How I solved an online treasure hunt

My friend foreverliketh.is shared a link to a treasure hunt hosted by Suntup Editions, a book publishing company. The challenge was to find 16 colored letters scattered across their website. Once you find all the letters, you unscramble them into a three-word Latin phrase. The potential prizes were awesome. The grand prize was a custom-bound edition of Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy, a piece of art in and of itself.¹ Even if I didn’t win anything, I can’t say no to a puzzle. Here’s how I solved it.

Sitemaps helped me find all the letters

I love a good puzzle. I do not love doing busy work. The first thing I needed to do was figure out how to find all the letters without manually clicking through every single possible page.

So, I went to the sitemaps. Sitemaps are very common pages that list every page and its location on a given website. They’re made for bots to look at so Google can properly index websites and make all its pages searchable. Suntup’s sitemap was conveniently sorted by last modification date. It told me the exact pages that were recently changed. I manually clicked through each of these and, sure enough, there were 16 pages and they each had a blue letter. In maybe 10 minutes of work, I found the following, sorted by letter frequency: R (4), A (3), E (3), O (2), B (1), L (1), S (1), T (1).

Searching for Latin phrases was much harder

I don’t know any Latin so I couldn’t even make a guess at this point. A Google search quickly got me a list of Latin phrases sorted by letter on Wikipedia. I had no idea there were that many common Latin phrases. Again, I don’t like busy work so I tried to come up with a smarter way to comb through these lists.

First, I noticed that there weren’t actually that many letters available to me: RAEOBLST. That meant I only needed to look at the tables for those eight letters, removing more than half of the possibilities. Then, I manually went through each phrase in each table and looked for these requirements in order:

• Is it exactly three words?
• Does it only have the letters in RAEOBLST?
• Does it have one and only one B? L? S? T?

I went through the relevant lists with this method a couple of times. I didn’t find anything. As I was sifting through, I began noting down full words that fit the bill: ARTE, TERRA, LABORE, ASTRA, RES. This turned out to come in handy later.

My next algorithm was technology-assisted. I downloaded each table from Wikipedia and opened them up in Excel. I created a new column that calculated the length of each phrase. The one I was looking for was 18 characters long—16 letters plus two spaces. From those 18-character phrases, I asked my questions from before. Still no luck. The phrase I needed definitely wasn’t in these Wikipedia tables.

Random old website to the rescue

In the “External links” section of the Wikipedia page, I found a list of notable idioms on an un-notable website. This list was comparatively short so I scanned the whole thing using my questions from above—nothing here either.

I did find more links though. One of them was Simply Latin, another boring website. It was much more comprehensive and I knew there had to be a smarter way to look through these lists. I started looking for whole words—the same ones that I jotted down while going through the Wikipedia tables earlier. LABORE was calling to me² so I went to the L table. Four entries down, there it was: LABORARE EST ORARE.

Work is prayer. What a rush. I checked to make sure it wasn’t a mirage: R (4), A (3), E (3), O (2), B (1), L (1), S (1), T (1). A perfect match!

I submitted my answer and the drawing took place a few days later. I had the right phrase but it was a random draw and my name didn’t get pulled. Even so, this was a fun little challenge that I enjoyed solving. Congratulations to the winners!

Created: 2024-10-17

Last modified: 2024-10-17