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 Forum index » Diversions » Perplex City Puzzle Cards » PXC: Silver Puzzle Cards
[Puzzle] #243 Silver - Shuffled Part 2 (Read 1st Post!)
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baf
Boot

Joined: 29 Mar 2006
Posts: 46
DJ FreeMason wrote:

Not trying to get into a pissing contest here, but why does it have to always be padded and if it always gets padded what do we have? One block of the ciphertext here has 3 letters, not 5. So either this isn't Solitaire and we're being misled or your assumption that the cleartext is always padded is an assumption we can't make.


There's at least one other possibility for the false assumption: that the 108-letter sequence is the ciphertext.

It's been pointed out that 108 is exactly twice 54, which is the number of cards in the deck. This has led some to speculate that these letters somehow encode the initial deck ordering.

This leaves open the question of what the ciphertext is. Perhaps it's the twenty heat-sensitive characters.

PostPosted: Sun May 21, 2006 3:07 am
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Sh1ft
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Joined: 12 Nov 2003
Posts: 110
Location: Salt Lake City, Utah

 		Re: New Deck Order
BriEnigma wrote:
mfm2189 wrote:
Is everyone agreed the order of the cards in a fresh deck is what is shown on the wiki site? I've opened a few new decks and they (for the most part) go A-K Spades, A-K Diamond, K-A Clubs, K-A Hearts with the Jokers at either end?


I'm not sure about Joker ordering, but I just added to the Wiki the numeric ordering of the cards used by the Solitaire algorithm itself. Each card gets assigned a numeric value from 1..52 (mod 26). The ordering for this number assignment goes A..K through each of the four suits, starting with clubs, then diamonds, then hearts, then spades. From an algorithmic standpoint, this could be considered a pristine, unshuffled deck.


Hmmm, I think we should examine this more closely.

I agree with mfm2189 according to the fact that different card manufacturers seem to change their definition of a virgin deck. I think it should be explored. I just opened a new pack of aviator cards and the virgin order is:

- joker (a?), joker (b?)
- A-K spades
- A-K diamonds
- K-A clubs
- K-A hearts

Do we happen to know the virgin order of the motor playing cards?

One other thing, Counterpane (Bruce) says:

Note: only the Perl implementation has been tested by Counterpane.

The perl implementation (even the "verbose" version is brief) uses the following to key the deck:

Code:

## Set up the deck in sorted order.  chr(33) == '!' represents A of clubs,
## chr(34) == '"' represents 2 of clubs, and so on in order until
## chr(84) == 'T' represents K of spades.  chr(85) == 'U' is joker A and
## chr(86) == 'V' is joker B.
$D = pack('C*',33..86);


Which then defines $D as:

Code:

!"#$%&'()*+,-./0123456789:;<=>?@ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUV


What is their deck order?

- A-K clubs
- A-K hearts
- A-K diamonds
- A-K spades
- Joker A and B (U and V as above)

Or are the hearts and diamond suits reversed? Later tonight I will play around with the deck order, keying the perl script with the ASCII above trying all three variations of the encoded text.

Again, it should be important(?) to know the native deck order of the motor cards.

PostPosted: Sun May 21, 2006 11:18 pm
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Stratman
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Joined: 03 Feb 2006
Posts: 81
Location: Kettering UK

 		As I mentioned on the previous page, the ordering of a new Motor deck is in the wiki and has been in prevous threads.
Here
http://forums.unfiction.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=223505#223505
Here
http://forums.unfiction.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=223529#223529
etc
(face up) joker (coloured),joker (mono), A-K diamonds, A-K clubs, A-K hearts, A-K spades.
As the Shuffled card box is drawn, the cards are face down in the box.
And if it helps...the jokers look like this
http://forums.unfiction.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=223523#223523
Strat
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PostPosted: Mon May 22, 2006 4:01 am
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DJ FreeMason
Boot

Joined: 30 Mar 2006
Posts: 66
baf wrote:
DJ FreeMason wrote:

Not trying to get into a pissing contest here, but why does it have to always be padded and if it always gets padded what do we have? One block of the ciphertext here has 3 letters, not 5. So either this isn't Solitaire and we're being misled or your assumption that the cleartext is always padded is an assumption we can't make.


There's at least one other possibility for the false assumption: that the 108-letter sequence is the ciphertext.

It's been pointed out that 108 is exactly twice 54, which is the number of cards in the deck. This has led some to speculate that these letters somehow encode the initial deck ordering.

This leaves open the question of what the ciphertext is. Perhaps it's the twenty heat-sensitive characters.


