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You wake up in an underground maze, at the location marked with $X$ in the below image. A voice tells you: "You need to find the exit of the maze if you want to live!". You begin to panic and run around the maze, but just after a few minutes you find the exit and escape. You are still in a cave, so you head to what seems to be an exit, when suddenly a crazy man jumps in front of you with a gun in his hand and says: "If you followed all the clues in the maze and don't want to get shot you would be able to tell me what's the color of the sky outside right now!".

What do you tell the crazy man?

Maze

Notes

  1. I will only accept an answer that can explain how you came to the solution.
  2. The "cave" you enter after leaving the maze is just meant to prevent you from the seeing the color of the sky. You can imagine that the end of the maze is just a small room with an obvious door at the end saying "exit".

Hint 1:

The only thing that you have to figure out is the maze, the text has no clues in it.

Hint 2

If you are at a computer the device to help you solve this should be close to you.

Hint 3

As people have guessed already the device is a keyboard

Vajura
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    Microsoft Paint FTW :') – Marco Bonelli Mar 17 '15 at 12:11
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    I'm waiting to see the answer before I upvote or downvote your question. This is either really clever or arcane, and it's too soon to tell which... – Kevin Mar 18 '15 at 04:14
  • More relevant to the puzzle, I just tried a reverse image search of the maze on Google and got nothing useful, so that's not the trick... – Kevin Mar 18 '15 at 04:16
  • It seems the author drew the picture him/herself. Besides, I interpret the second hint as a separate device that can help you solve it, not the computer itself. Would be really disappointed if the "device" was actually a software, since it's described to be "close to you". A mouse/keyboard seems like the first things to think of, but I don't know. – RickardNi Mar 18 '15 at 08:29
  • Is there no way to edit your own comments? Anyway, I figured out which device he/she meant (I'm certain of), and it's neither the mouse/keyboard. :) – RickardNi Mar 18 '15 at 08:59
  • No its not a software and its not the computer.It is as you figured something that would be close to the computer in real life, but i am not telling you if your assumptions are correct or wrong :) – Vajura Mar 18 '15 at 09:15
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    I would guess that hint 2 refers to a keyboard, and that the path through the maze encodes a letter sequence on the keyboard. – Gamow Mar 18 '15 at 09:29
  • That's really smart, didn't think of that at all. Haven't found anything that makes sense yet though. But I like the idea. Problem is that even though the number of columns make sense, the numbers of rows really doesn't. At least 4-5 rows would be represented by the maze's height, and a keyboard only have 3 rows that makes sense in spelling out a word. – RickardNi Mar 18 '15 at 11:52
  • One thing I really wonder about the riddle (but prehaps it would give away too much information) is: Has the crazy man been watching you while you ran around in the maze? That has a huge impact on the riddle, since if the answer is no, he cannot be certain that any places in the maze have been visited, except the direct path from X to the exit. The riddle states that you've paniced and ran around, so that opens up possibilities to dead-ends that can be tied to the answer, but how can the crazy man possibly know what path you took? – RickardNi Mar 18 '15 at 12:15
  • I can say that the crazy man saw every path you took and you indeed took every path and ran into every dead end in the maze. But as i wrote the crazy man is just a story element. I could have just posted the maze with some hints the story is just fluf. Since you can see the whole maze in the picture i posted you can asume you ran into every dead end before finding the exit. – Vajura Mar 18 '15 at 12:20
  • Ah, I see, that certainly clarifies it and opens up to some ideas I discarded before, and makes some of my other ideas worthless. :) Another round it is. – RickardNi Mar 18 '15 at 12:22
  • I changed the title to describe the puzzle better, and also changed the tag to something I think is more appropriate. Do rollback if you disagree :-) – Rand al'Thor Mar 18 '15 at 12:50
  • @randal'thor I'm not sure that's the correct title. The original question was "what do you tell the crazy man?", not "what colour is the sky?". Presumably a potential answer doesn't actually involve selecting a colour at all. – Digbyswift Mar 18 '15 at 14:21

9 Answers9

11

The color of the sky is:

white

There are 6 Fs that can be identified in the maze, which means the color is #FFFFFF

enter image description here

Len
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overloading
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6

The colour of the sky is

Grey
There are 9 key strokes used, URD-LUR-ULU. If you add the keyboard code of each to get a RGB value this comes out as R 117 G 114 B 113 or #757271 or a mid grey

Digbyswift
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5

enter image description here

He got out of the cave and entered into the other cave as shown in the image. So that, means he didn't understood that he is entering in to another cave in the same maze. Which means it was perfect dark. That means night (darkest night). So the color of the sky will be black.

AeJey
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  • Nope this isnt what i was going for, also added a note for clarification on what the "second cave" looks like – Vajura Mar 17 '15 at 12:46
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I think its time to post the answer to this puzzle, i should have made a better job at describing everything, oh well here it goes :)

The image is actualy a overlay for a keyboard. The intersections in the maze tells you which letters to take(apart from the starting position). So with this you just need to find the correct position and the only one that roughly provides a word is if you put the starting position over the letter N which then spells out NIGHT, so since its night outside the color of the sky is BLACK.

