The Genome Game

Stars - Solution

Next Puzzle: Wordlists

Let's start by taking a close look at the anatomy of a single "star".

Each star has five interesting features:

   1. Five "notches" at the base of each point.
   2. Five triangular image fragments, one on each point.
   3. A comma-separated list of four numbers, at the center of the star.
   4. Five circled capital letters, one on each point.
   5. Five path segments, one on each point. These path segments start at one of the long edges of a point and extend to the
       bottom of the triangle or to the other side. The path segments vary between thin gray segments and thick red ones

The first step is to use the image fragments to assemble the stars into a three-dimensional structure called a "small stellated dodecahedron". This is a regular dodecahedron (12-sided) with five-sided pyramids (or points, or "stellations") on each face. Since the stars are all identically shaped, there are many ways to assemble this structure, but only one where the image fragments line up into the faces of 12 celebrities. Stars interlock with each other at the notches.

You can make a structurally stable "corner" by interlocking a third piece:

The completely assembled structure looks like this:

The next step is to look down each point of the assembly and recognize the person pictured. Here, for example, is Sean Connery:

Underneath each celebrity image is a list of numbers:

These numbers are treated as indices into the celebrity's name, providing a four-letter sequence for each point of the stellated dodecahedron.


Picture	Name	Indices	Letters

	Kermit the Frog	6, 8, 2, 10	THEF

	George Washington	14, 9, 3, 12	TSON

	Condoleezza Rice	11, 3, 4, 1	ANDC

	Paul Simon	8, 3, 5, 1	OUSP

	Marty Feldman	4, 6, 2, 1	TFAM

	Steve Martin	10, 8, 1, 2	IRST

	Sylvester Stallone	1, 5, 16, 7	SENT

	Oprah Winfrey	1, 9, 6, 4	OFWA

	Spiderman	8, 2, 5, 6	APER

	Dick Tracy	6, 2, 8, 4	RICK

	Sean Connery	2, 4, 5, 9	ENCE

	Moses	3, 1, 2, 5	SMOS

The next step is to order the sets of letters so that they make a meaningful sentence:

THEF IRST SENT ENCE OFWA TSON ANDC RICK SMOS TFAM OUSP APER

Or, with the correct spacing and punctuation:

THE FIRST SENTENCE OF WATSON AND CRICK'S MOST FAMOUS PAPER

At the very start of the game, teams were given a copy of Watson and Crick's famous paper entitled "A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid". The first sentence of this paper is:

We wish to suggest a structure for the salt of deoxyribose nucleic acid (DNA).

This brings us to the next step in solving this puzzle. Let's turn our attention to the circled letters. Every circled letter sits on a path segment; the goal here now is to reassemble the structure such that all the path segments connect and the circled letters on that path spell out the first sentence of "A Structure for DNA."

There are two half-segments which start in the middle of an image fragment and exit on an edge. One has a "W" on it (is the start of the sentence) and one has a "." (which ends the sentence). The complete sentence does not have the parenthesized (DNA) that appears in the original work; that would make for too many letters.

The correctly reassembled polyhedron now looks like this:

In the closeup below, you can see the "OXYR" in "deOXYRibose" on a continuous path:

The thick red segments comprise a message written in Morse code. Dashes are long stretches of red; dots are little squares. For example, the following sequence represents the letter N (dash dot):

We know this is "dash dot" and not "dot dash" upside down because the H comes before the T in the Watson and Crick sentence ("we wisH To suggest...."). Note that the dash and dot are separated from adjacent dashes and dots by quite a bit; the letter breaks are unambiguous.

The morse code message is as follows:

- ..- -. -. . .-.. .. -. ..-. .- -.-. ..-
T U N N E L I N F A C U

.-.. - -.-- --. .-.. .- -.. . ..- -.-. -...
L T Y G L A D E U C B

Producing the final solution to the puzzle: Tunnel in Faculty Glade, UCB.