Ever Encounter A Puzzle Cache With Errors?

[+MysteryGuy1]

I went after a puzzle cache over the weekend that turned out to be slightly incorrect.  Clearly, most people have either failed to notice the mistake or managed to work around it, as the cache has a high number of finds.  But in my case, it turns out that I only found the cache because I initially made the same mistake myself.

This cache involved getting information off of a gravestone and doing various calculations to get the actual coordinates.  One piece of information involved determining how old the person was when she died.  However, the puzzle expects you to simply subtract birth year from death year, and does not take into account that her birthday had not yet occurred when she died.

So naturally, I took it literally and spent 15 minutes combing a spot nowhere near GZ.  Thankfully, I decided to try the other option which led me straight to a find.

Still, it amuses me that so many people have found this either without noticing the error or without being tripped up by it.

[+Max and 99]

Yes. Quite a few. Even going after FTFs. Once in a while, someone finds an error on mine too. 

[fendmar]

Yes, one that immediately comes to mind is an older mystery cache which failed to factor in the equation of time that put the cache miles from the actual correct solution. It had been found for years without problem. I guess all the solvers made the same error so it never was corrected.

That's a big part of the reason why checking your solutions against maps and satellite imagery is a good idea before heading for the door.

[+redsox_mark]

Yes I've found errors, including the exact same case as the OP.   It was on a multi.  The question was "How old was X when he died", and I calculated the correct answer (taking into account his birthday).   The CO just took the difference between the years.   

I've found more errors and ambiguities with field stages/multis than "solve at home" puzzles, but I've found issues with those too.   And sometimes as a CO I've made mistakes too.  

I had a recent case which I don't understand how it happened.   A multi.   Need to count the number of boards on a bridge.  There are 62.   It was found by 30 or so cachers over 2 years without an issue.  Then there were 3 DNFs where the cachers said the coordinates took them to an inaccessible place.   Then a find.  My calculations took me to an inaccessible place.  I phoned a friend who confirmed I was in the wrong place and gave me the final coordinates.   The formula was assuming 26 boards, not 62!   I told the CO, but he didn't believe me, as the previous cacher found it and claimed there were 26.   Fast forward a couple of months, the next finder comes along and has the same problem as me, and uses the corrected formula I put in my log and found it.   Now the CO has updated the formula.   But still not sure what happened, would be a strange coincidence if the bridge was repaired, replacing 26 wide boards with 62 narrow ones.   

[+arisoft]

1 hour ago, MysteryGuy1 said:

This cache involved getting information off of a gravestone and doing various calculations to get the actual coordinates.  One piece of information involved determining how old the person was when she died.  However, the puzzle expects you to simply subtract birth year from death year, and does not take into account that her birthday had not yet occurred when she died.

Integral part of this game is some kind of mind reading.The correct answer may not be the same what the cache owner has in his mind. Even the simplest tasks can be difficult to do in the right way. Just think about counting stairs. Never the same result. As experience gains, it is easier to solve them. Sometimes you may earn an extra FTF if you are good enough to guess what has gone wrong.

[+Mudfrog]

Quote

This cache involved getting information off of a gravestone and doing various calculations to get the actual coordinates.  One piece of information involved determining how old the person was when she died.  However, the puzzle expects you to simply subtract birth year from death year, and does not take into account that her birthday had not yet occurred when she died.

So naturally, I took it literally and spent 15 minutes combing a spot nowhere near GZ.  Thankfully, I decided to try the other option which led me straight to a find

Just curious, what makes you think the puzzle "expects" you to simply subtract birth year from death year? Since the simple method was wrong, but factoring that the birth day hadn't arrived yet was right, it makes me think that the CO got it right. The finders that did it the simple way were the ones that erred.

[+J Grouchy]

1 hour ago, Mudfrog said:

Just curious, what makes you think the puzzle "expects" you to simply subtract birth year from death year? Since the simple method was wrong, but factoring that the birth day hadn't arrived yet was right, it makes me think that the CO got it right. The finders that did it the simple way were the ones that erred.

Example:

John Smith

Born 8/15/1900

Died 6/15/1960

Sounds like the CO would have made the equation based on 1960-1900, yet the actual AGE of John Smith was 59, since his 60th birthday was two months AFTER his death.