Vajura
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    I don't understand the solution. What are intersections? How do they correspond to keyboard letters? Maybe include a picture. – xnor Mar 19 '15 at 06:51
  • Intersections are places in the maze with multiple possible paths. Imagine printing out this picture and then placing it on top of a keyboard so that the starting place is at the letter N – Vajura Mar 19 '15 at 07:02
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    I can't see how someone could have figured that out. And if someone had posted this solution, I would have thought it to be grasping at straws the same way the other posted solutions area. There's lots of steps that are unclued and don't get confirmed: overlaying on a keyboard, starting at (and including) the letter N, looking at maze intersections, and taking the anagram. A lot of the maze structure and the story gets ignored. I think the idea was cool, but the puzzle turned out way harder than you intended. – xnor Mar 19 '15 at 07:19
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    I did exactly this. Because I thought the device was a printer, so I printed it, and tried different markings, like the dead ends, the turns. Then I placed it over my keyboard to try to find words that made any sense. Even after spedning quite some time doing this, I couldn't figure out the answer, and still don't understand fully. Even when marking the intersections I can understand it, as there is no intersection for the letter N. – RickardNi Mar 19 '15 at 08:19
  • Ok, I think I got it. I agree with xnor, but I actually do think the hints and discussion opened up the possibilities for some parts. Obviously I was close, since I did the overlay thing with the keyboard. But seriously, I would probably not have figured it out anyway. The intersections are hard to figure out itself (because they are way less obvious than the dead-ends which I tried), and not only that, the intersections are not enough for the solution. The answer involves intersections + the starting point. I don't think there was clues enough to even remotely indicate this. – RickardNi Mar 19 '15 at 08:27
  • Yea looking back at it i should made it better, my bad! Lesson learned atleast – Vajura Mar 19 '15 at 08:41
  • I like these hybrid puzzles! I came close to its solution, and only missed one crucial idea: your puzzle is centered around the crossings and not the turning points of the corridors. – Gamow Mar 19 '15 at 08:52
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    No, I don't think this is correct. When I overlay the maze on my keyboard, with the starting position above "N", I get the following key presses from the intersections: nui fgtr5. – Ian MacDonald Dec 09 '15 at 19:41
1

An idea nobody seems to have tried yet:

Logo commands. Link in case people don't know what I'm on about.

Your path out of the maze, imagining you're

the Logo turtle,

would correspond to the following list of commands:

FD300
RT90
FD100
RT90
FD400
RT90
FD400
RT90
FD300
RT90
FD200
LT90
FD200
LT90
FD200
RT90
FD300

(by some rough length measurements made on my computer screen). This could be made even more complicated if you want to allow for the possibility of trying dead ends and doubling back, but then the solution would be non-unique.

Maybe these letters and numbers can somehow be turned into a colour code?

Rand al'Thor
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0

It's a shame it's hinted that the answer is something to do with the maze and a keyboard because the following occurred to me:

The crazy man states, "if you followed all the clues in the maze and don't want to get shot you would be able to tell me what's the color of the sky outside right now!"

So, given that at the time I am escaping I am unaware of any clues existing in the maze, visual or otherwise and given that I am panicked as I escape, I can assume that I did not follow any clues whilst escaping.

The crazy man states that I'll be able to tell him the colour of the sky if I followed the clues AND don't want to get shot. Therefore I can't tell him the colour of the sky because only one of those statements is true.

Therefore to answer the question "What do you tell the crazy man?", I tell him "I can't tell you the colour of the sky."

Digbyswift
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    It's a riddle, and it was already mentioned that you explored the whole maze as visualized in the original question, and that the crazy man was added mainly for a story telling part. Granted it's not perfectly worded or told, but I think everyone can see the riddle concept, given the clues and comments. – RickardNi Mar 18 '15 at 15:34
  • @RickardNi I am not questioning whether it is a riddle - it certainly kept me frustratingly entertained! I'm just offering up a different and perfectly valid answer based on the information provided. I hoped that my initial sentence mitigated against anyone thinking that this was anything but food for thought. – Digbyswift Mar 19 '15 at 13:28
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It will just be SKY BLUE :D

The runner was just finding the exit but was in the cave where there cannot be seen any light. But the man with the gun asked for the color of sky while he was running in the maze.

I guess he would just say sky's original color, sky blue.

raisinghellyer
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Nai
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  • In fact this is always the answer. The sky is always sky blue, even at night; only your eyes can't see it. – Joshua Jun 02 '16 at 15:26
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The answer is blue (or possibly black).

The question clearly states that I'm the protagonist of this story. That means that I'm wearing my watch (which states the time). Given that I too have trained under a master of chronobarbology I can also estimate the passage of time by my beard-growth to within a fair degree of accuracy.

Community
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Richard
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-1

He just said the color of the sky because the maze has no roof, only walls

muhsin panthakkan
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    It states you're in an underground maze, and once out, you're in a cave. So yes, I assume there is a roof. – Digbyswift Mar 18 '15 at 12:37