Solution: Through the Looking-Glass
Answer: CLOUD SEEDING
Written by Thomas Gordon; with help from Abhinav Makam and Reagan Guan
Initially, this seems like a chess puzzle… except there aren’t enough pieces on any of the boards. What’s going on?
This is also the only puzzle in the hunt to feature a “dark mode”. Turning the page to dark mode, however, also changes the pieces on all the boards, and the letters in the final board.
As clued by the title, prose, and the two boards in two different “universes”, this is not a game of regular chess... but Alice Chess! Alice Chess is a chess variant where there are two boards; one that initially starts empty, and one that initially is set up for a regular game of chess. When a piece is moved, that piece “transfers” from the square it landed on to the same square in the other board. A move must be legal on the board the piece is on in order to be made. The square the piece lands on must be unoccupied on the other board in order for the move to be legal. Additionally, the king cannot “escape” check via a transfer; if a king moves to a square, it cannot be in check on that square on either board in order for that move to be legal. A player, however, can interpose to block a check by transferring a piece from one board to another.
The question of which pieces correspond to which letters can be solved using just the first two boards, based on how the Rabbit describes the positions:
- A: king
- B: knight
- C: rook
- D: bishop
- E: pawn
- F: queen
There is a unique series of moves to solve each board in the number of moves stated by the Rabbit. (Some boards have a checkmate in more moves, but those are irrelevant. Additionally, each checkmate assumes ‘perfect’ behavior by the opponent; each move your opponent makes is chosen to avoid any shorter possible checkmates.) These are listed below:
(Moves returning to board A are notated "/A”.)
| Board # | Moves | Commentary |
|---|---|---|
| Board 2 |
| A discovered check from the pawn transferring boards. |
| Board 3 |
| An underpromotion - White has a number of other lines here after Rb5+, such as Ka3 and Kc4, but they all lead to quicker checkmates from Black (b1=N# and Ne3# respectively). Forcing the pawn move first allows this quicker checkmate. Other opening attacks from Black also don't lead to checkmate quickly enough. |
| Board 4 |
| White needs to a) get their pieces past each other and b) get the piece to checkmate Black on the same board as the Black king. This is the only sequence of rook moves that keeps and defends the rook on g1 (which traps the king to the h-file), and checkmates the king, without causing a stalemate after the first move. |
| Board 5 |
| This is the only sequence of pawn moves that forces the Black king to allow White to promote. |
Finally, reading the letters on these squares on each world, in move order, gives us two clues:
Light Mode: NIMBUS CIRRUS EG
Dark Mode: SOWING THE EARTH
The answers to each of these clues (CLOUD and SEEDING) give us the two word answer, CLOUD SEEDING.
Author’s Notes
I've wanted to write a puzzle about Alice Chess for nearly three years now. I wrote a version of this puzzle for Shardhunt 0; it wasn't very good, so it died, to no great loss. I kept the idea in the back of my head for a while, looking for a new angle.
I found it when the first trailer for the movie The Matrix: Resurrections released, which was set to the classic rock song "White Rabbit" by Jefferson Airplane. (Yes, this hunt is that long in the tooth.) I'd heard the song before, but that trailer got it lodged in somewhere, where it repeated again and again... and obviously, I was then thinking about Alice Chess, and also that bit in SCP-4000 where Dr. Japers talks with the unnamed rabbit. Once I had the realization about the two "views" of the puzzle (though the Light Mode/Dark Mode concept was a late postprod formulation), and the initial logic puzzle about working out which piece was which, I was able to start again. Thanks, Lana!
The process for writing this puzzle involved simply writing many, many different potential checkmates... and picking the best. One interesting board was killed because it didn't fit the (very loose!) extraction requirements. Generally, I wrote boards to try and showcase how usual chess concepts (discovered checks, underpromotion, smothered mates, piece defence, et cetera) behaved differently in Alice Chess, and how a number of new considerations had to be made (the way pieces could 'teleport' past each other, universe parity, defending pieces across universes).
Kids, if you ever have the chance, write a puzzle that lets you say the words "universe parity" and mean it.
Given I've spent south of two years building Alice Chess positions, I think it's fair to say that I understand the variant pretty intuitively now. Unfortunately, I suck at regular chess, so an Alice Chess champion in the making I am not.