Solving the 2015 GCHQ Christmas Puzzle part 2

As we saw in my post on part 1 of the GCHQ Christmas puzzle, the solution to the grid puzzle gives us a QR code which takes us to the following website:

http://www.gchq.gov.uk/puzz/Pages/index.aspx

Part 2 of the puzzle states:

"Part 2 consists of six multiple choice questions. You must answer them all correctly before you can move on to Part 3."

We are then given our first question:

Q1. Which of these is not the odd one out?

1. STARLET
2. SONNET
3. SAFFRON
4. SHALLOT
5. TORRENT
6. SUGGEST

This is a strangely worded question... which of these is not the odd one out. We are more used to being asked which of these is the odd one out. What would it mean for something not to be the odd one out? My initial reading of the question, which turned out to be the correct one, is that each word except for one will turn out to be the odd one out for a different reason. For example, TORRENT is the only not starting with an S, therefore, it is the odd one out, and not the answer to the puzzle. SAFFRON is the only on ending in an N and is also there not the answer to the puzzle.

As an aside, this question reminds me of the interesting number paradox. If we attempt to divide all numbers up into numbers that are interesting (such as 2 which is the only even prime) and numbers which are not interesting. Then the numbers that are not interesting must have a smallest member. However, since this is an interesting property (the property of being the smallest uninteresting number), this number cannot in fact be an uninteresting number. And we must conclude that there are no uninteresting number. Similarly, if we work out that one of the answers above is not the odd one out, then we have found a way in which the number is the odd one out. Due to the fact that it is the only one which is not the odd one out! 

Q2. What comes after GREEN, RED, BROWN, RED, BLUE, -, YELLOW, PINK?

1. RED
2. YELLOW
3. GREEN
4. BROWN
5. BLUE
6. PINK

This turns out to be a cool question. We have a sequence of colours and we need to work out the next value. My first thought when I read this was that it perhaps relates to monopoly (possibly because I had played it just before trying to answer). I played around with this idea for a while but didn't get anywhere. I wasn't a million miles away as in the end my girlfriend gave me a hint that it related to snooker. Once you plug in the values of the snooker balls into this sequence you get the following sequence of numbers:

3   1   4   1   5   -   2   6

Which you will hopefully recognise as the decimal expansion of $\pi$. The next digit is 5 and therefore the answer is Blue.

Q3. Which is the odd one out?

1. MATURE
2. LOVE
3. WILDE
4. BUCKET
5. BECKHAM
6. SHAKA

I had no idea how to solve this question. I tried googling all the names but couldn't really see any common links. Below I show how to progress even though you haven't answered all the questions.

Q4. I was looking at a man on top of a hill using flag semaphore to send a message, but to me it looked like a very odd message. It began "ZGJJQ EZRXM" before seemingly ending with a hashtag. Which hashtag?

1. #SGM
2. #SEM
3. #SEN
4. #SGN
5. #TEN
6. #TGN

​
This should be quite a straightforward question to answer - my guess which turned out to be correct is that there is a fairly straight forward transformation that can be applied to how the man is using flag semaphore so that it makes sense. The first transformation I tried was to rotate the message by various degrees. I got bored of answering this question after a while so I decided to skip it. .

Q5. What comes after 74, 105, 110, 103, 108, 101, 98, 101, 108, 108?

1. 108
2. 101
3. 115
4. 123
5. 111
6. 103

Here we have a sequence of numbers and we need to find the next number. Since the number all cluster around the 70-110 area, my intuition was that they are some sort of encoding. The first thing I checked was the ascii values of these numbers. They come out as J i n g l e b e l l. This should be the answer then! The next value is s, and the next number is therefore 115.

Ascii is a way for computers to represent letters and other characters using numbers. The numbers 0 to 255 (giving a total of 256 characters which is a power of 2) are each assigned a character here is a link to an ascii table:

http://www.asciitable.com/

Q6. What comes next: D, D, P, V, C, C, D, ?

1. F
2. E
3. D
4. C
5. B
6. A

This was quite a fun question. I've got no idea how to help people solve it as I just stared at it for a few minutes then spotted the answer. These are the names of Santa's reindeers! I guess one possible hint was the use of jinglebells in the question above, and the fact that this is a Christmas puzzle.

So we have the answer to 3 of the questions and we have narrowed down some of the options on the other questions.

I noticed that the way the website stores your responses is to take the 6 answers and convert it to a web address. So by answering 1 on each question we will be taken to the following url. (Note the 6 As at the end which correspond to answering 1 in each question)

http://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/puzzleinabucket/AAAAAA.html

What I did next was set up a Spreadsheet with links to this url corresponding to the possible combinations of answers which I have not eliminated yet. For example, we know that the second digit is E and the second to last digit is C. The url of the next stage is the following:

http://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/puzzleinabucket/bb1f263f70e45b3d.html