH-TOA! xD

Congrats to the winners!

It took some pestering and tricky maneuvering, trust me. x_o Trees and flag posts were much easier as there's a ton of those, as you're all about to learn~

I counted trees six different times, by the way. I spent HOURS making sure I had my numbers right... So I really hope no one finds anything I missed.

Edited by Ralis, 07 October 2014 - 10:22 PM.

It took some pestering and tricky maneuvering, trust me. x_o Trees and flag posts were much easier as there's a ton of those, as you're all about to learn~

So it's vendor carts only and not vender stands? There's a difference and likely one that people aren't quick to notice.

*Grumble* I included both in the image to hopefully clear that up, but I'll specifically say Carts AND Stands if that helps you.

*Grumble* I included both in the image to hopefully clear that up, but I'll specifically say Carts AND Stands if that helps you.

ALWAYS a question.

Here's a question for you all, actually:

I was thinking about converting from a 5-people-win-each-week-and-the-rest-get-nothing system to a point system where you can earn points for each week's correct answer to go towards prizes.

It would mean a lot more weeks of being correct (I'm thinking 5 weeks = prize worth ~100m) to get a prize on the level that have been given out recently, but it would at least make everyone a winner. Thoughts?

I'm not sure if I'm missing part of the forums but when I count the posts in here http://forums.warpportal.com/ I can only reach something like 1.60X.XXX posts.

I'm not sure if I'm missing part of the forums but when I count the posts in here http://forums.warpportal.com/ I can only reach something like 1.60X.XXX posts.

There's a post counter at the bottom of the forum index that has it as 1,630,000ish.

Edited by Ralis, 07 October 2014 - 10:47 PM.

As I had hoped, this week's proved to be a little more difficult for a lot of you; there were 29 correct answers this week. The winners, chosen randomly by survey number, were:

spikexp, byliew2, neko1231, bunnywunny and Anonymous!

spikexp, byliew2, neko1231, bunnywunny and Anonymous!

spikexp

spikexp

spikexp

There's a post counter at the bottom of the forum index that has it has 1,630,000ish.

my bad, I missed it :/ 

my bad, I missed it :/ 

It's a bit tricky because there are forums not everyone can see. No worries!

 

 

**Important**:

Please give your thoughts on a proposal I had:

Instead of a system where only five people win each week and the rest get nothing, I was considering adopting a point system where you would win points for correct answers and could trade in points for prizes. This would allow everyone to win, but you would also need to get about five weeks correct to trade in for a prize on the level of what has been handed out recently (value of around 100m).

 

Points for each week would also fluctuate based on how "difficult" that week's puzzle was, based on the number of correct answers. Something along the lines of 100/correct answers = points per player, where 1 is the least amount of points you could ever get for a correct answer (the average would be about 2, based on numbers for past weeks) and 10 points would equal a 100m prize.

 

Please post thoughts, pros / cons, etc.!

 

 

I like this idea; the only con I see is that this will result in more correct answers as there is no penalty for collusion among participants (limited # of prizes in the previous scenario)

I suggest that the point system be retroactive.  Like a previous poster said, there have a lot of people over the many conundrums so far who have gotten correct answers but missed out due to RNG. 

To be fair to all (both people who have been playing from the start and people just starting), set the totals of anyone who has won in the past to 0 and credit 1 point per correct answer for everyone else, regardless of the difficulty of past puzzles.  This is because it is likely that more people would have participated in difficult puzzles if they were aware that they would get more pts for them.

Thus someone who has been correct on every conundrum so far but missed out would have a maximum of 6 pts (even though there have been 7 conundrums, there were only 2 correct submissions in week 1, meaning that everyone was rewarded).

You may get more participants with a point system. 

I know I only attempt this if the prize is worthwhile to me, I'm sure there are others that do the same.

(Although it means I may actually have to do these now instead of holding out for a good prize)

If you took basic Math and programming class, say C/C++/Java, last week's question is quite easy and solvable within 15mins. And most importantly, SOH-CAH-TOA! xD

Congrats to the winners!

didn't need to know programming

Such convenient formula! >.<

calculators are all over the place.  something i found just now: http://easycalculati...idal-number.php

you can just plug in numbers until you get something close to the post count.  there were also calculators that gave you the various measurements of a square pyramid using at a minimum 2 inputs.

I think that the spirit of this game is to have fun trying to solve the riddles and challenge yourself.

The possible prizes are icing on the cake. I personally don't like the idea of a point system since it encourages answer sharing or multiple entries from the same users.

The top prize would have to be something like an oca to make it trivial enough to go with a point system.

 

School has started up again, and that means it's time to get your brain back in shape!

Congratulations to the winners!  (One of these days, RNG.)  Looks like I"m not the only one who used the sum of squares formula.

If you give out points, I think a more balanced approach would be that the points are a second chance thing for people who did not win that week's draw,.that can be traded for lesser (possibly tiered) rewards.  This leaves the element of luck competing for something good, but also gives dedicated participants a way to at least get something for their effort.