Gavin Dorsey is the crew’s technology specialist within Sunday gold. His homemade Hack3rboy device allows him to crack almost any encryption, giving you access to information that Hogan wants to keep secret. Like Frank and Sally, Gavin has a unique minigame dedicated to using this signature skill.
Where the comrades’ mini-game focuses on precision and timing, Gavin’s mini-game is about logic and deduction. If you’re having trouble cracking a key device, follow the steps in this guide to get the right solution almost every time. If you run out of guesses, all you lose is a few AP, so you can try again as many times as it takes.
Overview of hacking
Gavin’s hacking interface plays like the classic logic game Master mind. To win you must guess the correct four-digit code. Each time you guess, you’ll see a series of symbols telling you how close you were:
- Each Circle means that one of your entries was the correct digit in the correct position.
- Each Triangle means that one of your entries was the correct digit but in the wrong position.
- Each The square means that one of your entries was a digit that doesn’t appear in the correct order at all.
The symbols are technically color coded, but if Gavin’s Composure is low the colors will quickly changeso it’s best to go by the shapes alone.
Note that the placement of the symbols does not indicate which digit each refers to. The only information you have is how many digits were correct. If you enter the correct code before you run out of guesses, the hack is successful.
How to guess the code
Fortunately, you don’t always have to guess the code from an entire keyboard’s worth of digits. Only the highlighted keys on Hack3rboy is used in every puzzle. But just because a key is highlighted doesn’t mean the digit is actually present in the solution!
Start each puzzle by entering the exactly the same number four times; “1111”, “2222”, “3333” and so on. This will immediately tell you how many times this number is present. Do the same for each available number until you know how many of each digit are in the solution.
For example, in the image above we started with “2222.” This shows us that there are no twos anywhere in the sequence. Next, we try “5555”, and find that there are two hits. This means that since six is the only other digit available, the sequence must consist of two fives and two sixes!
Then you start entering combinations of the known numbers. Continuing the example, we enter “5656.” Two of these digits are correctly placed, but two are not. If we swap two digits while leaving the others in place, that should give us more information.
We try to swap the last two digits, enter “5665,” and are lucky – it’s the right code! If that hadn’t worked, we could have kept experimenting with different combinations of digits until we found the solution – maybe try “6556” or “6565” to see what else we could learn. By quickly eliminating wrong digits and giving yourself more room to guess plausible combinations, you can easily win most of the hacking minigames in Sunday Gold.
