unforum

[bertyb]

Can we all call you stacy?

Apart from that the only difference between the unkeyed deck mentioned on the soltaire website and the deck in question is a different starting order.

The only thing that worries me is it clearly states that there is a star on 1 joker which either means the company have changed its jokers, or the cards have been tampered with before being passed on.

I like the logic behind the 108 characters being the deck order - or even 2 deck orders for the 2 parts of disappearing text but I struggle to see how a message can be conveyed in 20 letters unless it is literally a name or something like:

Sente created the Djinn worm

BTW - I have tried that on the solve page and it doesnt work.

[GuyP]

So I swear that the last time I looked at this thread, everyone was pretty much resigned to waiting for all the "playing symbolled" PXC cards to be released, in the expectation that this would provide the deck order. So while I'm not sure WTF happened to this theory, it seemed like a perfectly reasonable assumption then, and I'm sticking to it now!

[bertyb]

Apart from the fact that every card is solvable on its own which has been mentioned before. Every card relies on no other card to solve it, which means that theory got thrown out.

[padge]

Dunno if this helps at all, but I've been playing with the 108 chars, reordering them (shuffling them) to see if I could come up with 54 unique pairs. I thought that the title 'SHUFFLED' may be a clue for us to shuffle the 108 chars to get the correct pattern.

I know it's not very well presented, dots = the pair above is unique, a number = the pair above occurrs that many times.

[bertyb]

Run them through the solitaire web page and see what happens.

[mr_rich]

Hi, this is my first post so I hope I don't get beaten with the trout too badly

Given that some of the silvers have been suprisingly easy, are we over complicating this one. The thought that I had is the brand of cards could be the clue we are looking for? We now know they are motor brand 88. Could 88 of those letters be unimportant? This would leave us with 20 letters from the 108 and 20 letters that fade away.

[bertyb]

Possible, but which 88 would you get rid of?

I think as you say with the other silvers once the answer has been discovered then it is easy to see the link and connections but all silvers are hard until the answer has been discovered.

[doomsdayred]

I think the idea of removing 88 letters leaves us with too many options but i like the way you're thinking.

I'm going to try a full solitaire decipher tonight with the deck face up and face down and again with two decks. I'll give you my findings in the morning.

[zaeil]

[Guin]

[Magma]

There are 54 pairs of letters and 54 cards in the deck. I agree it has to be more than a coincidence, but rather than try to extract "KC" and "9H" etc. out of it perhaps there is some way of generating 54 unique numbers from each pair?

It occurs to me that seeing as there are 26 letters in the alphabet, you can assign numerical values to the letters and add each pair to get a number between 2 and 52. That's almost enough of a range, though it does produce a lot of duplicated numbers doing that.

Given the amount of trouble encountered in "Ciphers of History" trying to make XY=600, perhaps something similar is needed here?

[doomsdayred]

Apologies in advance for the long post.

I've sat with the deck and followed the Solitaire cipher step for step, the following represents my results to date.

I named the 1st ten heat sensitive letters set "1" the last ten heat sensitive letters set "2" and the 1st ten letters after the heat sensitive letters set "3".

Keying the deck:

I hit a couple of initial problems.

#1 - When moving cards i was dealing and not cutting. A deal is when you remove a card from the deck and form a 2nd smaller deck placing the cards in reverse order. A cut forces you to count the cards in the deck keeping them in order and removing them as a whole.

#2 - Each card has a value from 1 through to 52. The value of each card is determined by the deck order. However, during the keying stage I couldn't decide whether to count the deck by face value (Ace = 1, King = 13 etc) or by cipher value (Ace of Spades = 13, Ace of Hearts = 26 etc)

After several restarts I managed to cut properly and went with the face value of the cards. The first 10 outputs were as follows:

[Guin]

just to update and save anyone trying the same here are a few more methods I put into practice - again with no result

Using the idea of shuffling the blocks / letters of the coded text I looked for significant patterns by:

using standard deck key (I am going to repeat with the actual deck order) I took each block and moved them one at a time so WBBMC moved to end of text reading ......LULWBBMC and repeated with each block until I was back to the start.

I took each letter individually and repeated the process

I took the whole text, including the "hot" letters and repeated leaving the block EODMFXRUTH at the start and FHURGIFULP at the end both with blocks of 5 and individually.



I know i will kick myself when we finally get this

EDIT

just to clarify I am now keying the deck according to the order it arrived in. This being:

53, 54, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52

This produces the key stream letters (I generated 150 as it was better than having not enough)

DLGSE QNBWS PSSCZ JLDPJ OMYIL FRSIX LSSMA LFWBH YXDFI XJDFE GTSWI XOVRS OZVBC QIAWA VQKOA DFPKA MHPWC FUWAF YGDFF QPICA YMZBI IFURC CJWKK MXYFC UBTDS ZMHMQ COSXU OHZOI VTJCK XAGZX

i am using http://cif.rochester.edu/~la002k/solitaire.htm#fields as I am being lazy.

still no luck though

[anon]

[locqust]

Ok something Im gonna try.

Im going to take the heat sensitive letters and treat them as a seperate code we can use to crack the other one. Those 20 letters when applied to the rest somewhere along the line will start to reveal the plaintext. (ie A+K = Q thinking) Personally I think the majority of the non-sensitive text is padding to throw off any decrypting attempts, so as the program or manual decode goes through the process its always a few letters off and giving back gibberish.

That probably didnt make sense but hey ho gotta try somat.

I could always microwave it.....