king of research - season 2

enjoyed this a lot maps - thanks v much. impressed to the point of fear by lex's ability despite time to come up with the goods, but all the finalists made me go "ffs you BASTARD" at some point.

xpost

no.

Oh man, definitely not.

For those who were stymied by the initial encoding on the second-to-last round: the reason I recognized it so readily was because it was used a great deal on usenet/newsgroups.
Its primary function there was for hiding spoilers etc. It was common enough that most clients for reading news had a shortcut built in to rotate highlighted text. (e.g. in Forte Agent you could press ctrl+3)

What makes rot-13 so useful is that it's cyclical over the 26 letters of the English alphabet. To encode/decode, you just swap each letter with the one 13 places after it in the alphabet -- starting at A again after Z. So ABBA becomes NOON becomes ABBA. For the challenge I used rot13.com.
Any symbol not in the English alphabet simply gets ignored, so my name becomes Ølfgrva.
Uh, so that's today little history lesson for those who didn't feel like looking it up after it was revealed.

it's also used to drop answers on the xword thread so I was a little surprised lex wasn't aware of it.

i've never encountered it in a crossword...

no, just used in the thread when giving an answer so it doesn't spoil it for people still solving (but might not have been used recently)

oh, i don't think it's been used recently but if it was i wouldn't have known what was going on anyway

i was genuinely surprised to find out that these codes were well-known to the point of being obvious for so many people - it does feel good that this raised my awareness of them though!

> i've never encountered it in a crossword...

then you've not been on the receiving end of one of ledge's tiny rot13 crosswords...

I... have no recollection of those!

^ old age

Damn was this great. Maps isn't on ILX anymore, right? I crave a new season of King of Research.

Yes, I often think of King of Research. Might be the most fun I've ever had on the internet.

^same

I was under the impression 'Maps' was only a King of Research persona for another ilx0r - were they a regular under that name? I bloody loved these threads.

This was loads of fun, yeah.

Amazing! This thread just obliterated my afternoon in the best way.