Solution: Pirate Lingo
Answer: YOHOHO
Written by Caleb Hostetler
Each one of the nine "pirates" has a transformation that they perform on the input text, which can be determined through trial and error:
| Pirate | Effect | Example |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Take the second half of the string and append it to the end | ABCDE -> ABCDEDE |
| 2 | Move the first letter to the end, then add EFF | JBIG -> BIGJEFF |
| 3 | Replace double, triple, etc. with single letters | BELLOW -> BELOW |
| 4 | Do a ROT13 cipher | ABCDE -> NOPQR |
| 5 | If all of the letters in the string were alphabetized, replace all instances of the first letter with A, the second with H, and so on, indexing into AHOYMEMATEYSNOBEANSWERHERE. | ADNOYX -> AHOYEM |
| 6 | Remove first and last letters | HELLO -> ELL |
| 7 | Shift the string to the right by two letters, moving the rightmost two letters to the front | WAGON -> ONWAG |
| 8 | Remove letters from the second half of the alphabet (N-Z) | SPEW -> E |
| 9 | Swap each pair of two letters | ABACUS -> BACASU |
Then performing the appropriate transformations on ANSWERIS gives us
| Operation | Result |
|---|---|
| ANSWERIS | |
| 6 | NSWERI |
| 4 | AFJREV |
| 7 | EVAFJR |
| 2 | VAFJREEFF |
| 8 | AFJEEFF |
| 5 | AOYHHOO |
| 6 | OYHHO |
| 9 | YOHHO |
| 3 | YOHO |
| 1 | YOHOHO |
Author’s Notes
This was probably my favorite puzzle out of all of them. I was so happy when I was able to get a reasonable set of rules that made a coherent answer.