The Ranch

First Place (1)

Tih spent the next couple of days indirectly working for Maddox and Phillip by helping Instructor Henri with his game.

While Tih was busy with that, Kai and the rest took four days to map out the colosseum. The location of each game, it's rounds and difficulty, type, and rewards were all noted down.

The reason it took so long was mainly due to the extent of the information they wanted. They managed to write down all three rounds of each game. To do so, they had to wait for someone to reach the third round for each game.

They then take another day to use the complete comprehensive map to design a game plan, but first they had to decide on a goal.

After a discussion, they ended with aiming for largest amount of points, earning them the first place prize and few other prizes along the way. Winning first place will give them the notoriety they need for future business collaborations. They're already well-known among their own generation after winning the newcomers tournament, but to island veterans, they're just newbies still wet behind the ear.

Now that they have the capital they needed, they need to status to effectively use that money, but also to protect themselves. If they're reputable figures on the island, people will have to think twice before trying to mess with him. Though, it's a given that the larger players will want to test the waters. They'll need to be fully prepared for that. They still haven't decided whether to play weak or overpower the test.

It's been five days since the carnival first opened. They only have two days to execute the plan. They're not sure exactly how long the course they planned out will take.

After all, calculating the time for the waiting lines of each game depends on how many people are in line at that specific moment, which makes it hard to come up with a clear estimate.

Kai's rough estimates put them at two days, but who knows how large the crowd is going to be on the last two days.

They actually finished preparations the day before, and were waiting for Tih, this important chess piece for the physical games, to come back. Henri's ankle only healed the day before and Tih was finally set free.

They set out the morning of the second to last day. The plan is to go through the games as quickly as possible. What's more frustrating about their time crunch is the need to move as a group because points aren't transferable. They need to collectively use a single ID card when playing all the games and can't spread out to cover different areas.

The plan they made uses the shortest route possible, hits all of the easiest games considering their strengths, and will earn them enough points to top the leaderboard. The current highest score is just under [6,000 points] and is still increasing. That's equivalent to beating the first round of one-thousand, two-hundred game or beating the second round of four-hundred games.

If they really want to beat it in the fastest time possible, they would need to beat the third round of two-hundred games, which would rake in two-hundred prizes, but this is a bad idea for one main reason. Animosity. Winning that many things without the power to hold onto them is asking for trouble. They'd be targeted constantly, by many.

So, although it will take more time, they plan on depending on the second rounds and very few third round games. The ones that have prizes that they deemed useful.

The start with a game close to the entrance of the colosseum and make their way through the carnival, winning round after round before moving on to the next game at top speed. Each game take them a couple minutes at most. The main annoyance is the time it takes to wait in line.

Sherlock solves the puzzle type problems, Kai solves the information type games, Kai solves all the physical related games, and Lucien takes care of the few tech related puzzles.

One game asked them to untie different types of knots, with each knot becoming increasingly more complicated each round. Each person receives a random knot out of over one hundred knots, making it impossible To cheat or copy the person before them. If a knot reverts into its final form, a circle, it's solved and that will no longer be used in future games. Sherlock was the one that solves this.

Another game used an extreme version of the cup and ball game. In the original version, a ball would be placed under a cup and you would have to follow that cup with your eyes as three cups are moved around.

In this new version, instead of cups, the ball is placed in one of the many spherical containers. In the first round, ten containers are spun around at high speed inside a clear, wash basin-shaped tub. The second round added twenty more containers and the third round used fifty in total. Tih relies on his hawk-like eyesight to beat all three rounds.

Eventually, Lucien got a problem of his own. The game was simply to [Does P=NP]. This simple-looking question has never been answered by anyone.

One of the pits Maddox and Phillip used when designing each game was putting in unsolved problems or questions. For example, the unknotting game used knots that even computers haven't been able to untangle yet. That game actually involves the equation P=NP.

Effectively, it asks whether NP problems, those with solutions that are hard to compute but easy to verify, are equivalent to P problems, those that can be solved quickly by a computer program. No one has been able to prove or un-prove this problem, that is, until just now. Lucien spent less than a minute to write out an answer.

Those watching would think Lucien as a genius, a computer god. Only Lucien knows he's already spend a lot of time working on the problem previously, which is how he already had the answer in his head. That's not to say it's any less incredible. Most people could spend half their life trying to answer this question without a breakthrough.

The computer scientist that was hired to work behind the booth and check the answers stared at Lucien's answer. Even if they can't answer it themselves, they have the knowledge to be able to tell if something is right or wrong. Lucien's answer...is correct.

The man was so shocked and elated he wanted to call over all his other co-workers to talk with Lucien, but the group didn't have time to waste and immediately escaped to dominate their next game.

Most of the puzzles Kai played wanted lesser-known answers than no one would know. It would ask history questions that no one has ever heard of and wouldn't be able to read in history books because of how irrelevant it was. There were also well-known games like crossword puzzles that were so hard that no one over the past five day could solve them, at least until Kai cane along.