This year, you were invited to attend the WPC, otherwise known as the World Puzzling Competition. The World Puzzling Competition is attended by the 88088 users of PSE (as per writing of the draft) all around the world. You, as one of the participants, want to answer every question as fast as possible, while making sure it is correct and robust. The organizers also seem to suggest that there will be a 50 reputation bounty for every question (subject to change for future questions) for the "most contributive person", defined as the person to uncover first the most amount of clues leading to the answer. The final solution counts as 2 clues. Ties are broken by time of last found clue.
Sny Smartie then walks onto the stage and starts the pre-prepared presentation, which said:
Here are the assumptions you can make about the puzzles:
You can assume that, by default, everything is self-contained. That is, you will not have to search anything particular up, such as a twitter tweet. Exceptions include searching up resources for knowledge questions. These are not intended paths for solution, even if the resulting solution is correct.
Any information contained in italics is flavor text and does not include any information required for the puzzle. You are free to skip over these parts, although the plot may sometimes appear to be confusing. Flavor texts may contain hints.
Only the question itself can be used as a resource. Answers based on edit history, post time, etc. are considered to be cheating. That is, there will not be any hidden HTML tags or
nbsp;etc. These are not intended paths for solution, even if the resulting solution is correct.Specific rules overwrite general rules. If, say, the post begins "tweets from a mysterious source", then the first rule may not necessarily apply and you may need to search on Twitter. Similarly, if the post says "analyze the source" then the third rule may not necessarily apply.
The puzzle never lies. If the puzzle says "this is the puzzle", then that is the puzzle. The characters also never lie, so if a character presents you with a puzzle, "the character is lying and there actually is no puzzle" is not contributive.
These same rules will apply to each puzzle in this series. Puzzles will be posted as soon as both the last puzzle has been solved and the author has finished writing up the next puzzle.
To warm you up, Sny Smartie said, here's an easy first puzzle that may just provide the shortest simple path from this puzzle to the next. The answer will be a three letter abbreviation.
Transcript: If we let light grey cells be ., dark grey cells be #, and red cells be ;:
..#......# ...#...... ...#...##.
.;.#..#... ;#.##.#.#. .#...#.#..
..#.....#. ..#..#.... .;####...#
...#...... #...#..#.. #.#...##..
..##..#.#. .#.#..#.#. #...#.#..#
#...#.#... ....#.#... #####..#.#
...#..#... #.###.##.. #.#.#.#...
..#..#.##. ...#...##. ......#;#.
#.#....#;. .#..#..#.; .#.#.##...
.......#.. ..#.....#. ..##....#.
Sny Smartie reminds you that although friends might not help you, mods sure will.
There are 3 clues to solving the puzzle, excluding the solution itself. A clue may be a part of the question that hints at the solution or the deduction of the solution, a connection between the solution and the question. A solution counts as 2 clues.
