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[doomsdayred]

[doomsdayred]

In addition to this the heat affected ink should be the "keystream letters"

EDIT:

Having major probs converting this so if anyone can help would be appreciated.

Have been wondering if one of the 5 letter series' is the word Djinn. If so it could be that MVBAA or KPGVV is the coded version of DJINN. Any help?

2nd EDIT:

Dammit, I've read thru every1 elses work and seen all my suggestions have already been...suggested.

One thing occours that I cant see anywhere else though. After you remove the heat sensitive ink we are left with 108 letters and a pack of cards with jokers has 54 cards.

Can the solitaire cipher be altered to account for two packs of cards? i.e instead of adding 26 add 52 etc.???

[Langley Moor]

I'm sure that's also come up before, but once again comes back to the fact that we don't have the original deck order unless they were 'unshuffled', i.e. ace to king for each suit. However, I've got another idea I'm currently running with, which will take me the rest of the evening to complete (it does say on the card it took a Perplexian a long time to solve, so bear with me! ), which basically involves splitting it into two sets of information and applying separate, repeating keystreams to them both, then removing one from the other. Am currently just translating the scripts to numbers for the second set of data, then have to apply the keystream and subtract. Complex, but you never know!

[Langley Moor]

Right, it's taken my entire evening, but my plan went something like this:

Take the top line of 'visible' ink, and apply to that a repeating key of the heat sensetive ink on the top line. Unfortunately there are an odd number of 5 letter blocks in this line, so I applied it to the blocks starting from the start (called Text 1), and starting from the end (Text 2) so that in each case a block of five was missed out.

I then repeated the same process for the second line, using the heat sensitive ink and cycling it to produce a third set of 'plaintext' (Text 3).

None of these made any sense, so I tried subtracting one set from another: text 1 - text 3 and text 2 - text 3.

None of these made any sense either, but posted below are the text strings incase anyone wants to try doing anything else with them.

Sorry!

Text 1: rmxzw jokot giydr ymeld dedcd nnmcq zegjb nrtzq tycld

Text 2: crbtv nfhwq rpvsf kbmvb gqdjs gbpcq gukgs avleb wtktc hcasj

Text 3: ramon iullr rimzl oubxe zbyif jgrcc gngit bjljh qftdf peejv

Text 1 - Text 3: zlkki atycb ozldg jrcny dcetx dguzn sqzah lhhpi ciihx nloce

Text 2 - Text 3: kqoeh ekvky zgist vgkxw goeam wuxzn zgdxy ylzus fdqap rxvin

And just cos I refuse to give in, here's (text 1 - text 3) - (text2 - text 3), although I'm certain it doesn't extend to this many steps because of room for error and the odds of actually hitting the right combination. Plus, it just *feels* too untidy.

ouvfa vicrc osckm nkrpb gnzsk glwzz sjvci mvhup werra vnstq

[ramsfan]

No one's mentioned "ruth" ?ruth coralhouse for ages. Also why is there one 3 letter group. Could that be "love you loads". Reading cryptonomicon at the moment. The bicycle analogy goes on for ages. It's difficult to see how that could be coded. I think we can make assumptions about the starting order of the cards as the standard order is described in the appendix/website, if it's not the order suggested by the whole prime number pack. Cold gets two mentions, both in the question and in Von's hint. Feels as though that could mean more than just a hint towards the heat sensitive ink.

[Langley Moor]

If you can describe the standard starting order of the pack, I'll have a go at deciphering it as soon as I can - won't be for a couple of days though, am at work all day and evening tomorrow.

[Ashin]

First post, wooo!

I was staring at this card for quite some time last night, pulling on Von's hint, and my background in cryptography, and I started thinking there has to be more to this card. So I starting playing around with it.

Turns out, if you put this card under a blacklight, the heat sensitive text turns bright red. If you apply heat to it under the blacklight, it completely dissapears.

Not sure if this was meant to be one of the clues or not.

The entropy statement in the most general sense would describe the death of the universe. As of currently, we cannot tell whether our universe is going to recollapse, or continually expand until the density of the univerise is roughly one hydrogen molecule per cubic meter, at which point the universe would reach a sort of 'stasis' if you will. The way we try to predict this is based off the red-shift of the stars in the sky. Red-shift is something akin to the Doppler effect of sound, but with light. Red-shift, as opposed to blue shift, means the universe is expanding, not contracting. Since all the stars in the sky show red-shift, we know the universe is expanding (at roughly 75km/s per megaParsec).

Maybe a little too much background, but not sure if the blacklight color plays into the riddle somehow.

I think the riddle is the real key to figuring out this card.

[doomsdayred]

Does anyone know what the 95 bit bridge key is mentioned here?

http://www.schneier.com/solitaire.html

[beglee]

Hes referring to using "A description of a set of bridge hands that you might see in a newspaper or a bridge book" as a way to key the deck and position the jokers in it. The sender/receiver take the same description of a set of bridge hands and an agreed method of converting it into a keyed deck in order to encode/decode a message. The set of bridge hands provides a 95 bit key, which refers to the randomness of the key.

[doomsdayred]

[rose]

I know this is a long thread, but, still... You might read back to the discussions about the order of a sealed deck. And then the question of whether the deck is keyed, if so, which key was used.... etc.

I hope someone solves it, we are obviously missing something, but we have had some previous posts that you may find useful, if only to stop you from repeating what has been done.

[oliverkeers13]

I've posted this before, but it's been ignored, and I feel it's vital, particularly after Von's hint. On the Background of the card (The grey box at the top, with the name of the card, the PXC logo, the number etc. on it) there are card suits. I can't see them myself, and don't have a magnifying glass, but it may be worth looking at for the deck order!

[CherokeeParkes]

I don't know if this is allowed, so here goes. Feel free to examine using your favourite picture editor and see if it has anything useful. Will repost as a gif if requested.

Added suggestion. If using Photoshop or any other picture editor which has rotate. Use an arbitrary rotation of 45 degrees clockwise

[Brian Morton]

I eyeballed the card with a pretty good magnifying glass and I think it's a repeating pattern of heart. club, spade, diamond going from lower to higher at an angle. It's pretty blurred and not detailed (or I'm just blind). I hope it helps

[RebusPrime]

Been playing with a high res scan and photshop on this one. At this level all you can really see is a series of dots, very few of which show a consistant repeating pattern so it's quite difficult to be certain about what's what. As far as I can figure it the pattern seems to be:

H___C___D___S
__H___C___D___S
____H___C___D___S
______H___C___D___S

The hearts and clubs I'm pretty certain of, some of the diamonds are pretty obvious (but some aren't) and the spades are there by a process of elimination.

As mentioned by CherokeeParkes, all the symbols are rotated by 45 degrees. Haven't got a clue if that's relevant but thought I'd include it for completeness.

There doesn't appear to be any indication of 'Jokers' anywhere. From what I understand of the Solitair cypher these are a major part of the encryption process - is it just assumed that these are at the top (or bottom) of the pack?