Silph Puzzle Hunt 2021/Getting Going

Getting Going is the metapuzzle of Round 1 of the 2021 Silph Puzzlehunt and acts as the first story checkpoint of the hunt. Aside from flavortext on the puzzle page, the entirety of the puzzle is contained in the map solvers have been navigating through in round 1.

Solve Path
On the puzzle page, teams are presented with the following flavortext:

''You're having fun walking in all directions across the city grid, when suddenly your phone rings! You straighten up as you hear the unmistakable voice of your team leader themselves.''

"Hope your preparation's going well, agent. Remember that this is a game of strategy and territory, and it's only through strategy that man has been able to triumph over machine. Get ready for the alpha stage of your mission!"

''Oh, right, your mission. Um, what were you supposed to be doing again?''

The title, Getting Going, the flavortext, game of strategy and territory, along with the 18x18 grid the puzzles are presented on are hinting the solver to think of the popular board game Go.

The feeder puzzles are each presented at a particular location on the Go board, and now have answers associated to them. Solvers are meant to turn to the parts of the flavor text that are unused to figure out the next steps. The text ''it's only through strategy that man has been able to triumph over machine. Get ready for the alpha stage...'' clues solvers to AlphaGo, a technology that uses machine learning to play the board game Go, and in particular, a series the program played against Lee Sedol which ended 4-1 in favor of AlphaGo. the flavor text man has been able to triumph over machine clues game 4 of the match, in which Lee Sedol was victorious over AlphaGo.

Because this is a metapuzzle, somehow the feeder answers will play a role. The flavor text walking in all directions clues the connection these words all share, though it can also be realized through a letter frequency analysis. Each of the feeder answer contains exactly four of the letters [N,E,S,W], and when treated as movement instructions on the Go board, make a pentomino, which is to say, they never go back on themselves, always moving to five unique positions on the Go board.

Given the cardinal directions from each answer, solvers are meant to make a pentomino on top of the Go board for game of the AlphaGo v lee Sedol series and notice that they always encompass five different stones played in the game. A traditional Go game is played with white and black pieces. This fact, along with the fact that each answer clues to five positions on the Go board, might clue the solver to binary, which in five digits can represent thirty two characters, meaning it can represent every letter of the alphabet (plus more).

Solvers now have one letter associated to each feeder puzzle, placed on the Go board. To get the final answer, solvers are meant to order the letters extracted from each puzzle by looking at the game Lee Sedol was victorious over AlphaGo and reading the letters in play order. Doing so yields the final answer.