2701

Inspiration

The inspiration for 2701 stems from the enigmatic Cicada 3301 puzzles that captivated the internet starting in 2012, blending cryptography, steganography, and philosophical riddles to recruit "intelligent individuals" through a series of increasingly complex challenges hidden in images, music, and obscure websites. We drew from its anonymous, collaborative ethos, where global solvers pieced together clues without central guidance, fostering a sense of mystery and communal discovery akin to a digital treasure hunt. To adapt this for modern platforms, we embedded the game within Reddit, leveraging its viral, chaotic community dynamics to create an ARG tied to real-world scandals, encouraging players to decode ciphers anonymously and rally around breadcrumbs that unlock deeper narratives.

What it does

Generates hourly, event-driven cryptographic puzzles from live news data; validates and schedules them; accepts and sanitizes player guesses; enforces rate limits; lets the community “rally” behind candidate answers (atomic counter increments); locks interactions at T−10s; deterministically selects winners (correct answer); issues standardized breadcrumb metadata for each solved puzzle; clusters breadcrumbs into narrative threads via cosine-similarity; triggers story-fragment unlocks and a final master cipher at configured thresholds; maintains player state, scoring, titles, leaderboards and Reddit flair; provides admin moderation, audit logging, and deterministic fallback behavior when AI services fail.

How we built it

Scheduler pulls event signals (Perplexity) and requests cipher construction from an AI generator (Gemini) with a 30s timeout and a 50-item precomputed fallback pool. Game state, counters, profiles, breadcrumbs, and audit logs persist in Reddit’s KV_Store with atomic ops and SHA-256 duplicate checks. Real-time updates propagate via Devvit realtime/WebSocket channels with polling fallback. Breadcrumb clustering uses embedded vectors and cosine-similarity thresholds (>0.7). Assets (audio/image) are stored on S3 and served via CDN; uploads are scanned (ClamAV) and signed. Backend microservices run TypeScript/Node with explicit retry and circuit-breaker logic, rate-limit enforcement via KV counters, input sanitization (DOMPurify + regex), OAuth-based auth, CSRF checks, and telemetry for monitoring and recovery.

Challenges we ran into

Kiro kept on crashing.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Proud of the thought that however this goes, there is a chance we create a new movement

What's next for 2701

Multi provider AI orchestration, human reviewed cipher sets, and tournament mode

Built With

• amazon-web-services
• cloudfront
• d3.js
• devvit
• gemini-api
• node.js
• perplexity-api
• reddit-kv-store
• typescript