SATOR - Escape The Room... With Code
On the 27th of September, I was chosen along with a friend to create an escape-the-room event at my school as a part of its annual science fest IRIS. I was surprised when I got the message saying that our pitch was approved since we did it partly as a joke, not expecting anything to come through, but I was enthusiastic. The idea was to have a group of puzzles in a room that the participants needed to code to find the answers to.
We started with a structure of three rooms, each with three puzzles. Each room would have a time limit of twenty minutes to escape and crossing that time limit would mean elimination.
We would hide keys (green cards with the event’s logo) around the rooms for competing teams to find and once they found it they could unlock the doors and escape. Quickly realizing that we wouldn’t be able to physically lock them in the room, we decided to have the volunteers assigned to us keeping track of teams. If a team found a key, they would hand it to the volunteer who would then lead them to the next room.
What got us excited about creating an escape room in the first place was the creation of the setting. We had an opportunity to create the strangest on-a-budget setting on the planet, so we went with a sci-fi setting called “The Sator Center For Scientific Development.” Taking inspiration from Portal 2, Sator is a futuristic laboratory that insists on endless testing in order to solve problems in the world. In our setting humans have receded into underground cities allowing machines to make the surface world habitable again. Observing participants complete simple tests fueled its hyper-intelligent machines which in-turn helps them terraform the surface. The name “Sator” comes from a latin palindrome puzzle called The Sator Square. We chose this name because the theme of the coding questions we chose was “loops” and one of our early ideas for a trick question was that the answer was to be given backwards to be correct.
We had a lot of fun creating a convoluted story for this setting, but I must admit we may have gone overboard during our planning phase, expecting a far larger degree of freedom while creating the sets. Luckily, we were given access to the rooms that would become the venue for the event very quickly, giving us a lay of the land and grounding our far-fetched nonsense in reality. We settled on a simple plot–a machine is observing participants’ methods and algorithms for solving our coding puzzles and “feeding it to the AI that manages the terraforming machines” because I know from the many conversations I’ve had with my mother: there’s only so much science fiction jargon a person can take.
For the creation of the setting itself, we took an hour to film random clips of our volunteers pretending to be scientists and mashing it together with stock footage of robots to create an introductory video. Luckily one of our volunteers was a good actor and his voice worked well for the setting we were creating. We even sent out the opening lines to the video as a part of the event brochure, hoping that it would be just absurd enough to hook participants.
Congratulations! Of the humans left, you and your companions have been selected by the Sator Center for Scientific Development as candidates for the re-establishment of human kind!
(You should be ecstatic.)
Your goal is to prove that you have the necessary skills to re-enter this new world. You’ll have to solve multiple programming problems at the SCSD, each taking you to the next level.
After the tests are complete, [you are free to go].
As an incentive, the tests will take place in the form of a race; be the fastest to escape to win.
Good luck on your mission, and may the best rebuild our world.
Now to the puzzles themselves: how do we create coding puzzles that match such a daunting premise? How do we marry it to the limitations of the classrooms, decoration capabilities, and time limits? How do we connect the various puzzles together? Most importantly, how do I get a team of people whose every conversation leads to movies and fiction design a cohesive set of escape rooms?
For my college applications, my dad hit upon an incredibly effective strategy for getting work done. One fine day, he saw that my progress in essays was slow, so he made me sit down on the couch and didn’t let me get up until the work was complete. I was greatly annoyed with his methods, but I admit, it worked like a treat. So I decided to put his method to the test and had the core team members sit down at a desk until we figured out the arrangement of all three rooms’ puzzles and the method worked like magic. While our conversations often diverted from the problem at hand, within a day we completed rough diagrams of how all rooms would be arranged, what puzzles we would use and where the keys would be hidden.
The puzzles themselves were questions from https://projecteuler.net/ - a repository of mathematical/programming problems that increased in difficulty as they went on. Each room had two coding questions which would lead to additional clues in the room that eventually lead to the location of the key.
For example, our first room went something like this:
The participants enter and find the following question taped to a desk-
The prime factors of 13195 are 5, 7, 13 and 29.
What is the largest prime factor of the number 600851475143 ?
Answer: 6857
The answer 6857 leads to a grid of alphabets on a wall by adding the digits 6, 8, 5 and 7 to get the number 26 which corresponds to the letter Z. Around the room were random letters leading to areas within the room, so following the letter “Z” through the room would lead the participants to a cabinet in which are a number of labeled files.
Next to the first question is the following question:
A Pythagorean triplet is a set of three natural numbers, a < b < c, for which,
a2 + b2 = c2
For example, 32 + 42 = 9 + 16 = 25 = 52.
There exists exactly one Pythagorean triplet for which a + b + c = 1000.
Find the product abc.
Answer: 31875000
The answer 318750000 gives them the correct labeled number to look for in the files, and once they find the file that corresponds to 31875000, the key (a green card) would be hidden in it.
After assembling the puzzles and decorating the room with our posters, we began adding false clues–pieces of decoration deliberately misleading participants in order to waste their time. One of our rooms that was designed to be a canteen had post-its with reviews of the canteen all written by “John Doe” and every single review was an empty statement such as “This was one of the canteens of all time.” During the event, we had trouble holding our laughter as we watched one team fixate on “John Doe” false clues. However, we spent an inordinate amount of time on these false clues, leading us to finish final set decorations minutes before participants were allowed to come in.
The day of the event came around and all fifteen of us were nervous. I had spent the previous day worried that we made the puzzles too simple so I was pleasantly surprised but also worried to see that none of the teams that participated were able to escape the rooms in time, so on-spot we came up with the “overtime contingency”-a rule that allows fifteen minutes extra to participating teams at the cost of fifteen minutes being added to the total time they take in the end even if they do not use all fifteen minutes. Since the judging criteria was the amount of time taken, it would prove to be both an advantage and a disadvantage for them.
Overall, it was a great experience–from plan to execution I was very happy to see the event going as well as we expected. The participants, to our relief, seemed to enjoy the setting we created and were engaged in the puzzles. Personally, my favorite part was seeing participants catching onto the smaller clues we left in the rooms. For example, our second room (the canteen) involved a Caesar Cipher and a key of 16, so around the room we had torn notebook pages reading “Et Tu, Brute?” referencing Julius Caesar’s final words, a giant menu titled “Julius Juice Junction” where all the items were priced “16” and the 16th letter of the Sator Square circled from both ends. I had the biggest smile on my face when I heard a team pointing at the “Et Tu, Brute?” pages and identifying it as a clue to the Caesar cipher.
A huge thanks to Siddharth Periera. Both of us were the event heads for the contest and it would not have been possible without h im. He makes some really cool music which can be found here.
Give him a follow here: Instagram
Before I finish, here’s a short video that we played to the contestants as the event started.
Here’s the set of posters we used for the event.
To connect the name of the event (SATOR) to one of our puzzles, the answer to the last question in the event needed to be backwards since a palindrome is read the same way backwards and forwards. To allow participants to guess it, we placed several small clues in the third room that were backwards versions of known words including bound pages that read the palindrome sentence “do geese see god”.
That’s for all for now. Live long and prosper.
Project Euler: Link