Dinosaur Comics
last update: 2010-03-09 ||
last fetched: 2010-03-09
-
Tue, Mar 09: i wrote this comic shortly before hopping on my bike and riding off into the sunset, i mean, into work
-
Mon, Mar 08: ASK ME WHAT DIRECTION PURGATORY IS IN SO THAT I MIGHT FLEX WHILE POINTING YOU IN THE RIGHT DIRECTION
-
Fri, Mar 05: "guys it's totally out of character that i'd ever admit to not being better than everyone else, SHEESH"
-
Thu, Mar 04: t-rex's original fantasy was spider-man saying "oh no! now i'm more spider than man", but then i remembered i'd read that comic, they published it in like 1960, that idea was older than TWO ryans
-
Wed, Mar 03: kant was the one who thought genius meant originality, but kant thought a lot of things
Tue, Mar 09
•
i wrote this comic shortly before hopping on my bike and riding off into the sunset, i mean, into work
•
archive - contact - sexy exciting merchandise - search - about– 
← previous March 9th, 2010 next March 9th, 2010: Brad took the Qwantz Corpus I linked to the other day to help the efforts to solve my yet-unsolved anagram, threw in some Markov chains, and used it to write a program that generates new Dinosaur Comics automatically! He's posted some results and they're pretty awesome. Enjoy!
– Ryan
Mon, Mar 08
•
ASK ME WHAT DIRECTION PURGATORY IS IN SO THAT I MIGHT FLEX WHILE POINTING YOU IN THE RIGHT DIRECTION
•
archive - contact - sexy exciting merchandise - search - about– 
← previous March 8th, 2010 next March 8th, 2010: Guys, remember Adventure Time? IF NOT THEN CLICK THAT LINK FOR AN AMAZING VIDEO. Anyway it turns out Cartoon Network has made a whole series out of it! There's a trailer here. I am the excited one!
– Ryan
Fri, Mar 05
•
"guys it's totally out of character that i'd ever admit to not being better than everyone else, SHEESH"
•
archive - contact - sexy exciting merchandise - search - about– 
← previous March 5th, 2010 next March 5th, 2010: If you're working on the puzzle (qwantzle?) here are some tools to help automated analysis! Paul Stansifer has released Qwantzle Data, which scraped the OhNoRobot search engine to gather Dinosaur Comics text, and then converted it into ngrams, 2grams and 3grams. Nice! I've also released the Dinosaur Comics text as XML, which might help you, though it's pretty redundant given the work Paul's already done! I haven't cleaned the XML so there's some duplicate entries, etc.
Also! In doing this I noticed there were transcriptions missing, which led me to discover I'd messed up the ONR code on this site for like a month! So that's fixed now, although this little bit of added data won't really make that much of a difference for puzzle solving.
Finally, a lot of the entries I've seen are getting closer! People have hit on some key phrases that are in the solution, though of course with anagrams it's impossible to tell whether you're close or not. So here's one more hint: there's only one sentence in the solution, so the two exclamation marks appear right after each other. And don't forget the clues I gave earlier!
– Ryan
Thu, Mar 04
•
t-rex's original fantasy was spider-man saying "oh no! now i'm more spider than man", but then i remembered i'd read that comic, they published it in like 1960, that idea was older than TWO ryans
•
archive - contact - sexy exciting merchandise - search - about– 
← previous March 4th, 2010 next March 4th, 2010: If you're working on the puzzle (qwantzle?) here are some tools to help automated analysis! Paul Stansifer has released Qwantzle Data, which scraped the OhNoRobot search engine to gather Dinosaur Comics text, and then converted it into ngrams, 2grams and 3grams. Nice! I've also released the Dinosaur Comics text as XML, which might help you, though it's pretty redundant given the work Paul's already done! I haven't cleaned the XML so there's some duplicate entries, etc.
Also! In doing this I noticed there were transcriptions missing, which led me to discover I'd messed up the ONR code on this site for like a month! So that's fixed now, although this little bit of added data won't really make that much of a difference for puzzle solving.
Finally, a lot of the entries I've seen are getting closer! People have hit on some key phrases that are in the solution, though of course with anagrams it's impossible to tell whether you're close or not. So here's one more hint: the longest word is 11 characters long, the second-longest is 8 characters long, and they're side-by-side in the solution. And don't forget the clues I gave yesterday!
– Ryan
Wed, Mar 03
•
kant was the one who thought genius meant originality, but kant thought a lot of things
•
archive - contact - sexy exciting merchandise - search - about– 
← previous March 3rd, 2010 next March 3rd, 2010: I thought I'd made up "head-explosion disease" in yesterday's comic, but Paul wrote in to let me know that not only does it exist (what??), it's curable! PHEW.
Okay, so the anagram from Monday's comic has still not been solved, so I thought I'd give a few clues before letting it stand for ALL ETERNITY:
- All words in the solution are dictionary words.
- What's more, all words in the solution are in the Jadrian's awesome Qwantz Corpus!
- The solution is natural-sounding, reasonably-grammatical dialogue that T-Rex would say, using phrasing that T-Rex would use.
- The punctuation :,!! is in the solution, in that order!
- The longest word in the solution is 11 characters long.
- The solution does not refer to anagrams or puzzles or winning t-shirts.
- However, what T-Rex is saying is directly related to the content of the comic the puzzle appears in.
- The letters given are case-sensitive!
- The first word of the solution is "I".
- I tested out Joel's puzzle-solving tool and it does let you know that the correct answer works!
Also linked on Joel's page are some brute-force scripts and even a branch-and-bound solver (awesome!), but the solution is long enough to make pure brute force not really feasable. You'll have to use your head.
