DudleyDude

no, not a guess. Would have gotten it a day earlier if I hadn't stupidly decided that h was the 7th letter of our alphabet

I've pretty much hit a wall on this one. The way I've been looking at the poem so for is that the first stanza sort of give directions. I think the "Get in position..." line somehow refers to the first 2 lines of each stanze while the "And take it to..." line refers to the last 2 lines of each stanza. So I think each stanza should somehow correspond to a number raised to the power of a 2nd number (x^y) and that will equal one of the 6 available numbers for us to choose. I think we have the word answers for each of the last lines in each stanza, but I haven't found a way to map those to the available numbers. Also, if the above is at all right then it might help to look at the available numbers in terms of x^y. They are: 23^5 12^5 18^4 3^10 14^4 5^6

Thanks Fab. I ran into so many deadends with the original numbers and didn't really want to start over with the revised ones. DD

I'm not sure I understand the b7-f7. Couldn't f7 also be reached from d7? If so, I think this eliminates most of your following deductions. But I do think that this is a good approach although I'm sort of hoping one of the programmers will just write an exhaustive search to find the right path...

grrrr, was writing up my failures and realized I had made a mistake and then found the answer. The actual sequence should be 28,31,48,21,18,42. I found a nice table for the Hiragana characters that was in "alphabetical order" and I used it to decode to Hu Ma N Na Tu Re -> Human Nature. I think this is probably the final answer.

I thought about the periodic table but couldn't build any words with the elements corresponding to the numbers. I'm going to keep googling for some sort of manga/anime connection, but I really don't know anything at all about that scene.

Heya Fab, those were good thoughts. I still haven't come up with any useful 6 letter word. From the hints, it would seem that the sequence going out 48 iterations is significant, but I don't have a good guess as to why the 48 is important. I'm also afraid that the cartoon reference is either a manga or anime reference and I also know 0 about that and haven't had much luck when trying to google "manga/anime green haired twins". I know that manga/anime seems to be a favorite with some of the younger BD crowd so I'm really hoping that someone will chime in with something helpful. When I simply look at the final "riddle" from the twins, my best guess so far would be 'oxygen' but I didn't want to start blindly guessing answers w/o being able to tie it back to the code in some manner. Also, the last number in my final sequence (28,31,48,21,18,28) could also be either 21 or 42. All three numbers (21,28,42) correspond to the final 84,7 pairing. That might help

My apologies for not using a Spoiler but I think we are all playing together against the Witch and trying to reformat this inside a spoiler would be a huge pain. This is what I have so far. Nothing I can make much sense of, but maybe will help everyone else. The nth term in sequence K is: (49 - n)/[2|3] where '[2|3]' means 'either 2 or 3', but I haven't yet figured out when to use 2 instead of 3 or vice versa. Similarly, the nth term in sequence H is: n*[1|2|3|4] Rewriting the sequences with the variable choices yeids: H: 3,2,2,2,3,3,4,1,3,2,3,1,2,3,1 K: 2,2,3,3,3,2,3,2,3,2,3,3,2,2,2 I'm guessing that we need to figure out the rules behind the 2 sequences and extend them out far enough to find the corresponding pairs that K and H quote at the very end (112,21), (93,9), (48,0.5), (84,14), (18,10.3), (84,7) and that the values of n for each entry will end up corresponding to a 6 letter word. Since the H sequence involved [1|2|3|4], I decided to try that as well for the K sequence. I'm still not sure how to decide which multiplier/divisor is used, so I opened a spreadsheet and calculated all 4 possible H and K sequence numbers for n=1:48. I then looked for n's where both the final values quoted by H and K were existing for that value of n. That yielded the following sequence 28,31,48,21,18, 28. I still don't know if this sequence is significant nor how to convert it to a word.

[spoiler=you guys started w/o me ]22.4 liters in a mole of ideal gas at standard temperature and pressure

Here's a few to get started (without explanations). I'll try to add more after work.

Agreed. Well hosted. The puzzles were fun and I'm looking forward to the next one.

0 ) . 3 4 ()3) )6 ) ), .. ) , ()4) ) 3 .) )3 5 )4 ()5) 5 )4 .0 5 ), .0 ) .. )4

I keep coming back to this and keep coming up blank. @PG - Do you have a link back to Shakee riddle you reference?

(1) 88888888 164,165, 155, 165, 154, 164, 165, 157, 165, 163

(4) (999) 999-9999 677678863

The clue is in the first spoiler. Still not positive of the final answer, but my first guess is in the 2nd spoiler Sometimes I get excited when I solve (or partially solve) a riddle and then realize that PG beat me to it by a wide margin....