Scott Duke Kominers, Columnist

Kominers’s Conundrums: Looping Letters in a Narrative Arc

Can you decode a colorful cipher that looks absolutely breathtaking in the right light?

November 7, 2021 at 1:00 PM UTC

Scott Duke Kominers is the MBA Class of 1960 Associate Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and a faculty affiliate of the Harvard University department of economics.

Can you create order out of this alphabetical chaos? — Can you create order out of this alphabetical chaos?
Photographer: Peter Dazeley/The Image Bank RF

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How’s the weather? This week’s Conundrum is perfect for a rainy day — or a sunny one, for that matter. We’ve encoded a message letter by letter, using a colorful cipher that looks absolutely breathtaking in the right light. It’s up to you to spell out a message by creating order out of the alphabetical chaos.1The puzzle ripples out from there: one more logical leap should lead you to a single word, which is this week’s answer.

As you start solving this puzzle, you might want to take some notes on what you’re seeing. And don’t worry — the animation plays in a loop, so it’s okay to oscillate back and forth between it and your notes in order to get everything down.