That is an interesting thought that the ciphertext is the outer 20 characters. If so, could the internal 108 be the key? Scary thing is, the phrase "outward looks" could indicate that. "Leave you cold" could indicate that we need to leave the outside letters unheated and therefore either the entire 128 letter or the 108 letter stream is the key. I can't get the decoder to work, but that isn't a bad idea.

Remember ciphers of history. It had multiple levels of code. The first is obvious. I don't have the card but looking at it, layer 1 is obvious. Then there was a second layer of code. However, what if this is one that we're not supposed to get a cleartext answer for the first decryption but supposed to get a second keystream? Then we have to take that second stream and plug it back into something. I know that isn't a solution, but it was an idea.

Unfortunately, all I'm seeing at the moment when I decrypt these things is a couple of words here and there, nothing substantial or that would relate to an answer. I'll keep trying.

PostPosted: Mon May 22, 2006 11:26 am
Last edited by DJ FreeMason on Mon May 22, 2006 2:48 pm; edited 1 time in total
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bertyb
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Joined: 28 Nov 2005
Posts: 128
Location: London

 		I have been working on this card for such a long time (since Wave 1) and have to say all we have done since day 1 is go round and round in circles when it comes to ideas......everything at the moment that is being said has been said at least once or twice before in either this thread or the other thread and is generally on the wiki page for this puzzle. All we seem to be doing now is filling up pages with the same information as what we have done in the past. I am not having a go at anybody - this card just frustrates the life out of me....I have spent most of today again on trying to figure this card without any success. After the report in the sentinel last week I think we should be trying to move in a different direction and stop repeating ourselves.

Apologies if I have upset anybody - my rant is over now....I dont want people to stop trying to solve it but just to be a little more focused and not duplicate what has been said before.
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PostPosted: Mon May 22, 2006 11:38 am
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beglee
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Joined: 21 Oct 2005
Posts: 164
bertyb wrote:
Apologies if I have upset anybody - my rant is over now....I dont want people to stop trying to solve it but just to be a little more focused and not duplicate what has been said before.

I whole-heartedly agree, that was the reason that this 2nd Shuffled thread was started, as the 1st one had become 40-sumthin pages of repetition, so PLEASE make sure to read the wiki page and use search to check your ideas before posting. Thanks

(and like berty said, i'm not having a dig at people or trying to upset anyone, just think we need to be a bit more sparing with our posts when its stuff most of us have seen/tried before)

[EDIT]noone needs to point out the hypocrisy to me of a post complaining abuot repetition, when im repeating what bertyb said Smile
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PostPosted: Mon May 22, 2006 12:01 pm
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BBuck
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Posts: 184

 		Rats. I really thought I was onto something, but haven't been able to progress. So apologies if this proves a dead end, but it might help someone else.

I'd been thinking before the Sentinel article about the phrase "If entropy...". In terms of the security of the cipher, if the secret police picked up Garnet outside the Five of Cups, then they would be able to grab the pack of cards, but wouldn't know the phrase. Of course, they might be eavesdropping, but a whispered message in a noisy bar would provide reasonable protection. So to maximise security, the phrase should be crucial in decoding the ciphertext.

I can't believe that all the phrase indicates is the heat-sensitive letters, because this is a pretty weak level of additional security. The letters might disappear anyway - perhaps someone holds the pack of cards in the right way, or it is left near a heat source - and the secret police would have this element of the cipher.

Assuming that the phrase is more central, I looked at the possibility of a cryptic crossword clue. Entropy can indicate an anagram, as has been said, but there are too many anagrams possible for the whole text to be used. If a cryptic clue, then it would be most natural for "outward looks" to be the anagram. This does provide "work out loads", but I've tried this (and a few others) and can't come up with anything.

Another possible answer would be "Insight", as the opposite of "outward looks", but, again, this doesn't work.

So I wonder if the phrase does indicate that some rearrangement is required, but refers to putting something into an ordered fashion (ie entropy loses). Anagrams do this by making jumbled letters into words, but there are other orders - alphabetical, for instance.

There are two ways these could be used, as the ciphertext or the keyphrase. I've looked at the former, with the 108 letters providing the keyphrase, trying various permutations of the two blocks of heat-sensitive letters, in alphabetical order as a block of 20, two blocks of 10 or four of 5. I've begun to try the other way round, with the 108 as the ciphertext. I've also tried putting all the letters into alphabetical order, but no joy so far.

I read the Sentinel hint as maybe showing I'm on the right track. I think it's a slightly different approach, and the word I found most striking was "reframe". "Get to the core" is also odd (as the_fountain pointed out).

Both suggest to me that something needs to be done to the characters, and the solution won't be through finding a keyphrase like "Made in China". However, I don't think this simply means removing the heat-sensitive letters, which Von's hint gives quite clearly.