[+Max and 99]

I can't even get that far. It's stumping me!

[+niraD]

I can't claim credit for discovering it, but around here there is (was?) a puzzle that involved the geometric relationship of the earth to the sun. Except that the equations used by the CO assumed that the earth is a sphere. A more experienced puzzler pointed out to the CO that using a more accurate model of the earth's shape produces a different solution, and now the puzzle specifically tells you to assume that the earth is a sphere.

[+barefootjeff]

There's one I did a few years back that involved counting the number of wheels on a sign. There was a bicycle and a motorbike, which were fine, but also this depiction of a SUV. There were the two road wheels, which the CO had counted, but also the spare wheel on the back which he hadn't. And is that a steering wheel inside the vehicle?

 

Edited July 31, 2017 by barefootjeff

[+Max and 99]

Oh that's funny! 

[+fizzymagic]

1 hour ago, niraD said:

I can't claim credit for discovering it, but around here there is (was?) a puzzle that involved the geometric relationship of the earth to the sun. Except that the equations used by the CO assumed that the earth is a sphere. A more experienced puzzler pointed out to the CO that using a more accurate model of the earth's shape produces a different solution, and now the puzzle specifically tells you to assume that the earth is a sphere.

I believe that was me correcting the CO. 

I have found many, many puzzles with errors both big and small in them. Having created a pretty large number of complex puzzles, errors are pretty likely.  I always have someone play-test my cache puzzles before I put them out. That catches most, but not all, of the errors.  Fixing errors as soon as they are found, *and making the correction on the cache page itself, not as a note*, is important. There will inevitably be errors, but they can be minimized.

Conceptual errors are more difficult to address.  For example, I recently tried to solve a cache that used atomic masses from the periodic table. It is pretty clear that the creator didn't understand how the atomic masses of the elements are determined, and how those can (and do) change fairly regularly.

Coordinate calculations making bad assumptions about UTM, and spherical earths, etc. are also very common.  Puzzles using one source for locations of e.g. cities are another conceptual problem.

Whenever I encounter a cache with careless errors, it makes me annoyed.  If the puzzle creator didn't care enough to double-check their puzzle; why should I care enough to solve it?

[+edscott]

Did one years ago that used the coordinates of a historical house in the general area of the cache as one factor in calculating the final location.  Quite some time after that house was built another house was added to the farmstead about a hundred feet away from the original structure.  The wrong house was used when designing the puzzle.

  

[+Isonzo Karst]

A number of times. A Sudoku that had two solutions, generating two different sets of possible coords,  both feasible.  
CO added info to the listing that clarified which location.

A simple letter=number substitution (a=1, z=26) from info off sign, where CO was 1 off in his conversion, which was then 1 off in latitude hundredths, ie about 60ft. Findable, but tough.

And a complicated mess of datum and coord format conversions that would only yield reasonable coords if you made the same errors the CO did. Took a long time for someone to find that one. Once someone found it, others did. Finders log was a masterpiece of quiet understated, but understandable, assistance in error making ;-)

 

[+J Grouchy]

21 minutes ago, barefootjeff said:

There's one I did a few years back that involved counting the number of wheels on a sign. There was a bicycle and a motorbike, which were fine, but also this depiction of a SUV. There were the two road wheels, which the CO had counted, but also the spare wheel on the back which he hadn't. And is that a steering wheel inside the vehicle?

 

Well...doesn't an SUV typically have four wheels on the ground?  I mean, I know the depiction on the sign only shows two, but...

 

[+niraD]

9 minutes ago, Isonzo Karst said:

A number of times. A Sudoku that had two solutions, generating two different sets of possible coords,  both feasible.  

I can see that happening. I've encountered that situation with Sudoku and KenKen apps, where the puzzle didn't have a unique solution, and the one I came up with was not the one that the build-in puzzle checker was expecting.

[+Mudfrog]

3 hours ago, Mudfrog said:

Just curious, what makes you think the puzzle "expects" you to simply subtract birth year from death year? Since the simple method was wrong, but factoring that the birth day hadn't arrived yet was right, it makes me think that the CO got it right. The finders that did it the simple way were the ones that erred.

