So the Buzz competition was won! The escaped convict was found! The winner? From everyone at the Buzz team we want to wish CaptainIce a big congratulations, 500 points are coming his way! But how did he solve the riddles and puzzles we hear you ask? Well we wanted to find out too so we tracked him down! He was reclining on a sun-lounger drinking a Pina Colada when we found him, enjoying the spoils of winning!
He was more then happy to answer our questions about the competition and his answers were very revealing! We asked him about the first part of the riddle which contained a picture of some symbols. Intrigued as to how he solved it, he told us, “Well, for the first riddle, it was a 4 letter number! So the first thing I noticed was this picture with 4 different symbols on it! So I decided to search for Japanese numbers and I got a hit on few different numbering systems! So I looked at the images and matched them with numbers and then submitted it to the buzz contest website. Turned out to be correct!” Sounds nice and simple! We asked him if he recognized them as Japanese straight away, “Well, I watched animé for some time, I know how Japanese characters looked like, those looked quite similar my hunch was correct.” Excellent. However the characters were actually Chinese, but the Japanese numbers are similar so its a good way to solve it.
So onto section two. After you submit the correct code you receive a message with a series of numbers and a mobile phone. You are told to solve the number riddle and you will have the name of a person who you are to call. So we asked CaptainIce how he was able to solve part two, “So I search for the properties of that number, and got something interesting. It matched up with something called Fibonacci number. So I read more about it and understood how it works, but the numbers didn't give me a certain name, so I decided to simply write "Fibonacci" and surprise .. it worked” Excellent. But we also wanted to know how long this took him to find, “Actually, at first it came out with a number that was based in Vatican city! But then I checked other hits and one of them was a hit of the property of this long number, and from there I looked up Fibonacci number and read about it for a while before making an attempt!”
Well that makes the second section look easy! But onto the third and final section! After inputting the name you make the call and a voice gives you a series of clues. He tells you that you already have some of the numbers but you need the 10,000th number and with this six digit number it will lead you to a dock side container which has the escaped convict. So how did he solve this confusing riddle? Here is what he told us “The only number smaller than 6 digits so far was 7919 (solution of first part). I checked the properties of this number, and one property was that it's the 1,000th prime number. So I looked up the 10,000th prime number and it was a 6 digit number! Tried that and it was correct.” Again nice and simple when you know the answer!
We probed deeper into CaptainIce's background. We asked him if this was his first win on a Buzz competition, “Yes, I won twice before actually. One was a similar riddle like this one, the other was a highest unique number game and I got very lucky with that one.” We probed deeper, as he seems very lucky, to find out if he has found a common theme amongst these competitions and he told us, “I wouldn't say one theme no. They did a singing competition few weeks ago, a number game and riddles, so they do try and change the theme from time to time” When probed if he had any ideas for future games or what he would like to see he told us that he didn't have any suggestions.
Finally we asked him if he had any plans of what to do with his winnings and he told us, “ I'll probably stack them up with my other points until I think of something to do.” When asked for any final comments he wanted to tell everyone to “just enjoy the game.” Nice and simple. But the way he solved this riddle... Was it a stroke of luck? Or after three wins on Buzz competitions is there a sign of a high intelligence present? We'll leave that for you to decide!
