Bio Engineer Archive

Bear with me here, my thoughts are sort of convoluted on the issue. Last night my guild succeeded in tearing down an Imperial player faction base. As you may know, there are 5 terminals that appear in a faction base when it is vulnerable, and one of these terminals needs to be hacked by a Bio-Engineer. All of the terminals present a mini-game to the person hacking it, which are not too hard. For example, a Bounty Hunter needs to jam a frequency and has to pick the right frequency out of 5 listed... if he fails, he picks one of the other frequencies until he finds the right one. Simple, eh? Now wait till you read about the Bio-Engineer terminal.

Queue the Bio-Engineer, he pokes at the terminal, and this is what he sees...

DNA Sequence Processing
Complete the missing parts: AT, TA, CG, GC
Matches Completed: 0
Sampled Chain: TTTCAA

....Then a list of choices of nucleotide letters, either pairs or single letters...
TA
G
TT
A
C
GC

...And so on. Every time he fails or succeeds in picking nucleotides, the Bio-Engineer will get fourdifferent pairs in the 'missing parts' line, and a new 'sampled chain'. The nucleotide list seems to remain static, though minus whatever letter or letter pairs have been used already. As more matches are completed, the list of nucleotide answers gets shorter (but less chance to succeed on random choice). Here's a photo of the UI for it.

http://groups.msn.com/RAIDScreenshots/rebelsinaction.msnw?action=ShowPhoto&PhotoID=117

Hmm... confusing, but we just need to guess until it cracks like all the other terminals, right? No! The BE needs to match TWENTY FOUR pairs of DNA nucleotides! Crap. Twenty-four pairs would take a bit but it can be done. The huge problem is that there is no discernable pattern to me for matching the DNA nucleotides.

I remember way back when in biology class that G's and C's bind, while A's and T's bind... I'm guessing a Bio-Engineer would need to find the letters needed to make the 'sampled chain' be an equal but opposite match for the 4 pairs. For example the opposite of ATTAGC would be TAATCG. The instructions are very vague, but this seems to make sense. But, in practice it doesn't work like that... I was succeeding more out of random selections than thestrands in which I attempted scientific knowledge and logic . It took me about twelve minutes to finish 24 pairs and be done with the terminal. Unfortunately my completion was due to 99% guesswork, and I'd really like to figure out if there is order behind this madness.

If anyone has some insight into this or has participated in faction terminal hacking, I'd be grateful of any feedback! Even if you've had nothing to do with it, helping decipher just what the heck is going on would be great!

bounty hunters are stupid. They like to keep it simple for us so we can go back to shooting people in the eye.

Yes, yes. Thank you for your constructive input.

I think this sounds interesting... I had not planed to get involved in the GCW, mainly because of the high amounts of points I will have to spend on becoming a be (will not leave much for fighting skills)... However this sounds like fun, and it means that I as a BE would actuarially have something useful to offer a group.

I do not suppose that you wrote down the first few correct answers and how the "puzzle string" changed with them?

I myself play as a bioengineer and am a senior working on my BS in Biology, with a certificate in biotechnology. You are right when you say that "A binds with T" and "G binds with C" Was there also U's in the code? Most DNA sequences are broken into triplets "ATT" for example, which is called a codon. This codon codes for an amino acid in proteins. Its looking however like they broke the nucleic acids into pairs instead of codons. I would probably have to play through this "mini-game" to understand it correctly and see whats going on. Hopefully this weekend!

Thanks for the responses! Mattakar, the base was not enterable due to a bug which allowed the base's owner to make the building Private. I believe this bug is gone now. Regarding the nucleotide U, no, it is not in the mini-game.

My guild had the luck of tearing down another faction base last night, yay! I found out something more... The list of letter options that is generated to pick from - I don't think it's a list at all! Although in list form, it appears to be an incomplete pair of DNA strands that we must somehow splice the 'sampled chain' into to complete. So here's my new analysis...

----------------------------------------
DNA Sequence Processing
Complete the missing parts: AT, TA, CG, GC
Matches Completed: 22
Sampled Chain: TTTCAA

Select the DNA Index to match the chain to:
GC
CG
CG
A
AT
(middle of list, more if scrolled upor down)
---------------------------------------------------

Okay! Now, this time the 'complete the missing parts" line did not change. It probably didn't change the first time either and I was just hallucinating. Now, although the 'DNA Index' thing appears to be a list, now I believe it's a new chain we need to make. This time I chose only single letters from the list and finished much faster (if pairs are completed nucleotides, why are the selectable?), since halfway through this I noted the new strand pattern and that paired letter options would never work.

Now, that above example is from a screenshot I took of the very last single letter left in the new 'DNA Index' chain. I was wrong about the number of pairs needed - it's 23, not 24. In this case I only had one option (letter A) to choose from, so I just had to keep selecting it and if wrong, a new 'sampled chain' would appear and I could try again. So now the goal is to splice the 'sampled chain' into a spot of your choosing into the 'DNA Index', right? Unfortunately the only way to test all this is to find another faction base to tear down . I'll definitely post my findings if I'm involved in another strike like the last two.

I can't tell what they are getting at. 2 years graduate level biochem from duke here. A bit in the past, but...

That follows no sensible pattern. I would have thought exactly what you did. With a bit of extra thought, I remember that DNA strands run in opposite directions, so if you were assembling a strand to match the "sampled" one you would actually fill it in from right to left - that still appears impossible by the selections they have given to you. Unless it resets after every selection is used, or there are a bunch of selections you can scroll down to. In which case you would want to build TTGAAA to match the TTTCAA strand in the picture.

Another thought is that they are wanting to build a palindrome sequence, a thing of significance when cutting and splicing DNA.In which case you would simply make a mirror image of the strand (AACTTT). However, that would not require any consideration of base pairing to complete, so that can't be right (assuming there is logic in this at all...)

A very, very scary thought is that they are wanting you to build the final codon for something. I've no idea what it would be. They have given you 2 codons, but no information as to what they want in the end.

I think my first idea is the only one that has any chance of being correct with the information given. Note it would be unbelievable if they expected the average person to know that bit of trivia. I suspect that the designer actually had no knowledge and so the solution will have no basis in reality.

Actually, the raid I went on had a red, no enter door on the base, and there was nothing to select to slice or destroy that we could find. How do you break in in the first place.

Took 2 bases down tonight and came here to see what was up with this madness. I succeeded by randomly selecting from the DNA index list. Took awhile but it worked. I think we may have to consider the possibility that this is random. It might not be a puzzle at all and just a 'time sink' to make the game more interesting. Here's hoping it's not.

Thanks for this post. I was just about to do a base this weekend. Now I know what to expect.

Took one out this morning, my mates were wondering what was taking so long. Like 7 mins or so, I was sweating it too. I could hear the AT-ST's outside, lol. What I noticed it that is was similar to those tests that we took in grade school. I just picked the next letter or pair of letters that fit, I think that is why they list the AT,TA,GC,CG at the top. And I had to pick either a single letter or pair, the pair gives you two points, the single well single point. Not sure yet if you can choose a pair at any time. The sequence moves each time you fail or not, so you can pick at random. I did this at the end because everything was re-spawning, and I was stuck at 22 points. And I was DB'donce. That is when I noticed the sequence moving during fails (after I picked each letter once and wondered why if I hit all of them did I not get a match). Well I am glad that the Base did not aggro me 99.5% of the time, I would have nerfed my hard drive and gone outside to work on my yard xp.

http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=bio-engineer&message.id=57674