I think that's pretty much it! Some of these clues I'd posted on Twitter or hinted at, but now they are explicit! And there's a few new pieces of information there too.
Since this puzzle has gone unsolved for three days, the prize is now two t-shirts AND an adorable T-Rex Squishable!
– Ryan
- Tue, Mar 09: i wrote this comic shortly before hopping on my bike and riding off into the sunset, i mean, into work
- Mon, Mar 08: ASK ME WHAT DIRECTION PURGATORY IS IN SO THAT I MIGHT FLEX WHILE POINTING YOU IN THE RIGHT DIRECTION
- Fri, Mar 05: "guys it's totally out of character that i'd ever admit to not being better than everyone else, SHEESH"
- Thu, Mar 04: t-rex's original fantasy was spider-man saying "oh no! now i'm more spider than man", but then i remembered i'd read that comic, they published it in like 1960, that idea was older than TWO ryans
- Wed, Mar 03: kant was the one who thought genius meant originality, but kant thought a lot of things
Tue, Mar 09 • i wrote this comic shortly before hopping on my bike and riding off into the sunset, i mean, into work •
| |||
| archive - contact - sexy exciting merchandise - search - about– | |||
| |||
| ← previous | March 9th, 2010 | next | |
March 9th, 2010: Brad took the Qwantz Corpus I linked to the other day to help the efforts to solve my yet-unsolved anagram, threw in some Markov chains, and used it to write a program that generates new Dinosaur Comics automatically! He's posted some results and they're pretty awesome. Enjoy! – Ryan | |||
Mon, Mar 08 • ASK ME WHAT DIRECTION PURGATORY IS IN SO THAT I MIGHT FLEX WHILE POINTING YOU IN THE RIGHT DIRECTION •
| |||
| archive - contact - sexy exciting merchandise - search - about– | |||
| |||
| ← previous | March 8th, 2010 | next | |
March 8th, 2010: Guys, remember Adventure Time? IF NOT THEN CLICK THAT LINK FOR AN AMAZING VIDEO. Anyway it turns out Cartoon Network has made a whole series out of it! There's a trailer here. I am the excited one! – Ryan | |||
Fri, Mar 05 • "guys it's totally out of character that i'd ever admit to not being better than everyone else, SHEESH" •
| |||
| archive - contact - sexy exciting merchandise - search - about– | |||
| |||
| ← previous | March 5th, 2010 | next | |
March 5th, 2010: If you're working on the puzzle (qwantzle?) here are some tools to help automated analysis! Paul Stansifer has released Qwantzle Data, which scraped the OhNoRobot search engine to gather Dinosaur Comics text, and then converted it into ngrams, 2grams and 3grams. Nice! I've also released the Dinosaur Comics text as XML, which might help you, though it's pretty redundant given the work Paul's already done! I haven't cleaned the XML so there's some duplicate entries, etc. Also! In doing this I noticed there were transcriptions missing, which led me to discover I'd messed up the ONR code on this site for like a month! So that's fixed now, although this little bit of added data won't really make that much of a difference for puzzle solving. Finally, a lot of the entries I've seen are getting closer! People have hit on some key phrases that are in the solution, though of course with anagrams it's impossible to tell whether you're close or not. So here's one more hint: there's only one sentence in the solution, so the two exclamation marks appear right after each other. And don't forget the clues I gave earlier! – Ryan | |||
Thu, Mar 04 • t-rex's original fantasy was spider-man saying "oh no! now i'm more spider than man", but then i remembered i'd read that comic, they published it in like 1960, that idea was older than TWO ryans •
| |||
| archive - contact - sexy exciting merchandise - search - about– | |||
| |||
| ← previous | March 4th, 2010 | next | |
March 4th, 2010: If you're working on the puzzle (qwantzle?) here are some tools to help automated analysis! Paul Stansifer has released Qwantzle Data, which scraped the OhNoRobot search engine to gather Dinosaur Comics text, and then converted it into ngrams, 2grams and 3grams. Nice! I've also released the Dinosaur Comics text as XML, which might help you, though it's pretty redundant given the work Paul's already done! I haven't cleaned the XML so there's some duplicate entries, etc. Also! In doing this I noticed there were transcriptions missing, which led me to discover I'd messed up the ONR code on this site for like a month! So that's fixed now, although this little bit of added data won't really make that much of a difference for puzzle solving. Finally, a lot of the entries I've seen are getting closer! People have hit on some key phrases that are in the solution, though of course with anagrams it's impossible to tell whether you're close or not. So here's one more hint: the longest word is 11 characters long, the second-longest is 8 characters long, and they're side-by-side in the solution. And don't forget the clues I gave yesterday! – Ryan | |||
Wed, Mar 03 • kant was the one who thought genius meant originality, but kant thought a lot of things •
| |||
| archive - contact - sexy exciting merchandise - search - about– | |||
| |||
| ← previous | March 3rd, 2010 | next | |
March 3rd, 2010: I thought I'd made up "head-explosion disease" in yesterday's comic, but Paul wrote in to let me know that not only does it exist (what??), it's curable! PHEW. Okay, so the anagram from Monday's comic has still not been solved, so I thought I'd give a few clues before letting it stand for ALL ETERNITY:
Also linked on Joel's page are some brute-force scripts and even a branch-and-bound solver (awesome!), but the solution is long enough to make pure brute force not really feasable. You'll have to use your head. I think that's pretty much it! Some of these clues I'd posted on Twitter or hinted at, but now they are explicit! And there's a few new pieces of information there too. Since this puzzle has gone unsolved for three days, the prize is now two t-shirts AND an adorable T-Rex Squishable! – Ryan | |||