Trapdoor Books

Today’s puzzle challenge is a new Decrypt the Signal puzzle! Cyberkill by Frank Fiore was the inspiration for this puzzle, and you can solve the puzzle without reading Cyberkill, but it’s an amazing read that shouldn’t be missed.

To grab the printable copy of the puzzle, click the banner at left.

Don’t forget to submit your solution to the puzzle to Chris for a Summertime Puzzle Contest code. Please be a good sport; don’t post the answer to this puzzle in the comments or elsewhere while the puzzle contest is still going on.

For more free puzzles, check out my work over at The Griddle.

Today’s puzzle challenge is another Decrypt the Signal puzzle! It’s a logic puzzle based on Cyberkill by Frank Fiore. You can solve the puzzle without reading Cyberkill, but you shouldn’t. It’s an awesome story and you would be missing out if you didn’t get a copy.

Note: The original posting of this puzzle had two solutions. If you plan to redeem this puzzle for a code for the Summertime Puzzle Contest, please re-solve rows 6 and 7 using the new shapes to ensure a correct answer!

To grab the printable copy of the puzzle, click the banner at left.

Like most techno-thrillers of the genre, the author seeks to come as close to reality as possible – then stretch the facts a bit.

My novel CyberKill is no exception.

Many years ago I read an article in Time Magazine dated March 25^th, 1996 about a young artificial intelligence (AI) programmer who created a series of AI agents and sent them out over the internet to see if they would evolve.

“An ecobiologist and bottom-up computer theorist will soon launch onto the Internet a single, tiny self-reproducing program which will spread among hundreds of computers around the world.

A Wall Street Journal article, Mass Paperback Publisher Goes All Digital, is an interesting look at the other side of electronic book publishing – the negative impact on traditional publishers who are not well positioned to break the distribution and wholesale chain.

Dorchester Publishing – famed for its mass-market romance novels – has seen sales of traditional books fall by 25% last year. This is interesting because their primary market focus has been on older women readers who have embraced new e-book readers – supposedly because of the ability to change font sizes.

An article last week in the NY Times entitled, E-Books Fly Beyond Mere Text, lightly touches on the first forays into the electronic book revolution.

I like the adjectives used by the publishers to describe the new generation of e-books: enriched, amplified, enhanced. Very cool. While publishers can’t decide what to call these new book formats, there seems to be general agreement that this phenomena has been kick-started by the arrival of the iPad – which really opens up the possibility of what interactive books are all about.