Devil's Centroid — broncoctf2026

Description

Rumors speak of a treasure buried in the center of a specific triangle. Three people have sent me locations where they are, but there's a problem. I think they're all possessed by the devil.

All they gave me 3 different pieces of information:

• I'm at a place called Devil's Isle
• I found myself near a haunted sentry box
• This one just went 'Nunca podrán dominarla La buena música no engaña'

The coordinates of the cities themselves on Wikipedia should give me a decent estimate.

Flag: bronco{XX(N or S),XX(E or W)}, Rounded down to the nearest whole number after all of the calculations. Example: bronco{06N,66E}

English summary: three devil-themed clues each resolve to a city. The three cities are the classic vertices of a famous "triangle". Take each city's Wikipedia coordinates, compute the geographic centroid (arithmetic mean of the three lat/lon pairs), floor both values, and format with N/S and E/W hemispheres.

Analysis

The core insight is thematic: a "specific triangle" whose points are all possessed by the devil is the Bermuda Triangle, popularly known as the Devil's Triangle. Its three classic corners are Miami, San Juan (Puerto Rico), and Bermuda. Each clue names one of these vertices.

Clue-by-clue resolution:

1. "I'm at a place called Devil's Isle" → Bermuda. Bermuda's historical nickname is "The Isle of Devils" / "Devil's Isle".

   • Red-herring elimination: Devil's Island (Île du Diable, near Kourou, French Guiana) is a different place and is wrong. The task deliberately writes "Devil's Isle", not "Devil's Island".
   • Also note the Wikipedia page for Hamilton, Bermuda has no coordinates field — another reason to use the Bermuda country page, which the prompt itself hints at ("coordinates of the cities themselves on Wikipedia").

2. "I found myself near a haunted sentry box" → San Juan, Puerto Rico. A Google search for "haunted sentry box" leads to La Garita del Diablo ("The Devil's Sentry Box"), a stone sentry box at Castillo San Cristóbal in San Juan. It is tied to the legend of the vanishing soldier Sánchez and the short story "The Haunted Sentry Box of Porto Rico" by Lewis Miller. City = San Juan, Puerto Rico.

3. "Nunca podrán dominarla / La buena música no engaña" → Miami. An exact-phrase Google search of the Spanish lyric (hitting Genius/Spotify/Musixmatch) identifies the song "Miami 666" by the Panamanian alternative rock band Señor Loop. The song title gives the city = Miami.

Solution

Step 1 — Fetch exact Wikipedia coordinates via the MediaWiki API

curl -s "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&prop=coordinates&titles=Miami&format=json"
curl -s "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&prop=coordinates&titles=San%20Juan,%20Puerto%20Rico&format=json"
curl -s "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&prop=coordinates&titles=Bermuda&format=json"

Coordinates returned:

City	Wikipedia page	Latitude	Longitude
Bermuda	Bermuda	32.32	-64.74
San Juan	San Juan, Puerto Rico	18.40638889	-66.06388889
Miami	Miami	25.77416667	-80.19361111

Step 2 — Compute the centroid and floor

#!/usr/bin/env python3
import math

# (lat, lon) from Wikipedia
points = [
    (32.32,        -64.74),        # Bermuda      -> "Devil's Isle"
    (18.40638889,  -66.06388889),  # San Juan     -> "haunted sentry box" / Garita del Diablo
    (25.77416667,  -80.19361111),  # Miami        -> Senor Loop "Miami 666"
]

lat = sum(p[0] for p in points) / 3   # 25.500185...
lon = sum(p[1] for p in points) / 3   # -70.3325

lat_h = 'N' if lat >= 0 else 'S'
lon_h = 'E' if lon >= 0 else 'W'

# "Rounded down to the nearest whole number" -> floor of the magnitude
lat_v = math.floor(abs(lat))          # 25
lon_v = math.floor(abs(lon))          # 70

print(f"bronco{{{lat_v}{lat_h},{lon_v}{lon_h}}}")
# bronco{REDACTED}

Arithmetic:

• lat = (32.32 + 18.40638889 + 25.77416667) / 3 = 25.500185...° → N, floor → 25
• lon = (-64.74 + -66.06388889 + -80.19361111) / 3 = -70.3325° → W (negative = west), floor of magnitude → 70