June 2026: Regional Artwork

This was one of the easiest Jane Street puzzles I’ve solved, and for me, also the most hands-off. I once again collaborated with Fred Vu, the decision being made immediately after we saw that this month’s puzzle was the kind that we usually do well on and have fun solving together. However, I was occupied with the orientation day of an internship, and only managed to contribute a couple of minor pieces of information before Fred brought it home with a full solution. A slightly disappointing month from the perspective of enjoying a good challenge, but a cool puzzle nonetheless.

Stats:

Difficulty: 3/10

Enjoyability: 4/10

Leaderboard Placing: 15/1136

The approach:

There wasn’t much to this one, so I’ll simply outline the approximate sequence of events that led to our solution.

1) Via a combination of prior knowledge and Google, we determined the answers Ali, Amazing Randi, Amerigo Vespucci, Artemis II, and Alpha Centauri to the first, fourth, tenth, twelfth, and fourteenth clues respectively.

2) We realised that AI was a plausible answer to “arguably, the story of our time”. Given we’re told that this answer provides a hint to all other clues, it’s impossible to not notice that all the other answers start with ‘A’ and end with ‘I’.

3) Via a combination of prior knowledge and Google and aided by our newfound knowledge of the necessary first and last letters, we determined all other answers. They were found to be of distinct lengths from 2 to 15 — unsurprising given that these numbers appear at the bottom of the puzzle.

4) Fred used Codex to solve the extraction: one permutes the clues so they’re in order of ascending answer length. In doing so, each clue must be displaced by a positive integer number of positions, which provides (1-based) indexing instructions into the associated answer. For example, “frequent Frazier foe” refers to (Muhammed) Ali. Since this answer is of length three, the clue should be second on the list, but is currently first. To permute it to second, we must simply displace it by one position, meaning we must index into the answer “Ali” by one, giving ‘A’. This letter is placed in the space labelled ‘3’ at the bottom of the puzzle.

5) After executing the above for each clue, the spaces at the bottom of the puzzle are seen to spell “George Lucas Hit”, which could describe his 1973 film American Graffiti. Since this matches the starting with ‘A’ and ending with ‘I’ pattern, it’s clearly the answer.

Note: I’m generally opposed to the use of AI for everything — a stance I’m becoming increasingly passionate about. However, Fred and I genuinely do like to compete for high positions on the Jane Street puzzle leaderboard, and I’m willing to allow its use in this competitive context (though I do feel the need to disclose such use).