 

1 hour ago, J Grouchy said:

Example:

John Smith

Born 8/15/1900

Died 6/15/1960

Sounds like the CO would have made the equation based on 1960-1900, yet the actual AGE of John Smith was 59, since his 60th birthday was two months AFTER his death.

But i think the OP stated that the coordinates he got were wrong using the simple subtraction. The correct coordinates were had when he factored in that the birthday hadn't yet been reached. In other words, the cache's owner placed the cache so that it could be found using the not yet reached birthday formula,,, which would be one year less than what a person would come up with if they simply subtracted the born date from the death date.

[+barefootjeff]

13 minutes ago, Mudfrog said:

 

But i think the OP stated that the coordinates he got were wrong using the simple subtraction. The correct coordinates were had when he factored in that the birthday hadn't yet been reached. In other words, the cache's owner placed the cache so that it could be found using the not yet reached birthday formula,,, which would be one year less than what a person would come up with if they simply subtracted the born date from the death date.

I read it as the other way around; the CO had merely subtracted the years but the OP had taken into account the birth and death dates.

[+J Grouchy]

14 minutes ago, Mudfrog said:

 

But i think the OP stated that the coordinates he got were wrong using the simple subtraction. The correct coordinates were had when he factored in that the birthday hadn't yet been reached. In other words, the cache's owner placed the cache so that it could be found using the not yet reached birthday formula,,, which would be one year less than what a person would come up with if they simply subtracted the born date from the death date.

What I got from the OP is that the CO's formula would (using my example) give you 60 while the CORRECT answer would be 59.   I don't know why there's any confusion about this...it seems straightforward to me.

[+hzoi]

49 minutes ago, barefootjeff said:

There's one I did a few years back that involved counting the number of wheels on a sign. There was a bicycle and a motorbike, which were fine, but also this depiction of a SUV. There were the two road wheels, which the CO had counted, but also the spare wheel on the back which he hadn't. And is that a steering wheel inside the vehicle?

 

Nope.  Wheels have axles.  Spare tires (or, if you prefer, tyres) do not.

 

edit: And no steering wheel depicted in your photo.  So, also no.

 

edit 2: on topic, yes, I've encountered errors on puzzle caches that I've owned and had to correct them.

Edited July 31, 2017 by hzoi

[+barefootjeff]

6 minutes ago, hzoi said:

54 minutes ago, barefootjeff said:

There's one I did a few years back that involved counting the number of wheels on a sign. There was a bicycle and a motorbike, which were fine, but also this depiction of a SUV. There were the two road wheels, which the CO had counted, but also the spare wheel on the back which he hadn't. And is that a steering wheel inside the vehicle?

 

Nope.  Wheels have axles.  Spare tires do not.

The thing on the back is more than just a tyre, it has a hub as well, and that combination is usually referred to here as a spare wheel. Also when I go into the shop to buy a set of "alloy wheels" they don't come with axles!

[+hzoi]

10 minutes ago, barefootjeff said:

The thing on the back is more than just a tyre, it has a hub as well, and that combination is usually referred to here as a spare wheel. Also when I go into the shop to buy a set of "alloy wheels" they don't come with axles!

I can't help it if you don't speak proper American English.    (kidding!)

 

Seriously - yes, if they are called spare wheels in your neck of the woods, then I see your point.

[+kunarion]

6 hours ago, MysteryGuy1 said:

I went after a puzzle cache over the weekend that turned out to be slightly incorrect.

 

I've seen some that had errors, and some got fixed after I let the CO know.

While planning a trip to Oregon from Georgia, I found an error in an unsolved puzzle cache at my destination.  So I notified the Cache Owner.  Although I had figured it out, it seemed unfair to leave the mistake in place.  The only reason nobody found it was because of the mistake.  Three months before my trip, that puzzle got corrected.  Now everyone would have a fair shot at FTF.  And the same day I arrived, someone else logged a Find .  Yeah, I flew to Oregon, checked and there were yet no Finds, sweet, I can get FTF.  I drove the 200 miles straight to the cache, signed the blank log roll, did more caching, and when I logged my Find from my laptop once I had a wifi connection, someone else had already logged it online.

