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 Forum index » Diversions » Perplex City Puzzle Cards » PXC: Orange Puzzle Cards
[SOLVED] Orange - #053 - Etaoin Schrdlu (Maze set)
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uneasyjd
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Joined: 19 Sep 2005
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Location: Denmark

[SOLVED] Orange - #053 - Etaoin Schrdlu (Maze set)

(Apologies in advance - my piece-of-s**t scanner is being uncooperative today - I'll try to get an image up ASAP.)

For centuries codebreakers have used 'letter frequency analysis' as a starting point to crack certain types of coded message. The reason being that some letters in the English language appear much more frequently than others. E is the most common, followed by T, A and O. On the other hand, letters like Z, J, Q and X rarely get a look in and are a long way behind (although on the plus side they'll score you a lot of points in Scrabble*).

Assuming you had plenty of time on your hands and you were able to tot up all the letters in a book such as 'Alice In Wonderland', the order of frequency would look like this:

etaoihnsrdluwgcymfpbkvqxjz

You'd get a fairly similar result if you were to do the same for 'Pride and Prejudice':

etaoinhsrdlumcywfgbpvkzjxq

But I digress. As fascinating as all this it isn't directly relevant to the two-part puzzle below.

1. Read the following sentence:

FINISHED FILES ARE THE RESULT OF YEARS OF SCIENTIFIC STUDY COMBINED WITH THE EXPERIENCE OF YEARS.

How many times does the letter F appear within it?

2. In 1969 the author Georges Perec wrote a 300 page book called 'La Disparation'. How many times does the letter E appear within the novel?

* Sadly not so for the Polish version of Scrabble where a 'Z' is worth just a single point. Uwierz mi!

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PostPosted: Sat Nov 26, 2005 12:17 pm
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uneasyjd
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Joined: 19 Sep 2005
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Confirmed solve...

Spoiler (Rollover to View):
6 and 0

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PostPosted: Sat Nov 26, 2005 12:21 pm
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pharzo
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just in case anyone was wondering "uwierz mi" means "believe me" in polish Very Happy

PostPosted: Mon Nov 28, 2005 8:21 am
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European Chris
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Joined: 19 Jul 2005
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I realised I knew nothing about cryptography after the first wave so I started reading Simon Singh's The Code Book yesterday. The answer was on page 20. I was reading it this morning and then an hour later the second wave cards turned up. The perplex city secular god of fate is looking at me and winking.
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PostPosted: Mon Nov 28, 2005 4:29 pm
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Wowbagger
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Joined: 22 Aug 2005
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pharzo wrote:
just in case anyone was wondering "uwierz mi" means "believe me" in polish Very Happy


Dziekuje! Smile

PostPosted: Tue Nov 29, 2005 7:56 am
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Jaeneas
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Joined: 22 Jan 2005
Posts: 62
Location: Leicester, England.

There is some thing funny about this card.

The title is 'Etaoin Schrdlu' where as the accepted most used letters are ETAOINSHRDLU, no C, do you see?

http://www.etaoin.org/

Is this a printing error or a clue?

I am going to try running the text through an anagram programme just to make sure that I really don;t have any free time, ever.

TTFN

edit . edit. edit. etc.

I tried putting the text of the card into Anagram Artist 2.6.

First the full text, including the questions came out with...

etaoisrnlhd ucyfpgmwbkzvqjx

Then without the questions...

etoasrnilhd ucyfpgmbwkzqvjx

I'm not sure if this proves something about the card or my mental state.
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PostPosted: Sat Dec 03, 2005 7:50 pm
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