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SPEAKER 1: OK, so our final
puzzle of CS50x Puzzle Day 2023

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was the Meta Puzzle in
which you could use answers

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to the eight previous puzzles
to help you solve this one.

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Ultimately, we had about 900 of you
submit a correct answer to this one,

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and about 700 submit, again, a
good guess, but not quite correct.

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So let's have our friends at Meta walk
us through this final meta puzzle.

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SPEAKER 2: Awesome.

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So again, this puzzle
is called Metalinkshell.

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I was the one who wrote this puzzle.

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And this was the meta puzzle
in our entire hunt, which

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means that if you tried to do
this puzzle without solving many

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of the other puzzles in the hunt, it
would be extraordinarily difficult.

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But to start out, when
solvers are confronted,

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the first thing you should
do with any meta puzzle

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is write down the answers to the
previous puzzles that we have.

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So as a reminder, here
are all of the answers

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that we're working
with, tomato, construct,

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payments, rebounds, spider,
operetta, Miyazaki, and heartbroken.

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So we're going to be using these later.

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But here, as you solve these
puzzles on our website,

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on the checker website
that we were using online,

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you began gaining more and more
information about each of these places,

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and each of these metaverses as you
were solving the puzzles in the hunt.

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And this information started
getting populated into your tablet.

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So when you visit the
website, you will see

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that each of the metaverse
IDs on the tablets,

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if you were to go to the website
and type in these answers into it,

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would start getting populated as
you solved each of the puzzles.

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And when you do that,
each of the metaverse IDs

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would be something like F4, A4, or
D2, F6, which looks suspiciously like

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coordinates on the grid
that is below the puzzle.

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So as you solve this puzzle online,
you will see that there are first

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and second coordinates for
each of these puzzles that get

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unlocked as you solve each of the
puzzles that are feeding into it.

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Next, we gave hints about
what a metalinkshell was.

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But if you haven't
seen this before, it's

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actually known as a number link puzzle.

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There is a very popular game on the
iPhone called Flow, or the Android

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store, I think, that you can play
a lot of these number link puzzles.

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And it's a great deal of fun.

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I highly recommend it.

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But this was just one of those.

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And it was on this eight by eight grid.

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And each of the coordinates here allows
you to essentially create a numberlink

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puzzle where you connect each
of the nodes in the graph that

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have the same color, while trying to
fill the entire grid with no overlaps.

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So if you were to do that,
you can fill it in like this.

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And you end up covering the entire
eight by eight grid while not

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overlapping any of the things.

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And you'll notice that each of
these solutions to the number

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links that are colored here have
a suspiciously like wordy length.

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And in fact, if you were to
overlay the words from the puzzles

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onto this numberlink
graph, you will end up

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being able to fill this eight
by eight grid with answers.

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So as you solve each of these,
the previous eight puzzles

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will fill in this grid for you.

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And you end up with this
nice grid full of words.

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Finally, the last step
here, we highlighted

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the cross of this grid, the
yellow parts of this grid.

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So the goal here was just to read
down the diagonals of this puzzle.

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So by looking at the yellow
squares from the original puzzle

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you can read this out.

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And it says try metamorphosis, which
was our final answer to this puzzle,

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and to the entire hunt.

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So that's Metalinkshell.

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