Another cache that had a mistake in its puzzle was a "5 difficulty" puzzle that never was solved.  I wrote to the Cache Owner, since the mistake, an extra "#" symbol, would change the entire meaning of the puzzle if it was in fact part of the puzzle.  The CO deleted the extra symbol.  So I corrected a cache without even knowing the solution.  It was later archived with no finds.

I especially check out newly published puzzles, where none of the usual suspects have logged a Find, or where they are logging their frustration instead of Finding it.  Those puzzles might have mistakes.  I don't need to run some likely solutions, since the locals did that already.  Where everyone else tried to solve it, I look for the mistake.  

 

 

Edited July 31, 2017 by kunarion
Corrected Mistakes

[+fizzymagic]

1 hour ago, kunarion said:

 And the same day I arrived, someone else logged a Find .  Yeah, I flew to Oregon, checked and there were yet no Finds, sweet, I can get FTF.  I drove the 200 miles straight to the cache, signed the blank log roll, did more caching, and when I logged my Find from my laptop once I had a wifi connection, someone else had already logged it online.

Um, you know that FTF is generally determined by the order of signatures in the log, not the order of posts online, right?  Yours was still the FTF, for whatever that's worth.

[fendmar]

6 hours ago, fendmar said:

Yes, one that immediately comes to mind is an older mystery cache which failed to factor in the equation of time that put the cache miles from the actual correct solution. It had been found for years without problem. I guess all the solvers made the same error so it never was corrected.

That's a big part of the reason why checking your solutions against maps and satellite imagery is a good idea before heading for the door.

This one's been archived, but if you would like to have a look.

[+Mudfrog]

4 hours ago, J Grouchy said:

What I got from the OP is that the CO's formula would (using my example) give you 60 while the CORRECT answer would be 59.   I don't know why there's any confusion about this...it seems straightforward to me.

Read the opening post again and yeah, i guess you're right. I was reading it that he thought the CO expected people to just subtract, and when he did that, he wasted 15 minutes looking in the wrong spot. Since everyone else seems to be seeing it the same, i guess i was reading it bass ackwards. 

As far as puzzles, and even multi caches, i've placed a couple that had errors in them. As far as i know, i got em straightened out after the errors were brought to my attention.

[+J Grouchy]

10 hours ago, fizzymagic said:

Um, you know that FTF is generally determined by the order of signatures in the log, not the order of posts online, right?  Yours was still the FTF, for whatever that's worth.

Yeah...I thought that had been well-discussed in here and was pretty obvious. 

[+baer2006]

I like puzzles and multi caches, and I also like to get an FTF on these every once in a while. So I encountered a lot of errors in puzzles or multi stages over time. Many were trivial to fix or work around, others not so. Very common among the trivial ones is that the CO asks to "sum the numbers", when they actually mean "sum the digits". Not the same, if the sign (or whatever) has multi-digit numbers, but typically the results are vastly different so it's clear what you have to do. Typical errors, which are more or less impossible to fix without the help of the owner, are e.g. question-and-answer type of puzzles, where several answers are hopelessly ambiguous, or the formula to calculate the coordinates is completely wrong, or where crucial parts of the puzzle are downright missing . Seen all of this many times. Difficult, but often solvable without owner help, are puzzles where the owner understands less about the general topic than the cachers trying to solve it (like e.g. long-distance coordinate conversions, which are mathematically invalid but still "supported" by a carelessly implemented smartphone app).

On the other hand, I once made a silly mistake with one of my own puzzles. It was a multi-step D5, where the last step involved a one-time-pad decryption. But I accidentally got the encryption/decryption backwards, so you actually had to encrypt the cryptogram again with the one-time-pad to get the plain text. FTF/STF/TTF logged without mentioning anything, and only the fourth finder told me that my puzzle had a serious flaw .

[Ranger Fox]

A puzzle cache in my general area had a simple puzzle: look up one piece of information and choose one of four possible answers (GC76MFF).  Each answer had coordinates with it.  An easy puzzle.  Unfortunately, the coordinate template into which you were supposed to put your answer wasn't right!  What compounded this was the hider had an event to unveil the geoart that included this puzzle.  Everyone who got the printouts at the event had the right coordinates.  So the logs were all finds until I got there with someone a week or so after the event and tried looking for the cache, having solved the puzzle on the cache page.  The bogus final coordinates led to somewhere interesting, so we spent a lot of time looking there.

