Contest 4 Results: A Cleverly-Titled Birthday Contest

The clock striking midnight on my 24th birthday signals the end of A Cleverly-Titled Birthday Contest. In this contest, solvers were tasked to make geometric order out of a Polyominous grid; when the puzzle is completed, the units digits of the numbers in seven cells can be placed in the blank spots in a URL leading to the AllMusic webpage on a certain song; solvers had to supply the title of the song, or the URL of the webpage. Naturally, now that the contest has ended, my readers, particularly the ones who found time to submit entries, are probably interested in seeing the results.

Warning: the following results contain spoilers (obviously)! If you wish to solve the contest puzzle yourself, please do so before reading on!











I received 56 entries, 53 of which contained the correct answer, either the URL http://www.allmusic.com/song/t1819634 or the song title Subdivisions (by the band Rush). I accepted answers like "1819634", "Subdivisons", and "Subdivided", as well, because I'm nice; however, the answers "All American Boy" [1819234], "At the Dawn of Humanity" [1810634], and "Echo" [1819654] did not conform, and were cast out.

This was quite easily my most spontaneous contest yet on my blog, as there was probably at most a 7-hour gap between conceiving the contest idea and posting it. The inspiration came when I heard the song on the radio during a car ride to church on Wednesday, April 27. I thought, "Huh, interesting. That voice sounds like the guy from Rush. And there are weird time signatures in it, too." I managed to make out enough lyrics to perform a Google search on my iPhone, and discovered what song it was. "Oh, wow, this song is good. I somehow need to create a contest about it." However, I instantly recognized that making a puzzle where the song's title was revealed as one solved it would make it too tempting and too easy to fill in the blanks before finishing the puzzle. When I realized that I could use an AllMusic URL instead, I set off to figure out how to make a puzzle leading to that URL. The rest is history. :)

The randomly selected winners are ralphmerridew, Robert Vollmert, LordKinbote, and Jangler! Congratulations to you all!

On a completely unrelated note, look who else wished me a happy birthday!

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