I am not sure about the meaning of "a fresh pair of eyes". I thought it might mean we've missed something on the card, but I think it's been studied more closely than any other, so I'd be surprised, and can't see anything myself.

Anyway, not sure if the above adds an extra level of complication or simplification to the puzzle. Apologies if the former.

PostPosted: Mon May 22, 2006 3:14 pm
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DJ FreeMason
Boot

Joined: 30 Mar 2006
Posts: 66
BBuck wrote:
Assuming that the phrase is more central, I looked at the possibility of a cryptic crossword clue. Entropy can indicate an anagram, as has been said, but there are too many anagrams possible for the whole text to be used. If a cryptic clue, then it would be most natural for "outward looks" to be the anagram. This does provide "work out loads", but I've tried this (and a few others) and can't come up with anything.


Actually, I'd mentioned the cryptic crossword clue idea a few pages earlier, however that was before the Sentinel article. I had a number of possible idea combinations on how the clue works. Entropy could be either an anagram indicator or a "Bits and Pieces" answer. Outward looks could be taken a number of ways: it's the definition, it's the anagramed clue, outward modifies looks and takes the outward letters. Leaves could be an indirect reversal (Leaves, left. OK, it's out in left field but an idea none the less). Cold could be either the definition, an anagram indicator or part of the anagramed phrase. As well, the number of the bar could be the indication of how many letters there are supposed to be. The Five of Cups could indicate 31 letters total since in the Solitaire cipher, the 5H=31. However, the Five of Cups could also mean (5,3) with the five being exactly the number of letters in the first word, and the cups being the third in the deck mean the number of letters in the second word.

However, I haven't yet become good enough at cryptic crosswords to take a swing at what a possible answer might be. I'm also at a disadvantage that for all I know, the damn thing may use British spellings (colour, armour, etc.) or British slang, of which I know 3 phrases and all are dirty, and I'm an American. The only person I know who's good at these things is Riff. I'll have to ask him when I get a chance. Maybe this reveals something beyond I've had way too much time to think about this.

PostPosted: Mon May 22, 2006 6:14 pm
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BBuck
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Joined: 13 Dec 2005
Posts: 184
Quote:
Actually, I'd mentioned the cryptic crossword clue idea a few pages earlier


I didn't mean to claim originality on the crossword clue. I think it's become very hard to be original with this puzzle, but apologies for not crediting properly.

One assumption underlying my thinking is that we tend to overcomplicate these puzzles. Off the top of my head, I can't think of a single silver that has been nearly as multi-layered as we've made it. Even Ciphers of History was "only" Gematria followed by a proper laying out of the digraphs, whereas we saw Ciphers and went off on a tangent that involved four ciphers at its peak.

So if it is a cryptic crossword clue, I think that it should be relatively straight-forward. The Sentinel article - expressing surprise that this hasn't been solved - suggests that Shuffled will require something not far off a kick-me solution.

I'd therefore be a bit wary about going down the Five of Cups = 31 or (5,3) route, as this would make the puzzle very difficult. Same applies to leave=left, which I've never seen in a cryptic crossword (but is really impressive thinking).

If it is a "simple" cryptic clue, then it will include a definition and a cryptic bit. From the way it's written, I can only see that "cold" is the definition. If "If entropy wins" is an indicator of what to do with the cryptic bit, then "outward...cold" can't all be an anagram as there will be no definition. Plus the "leaves" bit normally indicates the end of the cryptic bit.

I am probably being a bit Anglocentric with these definitions of cryptic clues - based on learning how to do The Times crossword in post-exam English lessons - but I'd guess that the puzzle architect grew up in that tradition too.

PostPosted: Mon May 22, 2006 6:38 pm
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donstobbart
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Joined: 20 Nov 2005
Posts: 96
Location: Cumbria

 		Just finished reading a completely irrelevant book by my favourite author, but there was a passage that seems like it fits in here for all of us with no skills at cryptology.

Quote:
A cipher is different from a code, which usually requires a codebook to make the translation. To unlock a cipher, you have to have a key, which is included in the message itself"


He then goes on to explain, having Door as the keyword:

Quote:
You have to look at codebreaking in a couple of ways. At one level, you're dealing with the mechanics of things, such as word or letter transpositions, and substitutions. At another level, you're looking at the meaning of things" Seeing his explanation greeted with blank looks, he said, "What does a door do?"
"That's easy...It separates one room from another. You have to open and close it to pass through."


He goes on to explain that he used D for a plaintext alphabet, and R for a ciphertext alphabet, which incidentally didn't work (even intrepid hero's get it wrong!!!), but by using the fact that D and R are 15 letters apart, he could take every fifteenth word of the thing that was the cipher.(It was a poem.) He got the solution from this, and went on to save the world from doom and destruction.

