For the past two years, a mysterious and tantalizing puzzle has been intriguing internet users and the next installment of the scavenger-hunt is expected to appear within a few weeks. A computer analyst from Sweden stumbled upon an irresistible invitation from an organisation calling itself Cicada 3301. The call to find the others and to R.S.V.P. (regrets only) by teasing the hidden message out of the invite.

The clues led across a daisy-chain of increasingly challenging riddles, requiring novel and creative minds to resolve. Interest quickly spread with thousands participating and Cicada 3301 responded in kind with more and more esoteric subjects (involving obscure poetry, alchemy, rare music and even detours into the physical world) and rabbit-holes—that has brought many of the new initiates to the uncharted territories of the world-wide web, called the Darknet, that are not normally accessible to the public via search engines, the massive mantle under the surface of unindexed data that's multitudes bigger by volume that the visible internet world. Despite the great scrutiny and speculation of the hive-mind, no one has fully solved the puzzle or identified who is behind Cicada 3301. What do you think? Could it really be a recruitment tool, a push to gather the world's prodigies like in This Island Earth or The Last Starfighter? Could it be an experimental sandbox for the world's colluding intelligence networks to cull the best and brightest among cryptographers or to arrest their development? Is it just a game? Or worse, is it some publicity stunt that will lead up to the announcement of some new crap cyborg gadget? I personally think it might be a sentient internet's attempt at reaching out to its creators. Watch for the next clue to appear on 4. January 2014.