Sgt. Joe,

I only just noticed that you've edited your post regarding the city names; #7 was one of my two "problem children" but I eventually realized I had been mentally misspelling it so the anagram didn't seem to work :-)

That just leaves me with #12 as a "not sure" case, and I've still not looked online or at maps so I await Adri's "answer" post with interest...

Cheers - Al.

P.S. I wish the forum had some way of marking edited posts as "might be worth re-reading" (and flagging the changes in the threads list somehow); ah,well, I don't think the standard BOINC message boards do much (if any) better...

Dear puzzle friends,
It's time to post the solution to the puzzle consisting of French cities. Your job was to put the letters of each 'anagram sum' in the correct order so that you would have 24 names of French cities, whereupon the letters that were placed in one certain column would form a term that would relate to the summer of 2024.

SOLUTION
Here are the 24 cities:

 1.         |G|RENOBLE (place of the 1968 Winter Olympics)
 2.        P|A|RIS (in Dutch: Parijs)
 3.         |M|ARSEILLE
 4.     RENN|E|S
 5.    NANTE|S|
 6.   STRASB|O|URG (in Dutch: Straatsburg)
 7. CLERMONT|F|ERRAND (Clermont-Ferrand)
 8.         |T|OULOUSE
 9.       LE|H|AVRE (Le Havre)
10.       BR|E|ST
11.  BORDEAU|X|
12.   ROUBAI|X|
13.       AU|X|ERRE
14.        N|I|CE
15.       RE|I|MS
16.        L|I|MOGES
17.     TOUL|O|N
18.       LI|L|LE
19.        L|Y|ON
20.         |M|ETZ
21.     MONT|P|ELLIER
22.       AM|I|ENS
23.      LEM|A|NS (Le Mans)
24.         |D|IJON

The final solution is: "Games of the XXXIII Olympiad". It is the official name of the 2024 Summer Olympics, branded as "Paris 2024".
The difficult part was to find a well-known French city with an F in its name on the mainland of France (see "7."). After all, Clermont-Ferrand was also the longest name in the puzzle.
A trip by train from Amsterdam to Paris would take three hours and 20 minutes, while a train trip from London to Paris could take only two hours and 17 minutes.
This is the emblem of the event:

It wasn't until today that I read that this emblem for the 2024 Summer Olympics and Paralympics is a representation of Marianne, the national personification of France, with a flame formed in negative space by her hair. After reading this, I noticed that there is indeed what looks to be a female figure (or her head) in the image and it "also serves as an homage to the 1900 Summer Olympics in Paris, which were the first to allow women to participate."
The 2024 Summer Paralympics will be opening in three weeks on the 28th of August.

It was nice to spot that Al gave away one name in his reply to Mark.

Mark, Al, Sgt. Joe, and anyone else who took the time to try my puzzle, thank you very much for participating!

Adri

Adri,

Thanks for the solution...

I didn't get #12 right; I don't follow cycle-racing that closely and I just had a [bad] guess at something sounding like a French place-name! But I've learnt something new now; [nowadays] I just wonder whether the knowledge will stick :-)

Cheers - Al.

Dear puzzle friends, welcome!

This is the new puzzle:

s/:/*5*73+/;s/^/(/;s/:/)*2*3*4+/;s/^/(/;s/:/)*3*4*5+/;s/^/(/;s/:/)*2*5*6+/

What do you see in it? Does it have anything to do with WCG? If so, what? What if it doesn't

Good luck!

Adri
PS Solution will be posted in a week.

[As a programmer] I see something that could have an application for WCG and other places; however, I wouldn't do what this appears to do using this technique as my tools of choice have routines to do a similar task...

I can't really be more precise without giving the game away :-)

Cheers - Al.