Petals Around the Rose: Fraternity Register

2 hours in 2 days. Actually, the moment of truth for me was over about 5 minutes while I was out jogging.

Wow that was a good puzzle. A real thinker. Annoyed the heck out of me for a good 20 minutes! My colleague has been working on it for many hours and he seems annoyed at not getting it yet!

It was pretty much annoying at the beginning cause my boss was laughing at me...than the solution came by itself 30 minutes later

bloody hell that was annoying

1 I like it!
Now for the fun

Took me quite a while, and after going through some less great ideas I've finally solved this mystery. I bow to the mind who engineered this puzzle.

I kind of looked around the web for hints. One of the hints that I got didn't work, so I sat back and finally figured it out after an hour

Well, perhaps I cheated "a little" in the following sense. I was having a very hard time trying ever more complicated algorithms (for a few days ), obviously getting nowhere, even though the fact that it is simple is given away in the story.

Then I saw the response times (and just those!) of the people that solved it and ... just sat back, looked at the problem in a completely differrent way and it immediately came to me

And now I must keep the vows of the fraternity and not divulge the secret to ... my fiancee

Less than 5 minutes

I rolled about 10 times and had nothing before I sat back and really thought about the problem. Then I got it. Cute.