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[Seej]

n o w l o o k
n e x t s h a m e r o d e c o m

It all makes sense now...........

[Sygerrik]

Just to straighten everythign out: which gave us "Nitenite?" ASCII or straight-up base 10 conversion? Whichever it was, I say we parse the large string into four-digit miniseries and decode each using that same method. I maintain that "2210" was given to us to serve as the key to unlocking the longer number.

[KevDude]

NITE NITE was derived by taking the ASCII and converting to binary. Then making that morse code.

[Seej]

Re: 2210 symmetry

[ffx]

[anonymousous]

[KevDude]

Meh, even I'm I'm getting really confused, I just realized that ASCII translated to binary would give too much for morse code.

[InspJJ]

www.shamerode.com - nope......

[InspJJ]

nextshamerode.com also nix....

[firefox]

okokokokokok... scratch all of that- shalmdnlw-whatever it was.

i was putting in random letters to fit.

what does look more plausible is the emergence of

-. . -..- -

next

.. ...

is

...-

??

-- .. -.-- --.
zyg
.. -. -.-- --

??

now please- if you are also working on the puzzle, post, cos two heads are better than one. anyone out there with morse code exp? pls step up.

now ppls dont go off and scream omg! this puzzle clearly (i am going the wrong way about it, yes i know this is bout 99% right now) or it was ment to be cracked in a different way, a way not known to man !!! cos all this letter sub is giving me the shiets.

so far i can only get:

now ??? look next is ?? zyg ??

this is not a guarantee of it being right. in fact its probably wrong. but this has more probabilty of being right that anything ive posted above. i have to think out loud as i go, so sorry.

i think i will just post the full solve when i get it (hmm should be a month or so )

[StarryNight]

"NITENITE" was derived by taking 2210 as a base 10 number and converting to binary.

2210 is 100010 100010 in binary. I had to go through 52 possible combinations to translate 100010 into NITE (26 once you figure out how to translate 0 and 1 into dot and dash). Without the symmetry, there would have been hundreds of possible Morse Code translations.

I'm not optimistic about "NITENITE" being the right solution for 2210 and less so about solving the 24 digit one this way. I still think that both are a series of 2 digit numbers ranging 00 to 51 (or slightly higher).

That said, it's still worth trying. Remember that the web page titles were ".:::" and I forget the other one, but they looked very much like Morse Code, so that could be a hint.

[Sygerrik]

Hmmm. This is intruiging. What if... we parsed the 24-digit number in four-digit strings, converted each to binary then assigned each to a "team" of players? It would still take a VERY long time to translate each into readable morse, but it's faster than doing it haphazardly. I think we should pursue this lead as far as it goes.

[Seej]

OK, I said I was leaving the long number (221545484848465100503215) alone but I've got this horrible compulsion to keep going, so here's my thoughts on the whole morse code thing.

Firstly, the binary code you get out is going to depend on how you break up the number. To encode a 1 digit number between 0 and 8 requires 4 binary digits (bits), i.e. 0 = 0000, 1 = 0001, 8 = 1000 etc. Therefore if we split the whole number into single digits we get:
0010 0010 0001 0101 0100 0101 0100 1000 0100 1000 0100 1000 0100 0110 0101 0001 0000 0000 0101 0000 0011 0010 0001 0101
(all separated into the individual digits to make it clearer to read).

But we can encode right up to the number 15 with 4 bits. Now, seeing as we get a 15 as the second 2 digits you can see that splitting the number into 12 2 digit numbers and then converting to binary we're gonna get a different set of numbers. To be able to fit in the number 51 we'll need to use at least 6 bits (and I'm gonna assume without properly checking it that using more than 6 bits will give us waaaaay too many 0s for it to make any sense as morse code). So, the 12 pairs of digits become:
010110 001111 101101 110000 110000 110000 101110 110011 000000 110010 100000 001111

As you can see, this is substantially different from the binary we get if we take individual digits (and, IMHO, contains strings of 0s that are too long to be morse code though I don't really know my morse code very well so this could be utterly wrong).

Just for fun, here's the number split into 3 digit groups then coverted to binary using the minimum possible number of bits (that'd be 10):
0011011101 1000100001 0111100100 1101010000 0111010001 0001100100 0111110111 0011010111

And 4 digit groups (13 bits):
0100010100111 1000111000100 1001011110000 1001000101011 0000000110010 0110010001111

5 digits doesn't fit, so 6 digit groups (19 bits) gives us:
0110110000101101001 1110110010111110000 1110001100011001100 1111010110110101111

8 digit groups (26 bits) give us:
01010100100000110100110100 10111000111101000100101011 00000001111010110110101111

12 digit groups (39 bits) give us:
011001110010101001000111101001000110000 110110001001010001001100111100010101111

And finally the whole 24 digit thing (as previously mentioned) gives us:
100111010011111110110010011000000001110010111100010101111

In each of these I used the least amount of bits I could but bear in mind that a computer would use a base 2 round number of bits, i.e. 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128 etc. because (without going into a deep discussion of digital logic) that's how computers work. Of course, in these examples that would give us lots of leading 0s on some of the numbers so I ignored this fact.

Personally the 1 digit breakdown looks most likely to me but as I said earlier I don't know morse all that well (and I'm not gonna try to learn it properly until at least next Tuesday) and it wouldn't surprise me (especially given my past success with this number) if I'm wrong.

I hope that this makes sense to those of you who 'get' dots and dashes. Not trying to confuse the issue here but I thought some clarification was necessary on the conversion to binary.

<EDIT> Just out of interest I tried running each of those binary strings (without the spaces) through the binary to ASCII converter, but sadly all I got was gibberish and non-printing characters (though I'm used to that by now ). I suppose I could have converted the 1 and 2 digit binary conversions to 8 bits by sticking some leading 0s in there to see if it made any difference and brought the strings into the english character number-space but frankly I couldn't be bothered - maybe someone else would like to try

[Olorin]

So...let me get this straight...
in morse code we are not guaranteed that the code for a certain letter is NOT a prefix to the code of another letter?

(ehr...wasn't there a mathematical property for codes where we are guaranteed that each code is NOT the prefix of another code...was it 'the prefix property' or something like that?)

'cause if that's the case, I'm not quite sure how you could ever be sure you actually decoded morse correctly... and that would surprise me
F.O.R.

[StarryNight]