unforum

[bwochinski]

Hey just wanted to let everyone know that caspian and I are going to be heading down to the Milwaukee lakefront in just about a half an hour.

I'll be bringing my video camera and I'll try to get the video posted by this evening. Should be fun!



EDIT: Here's a satellite view of the starting point.

http://local.live.com/default.aspx?v=2&cp=43.03954~-87.896058&style=a&lvl=17

The crescent of rocks in the water is the "rocky bay" and the boat shaped building directly inland would be "the bird that flaps its wings" or the Quadracci Pavillion

To the north there's a paved semicircle at the south end of the lagoon, which is the war memorial. It has 3 red granite pillars. That's the area I expect to be the endpoint.

[Dionysus]

SO what about Indiana? Lisa, when are you makign that run?

[bwochinski]

!UPDATE!

We found it! I'm getting ready to encode and upload the video...

[tom_in_bristol]

I just remembered something I noticed when I first looked at the individual frames.
If you just LOOK at them, you can clearly see the very tops of them look different to the rest of the image. With hindsight this looks like a direct result of the hidden messages being encoded at the start.
The effect is particularly noticeable in frames 6 and 7 which have the longer messages encoded.

From this it seems frame 5 may well have a fairly short message, as might frame 3, and frames 1 and 2 obviously have messages too short as to be noticeable

Just a thought....

[Caspian]

EVIDENCE FOUND!!!

[Ehsan]

As per the latest entry, frame 2 is supposed to say "Hello World!", I can easily find the first four letters at positions 0,1,8,27 which works very well as far as sequences go, but then the next letter (o) is too far away, in positions 388, 486, 598, 647, 948, and higher. I couldn't find any sequence that jumps that high after 27.

I also tried starting with different positions for the first 4 letters, like using the second H at 543 with the third e at 760.. no luck.

Here are a few starting positions if anyone wants to try:

H at 0 543 609 1048
e at 1 421 760 1144 1228 1255 1330
l at 8 27 161 431 518 819 842 887 950 982 1680
l at 8 27 161 431 518 819 842 887 950 982 1680
o at 388 486 598 647 948


Maybe we have another broken transcription here? Could someone check the values in the file by hand and see if there is an o (111) before 388?

[tom_in_bristol]

[mapmaker]

I might be able to make the Indiana run as well. If someone's going to take it, that's great. But I'll keep y'all posted.

[Greyelf]

I have just popped in and saw that one of the live events was/is in Melbourne, and thats were I live! I haven't been keeping track of whats going on but if something needs to be done or someone needs some help, just let me know.

I tried to down load the original GIF file but a username and password were asked for and as I dont know what they are I cant use something like python to convert the rest of the Melbourne clue.

Hope people are having fun. GE

[AmberJoy]

Just an update...am navigating Lisa through the Dunes with Stevie's help.

I have Stevie in #inquiringminds and Lisa on the phone. We have the right place, now Lisa is just digging around on the ground to find the evidence.

[AmberJoy]

okay, box has been retrieved and contents looked at!

Here is a brief description of what was in the box, and Lisa will scan it all in when she gets home in 4-5 hours.

[Ofiuco]

For convenience's sake, here are the frames in hex instead of decimal.

Unfortunately, they have commas, but whatever.

[tom_in_bristol]

FRAME 3: Frequency Analysis

The other frames (particularly 6 and 7) have had messages distributed within the first line or two of the file. Because of this there is a concentration of ASCII values within 97 to 122 (a to z, lowercase).

This becomes obvious when graphing the first line of Frame 6 (see attached.)
Since we are looking for information in Frame 3 I graphed this too as a comparison. What is shown is the first line compared to that of Frame 6, and it is obvious that there is no concentration of letters anywhere particularly. this would indicate either no direct message, or a very short one at best.

So - i have to asssume that we need another method to decode this file.... any thoughts?


EDIT: I have actually just noticed what could be a bit of a cluster during the first 40 or so characters. Are my eyes deveiving me?

[Dionysus]

Seth says that the math sequence to decode Frame 5 is

[Ehsan]

Just to make it clear because a couple of posts have indicated that we should get more out of solved frames and didn't know which ones were solved. It's my fault I wasn't clear on this... Frames 1,4,5,6 and 7 are completly solved.

There is no more text we haven't found in there, and I'm pretty sure of that as I've used the forumlas from the number sequences to go over the entire text until it stops and the gibberish "filler" starts. I've already posted the sequences of those frames before Seth claimed he found it himself

Frame 1: Odd Numbers - 1 3 5 7 9 11 13 ...
Frame 4: Prime Numbers - 2 3 5 7 11 13 17 19 23 29 ...
Frame 5: Aronson's Sequence - 1 4 11 16 24 ...
Frame 6: Connell Sequence (1 odd, 2 even, 3 odd...) - 1 2 4 5 7 9 10 12 ...
Frame 7: Even Numbers - 0 2 4 6 8 ...

So the only remaining frames are 2 and 3. There was no one to get anything out of two, even with the "Hello World!" hint, and that leads me to believe that the input I was working on was wrong. I spent 3 hours on frame 2 alone after that hint assuming I was doing something wrong...


Now if it was only a partial solve because of corrupt frames, I will revisit everything later today since I've already spent ten hours creating a program that pulls number sequences from the Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences and gets the text from the frame based on that sequence, meaning it will take 5 seconds to run it again on all frames knowing their sequences.

Now I'm even more pissed off at this puzzle.