Eclectic Spatial Geometry [SOLVED]
Nine painted Eastern Stone Geckos have returned to their home plane on the MIT campus from their annual migration. This year, they visited the Elongated Square Gyrobicupola, essentially a floating rock with 26 faces. Each face of the Elongated Square Gyrobicupola is named for a different letter of the English alphabet.
- Save for the gecko in clue 6, geckos can move from one face to another if and only if the two faces share one or two vertices (that is, they touch at a corner or an edge but are not the same). No two geckos stay on the same face at the same time, nor does any gecko revisit a previous face, but their paths may cross during moves.
- Every two geckos that visibly abut on their home plane were, upon their arrival at the Elongated Square Gyrobicupola, one normal move apart (as related in the first clue). They then proceeded to make five moves each, ending up on their favorite letters. Their first moves were all completed at the same time, as were their second, third, fourth, and fifth. Except for clue 4, each gecko's movement and position information is given in forward chronological order.
- Each of the eight letters naming a face on the equator is in the eight-letter title of the fourteenth track on an appropriate rock band's 2000 album. The starting letters of the seven geckos from across the middle of the plane clearly spell, with one word on each line, the title of the second track on the 2000 album of a similarly-named Southern rapper. The red gecko in the plane's northwest and the green gecko in the southeast started, in some order, on the letters M and C.
- The moves of the orange gecko are represented, in some order, by the words IDEOGRAM, MALLARD, NICEST, SCOFFLAW, UNSAVORY. The representation is thus: the gecko starts on a letter that appears once in the corresponding word, and he moves to the letter appearing immediately next in that word. Each word represents a different move.
- Having forgotten to put spaces between his letters, a second gecko has recorded [..----..-...-....-] as the Morse code for his six positions.
- Ever the adventurous one, even at the home plane, one green gecko travels in what appear to be knight moves, distinguished from the usual king moves. During each such move, she crosses three edges, the second edge sharing each of its vertices with one of the other edges. She does this quickly and doesn't think of the two intermediate faces as being "visited" at that point. In any case, here are those intermediate squares in the order she sped across them: HUFQAWENVE.
- Measuring the alphabetical distance from each of the purple gecko's positions to the next chronologically gives, in order, 3, 13, 8, 9, and 13 letters. (For example, A is 25 letters from Z, and vice versa.)
- Up on the plane, one red gecko is good friends with his blue neighbor. Over on the solid, they are always one move apart. This year, the spaces they occupied after each move (alphabetized within the pairs) were IU, FJ, CF, BY, and PY.
- Regarding the seventh gecko (because six have had their paths described so far), he is fascinated with antipodal points. He has noticed that five pairs of square faces on this solid are exactly parallel and opposite one another, and the other sixteen faces match up reasonably well. So on this trip, he looked up and recorded the antipodes of the six faces he visited, and in order, they are XTVNSM.
- As proud as the yellow gecko is of her fancy new watch with the 24-hour dial, she decided to use it for more than telling time. For each of her five moves, she noted what letter she was on. Then with the usual A=1, B=2 substitution, she travelled to the adjacent face in the suggested direction. As she did this, she did not turn to face the direction in which she walked. Her body rotated only as necessary to keep her belly on the surface of the solid as she went from one face to another. (Equivalently, she strafes around the surface with her belly facing the solid's center.) For instance, she could conceivably have come to her starting position in one move from K, which was touching her starting face at 23 o'clock. This system worked perfectly for all five moves.
- Last but not least, the ninth gecko fancies herself a budding surveyor. After each move, she takes note of the face she sees ahead of her--that is, the face she would be visiting if she made her very next move in the same direction. The five faces she so noted this year are HBGKU.