Hints

The word abstract is important here. Remember that this is a puzzle from the AlCoVE Times.

The three words have the same last 8 letters.

You should be able to follow the dependencies of the clues to get an equation to solve, and obtain all the numbers. You can also use the constraints of the grid to guess the numbers faster.

Most of the numbers should be spelled out in English in the grid. The mention old-school style hints at another way of writing numbers, also using letters. For the clues written upside-down, the answer should be written upside-down in the grid (in numbers).

Only one of the groups is about semantics (relating to the meaning of the words). The three other ones are about plays on words, and some of them are very customized for this conference.

This is related to the conference, or to chambers.

1,1,2,5,14… or others…

Change one thing in the elements of this group to obtain words that really count.

Some people in this conference are really confused.

The word Strands itself, and the emphasis on art in, are important clues for the theme of the words.

The longest word can be read starting from the bottom and going up. The two-word spangram as well.

After solving the sudoku, use all five previous answers to extract the nine letters.

If you’ve never seen this correspondence before, study the examples first.

The table of numbers (called a plane partition) is a bird’s eye view of stacks of cubes, each number corresponding to the height of each stack. The lozenge tiling gives a different perspective on this same collection of cubes.

After drawing the corresponding tiling of the big hexagon, extract the letters in order and fill the line below to discover what to do.

You have to decode somehow the definitions, but not only to identify to whom they correspond. You also need to understand how the definitions have been encoded, because…

Who is an essential participant of the conference. What is something they have been mutated into, using specific rules that you have to discover. If needed, pictures of the objects are available.

There is a special extra word in each of the definitions, use it to extract one letter per row.

Notice that the final question also has been mutated somehow.

Follow each lattice path of the second page to spell the 10 words defined in the first page. You may need to double back during your trajectory. Also, the title is there to help.

Lengths of the words from top to bottom of the first page: 6, 7, 7, 10, 5, 8, 8, 4, 6, 6. Also, the definitions are given in alphabetical order of the words (but the diagrams are in a different order).

How would you describe these paths, geometrically, or rather geographically? The segments correspond to specific types of letters. What about the dots?

The segments are cardinal directions (but they may be used several times in the path). The dots are other letters.

Select the 12 letters corresponding to the red dots and use them in the last four diagrams. The second diagram in the last row is tricky, it should be read starting and ending on a red dot.

Hint — Pista — Indice — Hinweis — Indizio: Multilingual teams have an advantage when solving this puzzle. The others will have to use a few dictionaries.

Some words are especially important in the announcement.

Each line represents the same things in a different language. The languages can be determined from the title of the blackboard. What represents each line is hinted at by the italicized words in the introduction: counting, number, language, the end, at least ten.

Write down the numbers from 10 in English (ten, eleven, …), what do you notice about the endings? What if you do the same in the other languages?

The white rectangles hide the same type of information as the other elements of the sequences. Notice that the numbers in these rectangles are not always in the same position.