unforum

[Guin]

[bertyb]

With the deck you purchased and now have, the 2 jokers were they different - like did one have that star on it? - and if so what order were the jokers in?

[Stratman]

For Bertyb...
Neither joker has a star
The pattern of the two jokers is identical except one was printed in colour, the other in black and white.
I have tried to add a jpg of the jokers and the box opened out
Hope they work

[bertyb]

So in some ways the jokers are different - colourwise - but dont match up to the desciption in the card itself.......so was the pack opened or sealed when he received it......this is getting beyond frustrating now!

[doomsdayred]

Facts, we have:

A standard deck of blue, plastic coated, 88, MOTOR BRAND HIGH QUALITY PLAYING CARDS which were handed over sealed. The words MADE IN CHINA are visible on the card and CSYJ-8418 is on the bought deck.

The deck was untouched except for 1 joker had a star marked on it.
(we don't know if it was the black and white or colour joker though)

The deck order when taken out of the box as per the card image:

[doomsdayred]

bertyb which joker was 1st the colour or the black and white?

[bertyb]

That is a question for Stratman re:jokers - he is the one with the deck at the moment.

[Stratman]

Coloured joker was on top

[locqust]

So I think we can assume from this and what we know about solitaire cyphers that the deck Garnet recieved was unordered and as new apart from the marked joker. So the phrase and coding on the box are the clues. Now the phrase is only 40 odd characters long which is too short to make a passcode for the ordering. (unless they are really making this easy for us)

If we should never use one cypher for two different messages is it possible that we need to encode this phrase into cyphertext (somehow) then use the resulting deck ordering that it gave us to do it as a key for unlocking the code on the box????

[bertyb]

The only other thing that you may want to throw into the mix is the fact that as you look at the pack on the front of the card the top left corner is whited out - there is no bike there. It is almost as something has been written there and then scrubbed out or covered in tip-ex.

BTW - dont try scratching this part as have done that and it just ruins the card.

Only other thought is it might be in invisible ink, or need black light or ultra violet light put over it to be able to view - but I believe all this has been tried from previous posts I have read. Perhaps if anybody has covered all these angles then they can confirm they have?

[donstobbart]

Just a thought, but if this is not a solitaire cipher, might it be a cipher known as mental poker on wikipedia?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_poker

This might take into account the two sets of disappearing letters at either end of the text, (I'm totally obsessed with those letters ) because you need two keys as it is a double encryption.

Just a thought.......

Don

[bertyb]

I have to say anything is possible now with this card.

I have had a read through the Wiki page on mental Poker and based on what I have understood on there I dont think it could be the case due to the fact that it has a double encryption, which would mean it would have had to be encrypted before the cards got to the person who then passed them on with another level of encryption.

As we have no information to support that I think it is more of a long shot personally but in all honesty I will be happily proved wrong if you can get the solve.....I am losing hours of sleep every night over this card.

I think there may be 2 levels of encryption or maybe more in there but not convinced on the mental poker theory - more convinced by the entropy encoding linked to information theory that I mentioned before in this thread - but a lot of reading there and most of it to me isnt making sense at the moment but will plod on.

[UKver2.0]

I was hoping that this might get solved sooner rather than later now that somebody identified the red herring that was the card box (backwards 'Yamaha' being my hands-down favorite). I thought, "good, now we'll have a few more people working on the real puzzle of turning these 108 characters into our deck order." NOPE! So it's back to deciding if the pack was opened and how the star got on the joker.

It seems to me that if the sentence reads, "When I returned home, I spread the cards out on my table and looked for any marks or signs, but they were all new and untouched, apart from one joker which had a star on it," it means that the person was looking for marks and signs and found only one mark or sign - the star. It says nothing about the deck order. It is new as regards to MARKS and SIGNS. This also means that it was added. If it were part of the card it wouldn't stand out as a MARK or a SIGN. Was the pack opened? YES! How else do you mark a card? I'm also wondering if our world's deck continues to have much relevance... It has now been shown that the two jokers in the our world's version of this deck are quite different. No star would be needed to differentiate (<--- that's the reason for the star, by the way). Maybe the deck choice has to do with the passphrase, but I'm gonna put it on the line and say it doesn't have anything to do with the deck order that we're looking for.

And as far as the order - does the deck order that was spread out before Garnet matter? NO! It surely wasn't in the Solitaire-Cipher-Deck-Starting-Order cause it would be awfully repetitive to put it in order and write the order on the box too. So fine, call it in new-from-the-box deck order or whatever - it doesn't matter. I mean, the puzzle card is called SHUFFLED so maybe that means that the whole point of the puzzle is to find out the deck order! The Solitaire part is the given. The passphrase could be an added challenge, but I doubt it. There are 2.3e+71 combinations for the deck order so calling that the puzzle is good enough.

I think the WBBMC... is a deck ordering. If it were the message it would be divisible by 5. Why break that rule? Doesn't make sense.

Now I know it's been brought up that with two of the sets of characters being the same this might lead us away from thinking it's the order. I think it might actually be proof toward it being the deck order and possibly even the key in cracking it. Let me give the dumb example...

Let's give each suit a letter - A, B, C, D
Now let's give each card a value 1, 2, 3... J, Q, K
And why not call joker one "JA" and joker two "JB"

If there was some encoding algorithm that multiplied suit by value (mod 676) then Suit A and Suit B's Jack might be encoded to look like joker one "JA" and joker two "JB".

A simplistic example I know, but you see there would be exactly two repeats and low and behold there is (if in fact they characters are to be paired WB BM CH...)

Mental poker could play a part I suppose... kind of a double encryption. We should keep that in mind, but we still need the encipherment method. Maybe if things don't work out singly, we do a double as plan B?

Edited for content… see numerous replies for details.

[donstobbart]

Thank you very much UKver2.0, for that in depth working out of the puzzle that we Brits in our ignorance cannot do. But let me just ask this. Have you done it?

Don

[zaeil]

*blinks*

UKver2.0, that is the most hostile post I've ever seen in a thread here. Period.

You might want to consider calming down and presenting your ideas rationally. That kind of attitude isn't particularly conducive to the sort of community puzzle-solving we like to do around here.