I have a thing about the word "should" in the clue If entropy.... and the 20 disappearing letters so I tried this theory, which of course didn't work. But, I think this might not be a bad road to wander down for a spell, to try to get the key.

Don
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PostPosted: Tue May 23, 2006 10:43 am
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DJ FreeMason
Boot

Joined: 30 Mar 2006
Posts: 66
BBuck wrote:
I didn't mean to claim originality on the crossword clue. I think it's become very hard to be original with this puzzle, but apologies for not crediting properly.


Not a problem on the crediting. I was just making the statement. It's the fact that in the 50some odd pages before, not a single person theorized about a cryptic crossword solution.

As for a number of my theories, the cryptic answer length would help immensely since it would let us know how many characters there are in the keyphrase. However, I do agree that the (5,3) and 31 are probably both red herrings. It was a strange theory that could pan out, we don't know. Using brute forcing, we could get the answer but someone has probably gone through all the 8 letter combos. 31 does present an interesting possibility since there are literally 26^31 possibilities, 7.314×10^43. A significant number less than the number of combinations of the deck, 54! or 2.307×10^71, but still would take a very long time to compute, about 9.6576×10^26 years assuming a single 2.4 GHz computer at constant speed and non-stop.

If you assume that it is a "simple" style, a definition, an indicator and a cryptic part are all that we have. Then it becomes a matter of figuring out which part of "If entropy wins, outward looks should leave you cold." correspond to which piece. That is if you assume that it's "simple." If it's a combination, then it becomes much more complex.

If it's "simple", I see more anagram indicators than anything, cold (poor condition), leaves (movement) (and which isn't a reversal, that was just a bit of loopy logic), entropy (poor condition or strangeness). However, as I said earlier, entropy could be a "bits and pieces" with it being S. Beyond that, I don't have any ideas at the moment. On an interesting note, "If entropy wins," does anagram to "Infinity powers", which is most likely a dead end.

PostPosted: Tue May 23, 2006 1:45 pm
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FranG
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Joined: 23 May 2006
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 		Confirm text
First post - I hope I did it right.

Would someone who has the card and a good magnifying glass check the letter groups? There's a correction on the Wiki, so now there are 2 versions scattered about. Is the 4th group in the 2nd line XAWHU or XAWJU?

Thanks,
Fran

PostPosted: Tue May 23, 2006 3:08 pm
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Sentinel
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Location: St Helens

 		I have the card, it's definitely:
Code:
XAWJU

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PostPosted: Tue May 23, 2006 3:48 pm
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BrianEnigmaModerator
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 		Re: Confirm text
FranG wrote:
There's a correction on the Wiki, so now there are 2 versions scattered about. Is the 4th group in the 2nd line XAWHU or XAWJU?


Sentinel wrote:
I have the card, it's definitely: XAWJU


Oh. My. That may change things. I know that the stuff I have been doing has been based on the Card Catalog text, which was previously the "HU" variant.
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PostPosted: Tue May 23, 2006 4:13 pm
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kontan
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Joined: 11 May 2006
Posts: 6

 		Solving based on a difference between messages
This is my first post, although I have followed it for some time.

I have been spending a lot of time with the possibility that there are two messages encrypted with the same keyed deck on this card. I don't neccessarily think this is the best option, but at the same time I wanted to make sure for myself.

From the Solitaire website it was said how, with two messages encrypted with the same deck, one could be subtracted from the other, giving you a sequence of 'differentials' from letter to letter. In other words, if you know the first letter from the first message, you can find out the first letter from the second message, etc. Obviously we don't know the first letter, and scanning through every possibility for each letter is a laborious process ( I know, I made a program to try this and I haven't had a lot of probable results.) So, I have made a couple assumptions.

I have assumed that at least one of the following word(s) is in one of the messages somewhere:

THE
THECODE
THECUBE
CUBE
THEWORM
THEDJINN
DJINN
DJINNWORM
WORM
SENTE
KITEWAY
SENTEKITEWAY

I then took the first dissapearing message, the second dissapearing message, and the full 108 message, broken into 2 messages of 54. I then subtracted each from another in every combination and plugged the previous list of words into each combo and every possible starting place. Actually, I didn't do this by hand- I made a program to do it. Unfortunately, nothing promising came from doing this. There was only garbled text. This leads me to one of two conclussions:

1. The messages are made up from words other than the words on my list.
2. There are not two messages encrypted from the same deck.

Having proven to myself that this line of reasoning is looking doubtful, I am now making a program that dictionary attacks the passphrase. Of course, my programs run a little slower as they run on my Palm phone, but they are indespensible when you think of a new passphrase to try and you're in the car. Very Happy

PostPosted: Tue May 23, 2006 5:21 pm
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