I've also gone after coordinate projection caches where the owner didn't project properly.  The problem here was one of them was done as a tribute cache to me, so I had it before it was published.  After making six or seven trips to the cache site and investing well over eight hours looking for the cache (the cache owner was known for devious hides and I'm known for not liking to ask for help), I finally gave up and called the guy to ask for information.  It turned out he was around 0.15 miles off in his projection.  I didn't like that my time was wasted, but it sure makes for a good story if I were to tell it in full.

Mistakes can happen, but it's sad when the cache owner doesn't want to invest that extra minute in verifying things, causing others to waste hours of their time.

[+fizzymagic]

10 hours ago, baer2006 said:

On the other hand, I once made a silly mistake with one of my own puzzles. It was a multi-step D5, where the last step involved a one-time-pad decryption. But I accidentally got the encryption/decryption backwards, so you actually had to encrypt the cryptogram again with the one-time-pad to get the plain text. FTF/STF/TTF logged without mentioning anything, and only the fourth finder told me that my puzzle had a serious flaw .

 

That's not a flaw, strictly speaking.  If the one-time pad was implemented using XOR, encryption and decryption are the same!  If instead it was by modular addition, then it is known as a "variant" version.  It may not have been what you intended, but it was not illegitimate encryption!

[+baer2006]

9 hours ago, fizzymagic said:

 

That's not a flaw, strictly speaking.  If the one-time pad was implemented using XOR, encryption and decryption are the same!  If instead it was by modular addition, then it is known as a "variant" version.  It may not have been what you intended, but it was not illegitimate encryption!

It wasn't XOR, it was indeed "modular addition". A one-time-pad used like a very long keyword for a Vigenère-style encryption (which is what is described in the Wiki article on OTP). Obviously, it wasn't a show-stopper, but I still consider it an embarrassing bug.

[+jellis]

Had a cacher point one out while was in the field. I had to fix it and gave a good friend my password and asked them to change it.

Had parking coords also be way off.

 I try looking at my puzzles different ways.

Would you believe I had one I created only to have (not blaming) a reviewer release it before I was ready with the final coords visible. Had to recreate a new puzzle.

[+Goldenwattle]

I've had puzzles with wrong checkers.

[+Viajero Perdido]

I struggled through a letterbox-style cache of the sort: "walk on heading xxx to a spruce tree, then 30 meters to the nearest birch cluster..." There was a major error in the instructions, plus a minor one, which I realized when it wanted me to walk onto a freeway. Figured out the mistakes with some difficulty.

 

And I realized, this'd be a great theme for a puzzle: "There are two mistakes in these instructions". A free idea if anyone wants it.

[+niraD]

2 hours ago, Viajero Perdido said:

And I realized, this'd be a great theme for a puzzle: "There are two mistakes in these instructions". A free idea if anyone wants it.

I've heard a similar suggestion for "rethrowing" a car rallye. The idea was to take the instructions from an old car rallye and produce it again without changes. The trick is that in the intervening 30 years since it was originally written, a new freeway has been built, new subdivisions have been developed, roads have been renamed, etc., etc., etc.

[+*GeoPunx*]

All it takes is one slip of the finger. <---famous last words, huh? lol

I have discovered errors in puzzles(both large & small). The CO's have always been very appreciative of my reaching out to them.

After a pretty big bungle on one of my own puzzles(luckily I had someone helping me); I now have a fellow cacher, and a different non-cacher, test all of my puzzles for me. That does not 100% eliminate problems, though...if my testers make the same mistakes that I do!

I try really hard to get them right before publication, though.

We are all human. Mistakes happen. This is a game. 

[+coachstahly]

Been there, done that, both as a seeker as well as a hider, despite my best intentions.

[+arisoft]

52 minutes ago, *GeoPunx* said:

We are all human. Mistakes happen. This is a game. 

 

Sometimes the real puzzle is just to figure out the error in the puzzle to solve it "correctly". In that case the geochecker is quite important.

 

Once I mixed S and N in my puzzle and the geocacher, who tested the puzzle, did the same. Fortunately that error happened also with the one who got the FTF, but then I got reports from other players, who did not make the same error.