SPEAKER 1: OK, so our final puzzle of CS50x Puzzle Day 2023
was the Meta Puzzle in which you could use answers
to the eight previous puzzles to help you solve this one.
Ultimately, we had about 900 of you submit a correct answer to this one,
and about 700 submit, again, a good guess, but not quite correct.
So let's have our friends at Meta walk us through this final meta puzzle.
SPEAKER 2: Awesome.
So again, this puzzle is called Metalinkshell.
I was the one who wrote this puzzle.
And this was the meta puzzle in our entire hunt, which
means that if you tried to do this puzzle without solving many
of the other puzzles in the hunt, it would be extraordinarily difficult.
But to start out, when solvers are confronted,
the first thing you should do with any meta puzzle
is write down the answers to the previous puzzles that we have.
So as a reminder, here are all of the answers
that we're working with, tomato, construct,
payments, rebounds, spider, operetta, Miyazaki, and heartbroken.
So we're going to be using these later.
But here, as you solve these puzzles on our website,
on the checker website that we were using online,
you began gaining more and more information about each of these places,
and each of these metaverses as you were solving the puzzles in the hunt.
And this information started getting populated into your tablet.
So when you visit the website, you will see
that each of the metaverse IDs on the tablets,
if you were to go to the website and type in these answers into it,
would start getting populated as you solved each of the puzzles.
And when you do that, each of the metaverse IDs
would be something like F4, A4, or D2, F6, which looks suspiciously like
coordinates on the grid that is below the puzzle.
So as you solve this puzzle online, you will see that there are first
and second coordinates for each of these puzzles that get
unlocked as you solve each of the puzzles that are feeding into it.
Next, we gave hints about what a metalinkshell was.
But if you haven't seen this before, it's
actually known as a number link puzzle.
There is a very popular game on the iPhone called Flow, or the Android
store, I think, that you can play a lot of these number link puzzles.
And it's a great deal of fun.
I highly recommend it.
But this was just one of those.
And it was on this eight by eight grid.
And each of the coordinates here allows you to essentially create a numberlink
puzzle where you connect each of the nodes in the graph that
have the same color, while trying to fill the entire grid with no overlaps.
So if you were to do that, you can fill it in like this.
And you end up covering the entire eight by eight grid while not
overlapping any of the things.
And you'll notice that each of these solutions to the number
links that are colored here have a suspiciously like wordy length.
And in fact, if you were to overlay the words from the puzzles
onto this numberlink graph, you will end up
being able to fill this eight by eight grid with answers.
So as you solve each of these, the previous eight puzzles
will fill in this grid for you.
And you end up with this nice grid full of words.
Finally, the last step here, we highlighted
the cross of this grid, the yellow parts of this grid.
So the goal here was just to read down the diagonals of this puzzle.
So by looking at the yellow squares from the original puzzle
you can read this out.
And it says try metamorphosis, which was our final answer to this puzzle,
and to the entire hunt.
So that's Metalinkshell.