unforum

[brokasaphasia]

[gurupidal]

[Hunting4Treasure]

[BBuck]

[justdig]

gurupidal, the key is different to the keystream. Solitaire won't produce a repeating keystream like that.

[UKver2.0]

[gurupidal]

[Lilian]

This may seem like a strange request but does any one know of anything by the name of jef ......... from perplex city it may be the name of a street or building or person i have scaned the sentinel but cant find anything

[marcus interuptus]

Poker

[Cabbage]

"Reframing" the problem

[Grizy]

Cabbage,

Sorry but I have to pull you up on that one.
If you're expecting a trout, a lemon-horseradish sauce is appropriate.
Please don't try tartare sauce its an insult to the dish. IMHO

[BBuck]

[arnezami]

For those who believe the prime numbered cards somehow contain a keyed deck (whether or not resulting in a solution for this card).

I believe (although I didn't check myself sorry) that the new Wave 4 card "St. Ivy" (card number 31) contains a 7 of spades.

Here is the card 31 discussion.

Maybe somebody can double check this.

arnezami

[brokasaphasia]

[brokasaphasia]

For those interested, here are some paths that I have been following:
(I've pretty much given up on all paths except the last, so no need to argue about the validity of any path...)

1) IF ENTROPY WINS => BATTLE WITH ENTROPY => George Monbiot
He published a commentary about Peak Oil and how entropy is bound to prevail... reference to people riding bicycles => motorbikes on the motor card pack. Also a very interesting quote from H.G.Wells... something like "When I see people riding bicycles, I no longer despair for the Human Race."

2) 108 Characters => deck key
I note that a standard "UNO" deck has exactly 108 cards. Should we be using 2 decks? Or an alternate deck?

3) CIPHER CHALLENGE 2004 - Challenge 8B
I note that there was a Solitaire puzzle in a British online cipher contest in late 2004. This was probably just prior to the design of this card? Seem coincidental. Deck keying was released gradually. As soon as enough of the deck became available, brute forcing/trial-n-error became successful.

It was interesting to read that several people solved this WITHOUT a computer. Once they had enough cards properly keyed because they were given, they were able to decrypt at least a few of the first letters and then they started guessing at subsequent letters because the beginning of the plaintext seemed to match the beginning of plaintext messages from previous challenges.

4) Arnezami's Verification => Cribs => OUTWARD LOOKS SHOULD LEAVE YOU COLD
I am NOT a cipher guy. But "cribs" kept coming up as a good way to breaking ciphers. Arnezami previously pointed this out. It seems the best clue to a crib is from the whisper: IF ENTROPY WINS (if we get the card deck shuffling/keying right), OUTWARD LOOKS SHOULD LEAVE YOU COLD (the word COLD should be decrypted, and possibly in the OUTside ciphertext.)

So I tried every deck order I could think of: bridge, reverse bridge, reverse jokers, motor, reverse motor, reverse jokers, 9! versions of prime cards. Each trial I searched for COLD in the 128-text, 108-text, 20-text. When COLD did come up (as it did many times), I would use the same STARTING deck keying to decrypt a different set of cards... I was especially interested finding COLD in the 20-character text, and then decrypting the 108-character text with the same starting keyed deck.

5) OUTWARD LOOKS LEAVE YOU C-O-L-D => EODMF-XRUTH-FHURG-IFULP
whisper OUTWARD ... COLD. C-O-L-D is 4 letters. there are 4 sets of heat-sensitive characters (that only show up when the card is COLD). These sets are OUTWARDS of the main ciphertext. How to encode the word COLD into 20 characters? would this encoding lead anywhere?

6) ENTROPY ENCODING
lead me nowhere.

7) whispered ANAGRAM
This is what I am currently expending my efforts on. Too big for my little brain, but here are some of the most interesting ones and their current state:
you should use solitaire key word FNPNTWOOLAVCOLD
you should leave all idiots out of deck NRPYWNWROOS
you should interleave two of cups and rods YWILOKOL
you should swap every one and two IFIUTRLOOKSLCOLD
you should swap every two and four IEINTLOOKSLCOLD

8 ) brute force procedural deck ordering
Since I am now of the thinking that the whisper anagrams to a deck order... the procedure is a total of 43 characters long. this cannot lead to anything overly complicated. So I've started to code up every procedural deck ordering I can think of. I am just decrypting the 108 ciphertext (totally ignoring the 20 characters of text) and saving all of the output... greping for cribs.

I need more ideas for procedural deck ordering that a 43 letter phrase could describe.
54^2 single card swaps
13^2 matching face value swaps
2 suit interleaves

Of course, the whisper could lead to a procedure to order the ciphertext as well... but I haven't gone here yet.

9) not a solution path, but some of my convictions:
This is a Solitaire cipher
The 108-character text is the ciphertext
The 20-thermal characters are most likely noise
The 3-character set is nothing to worry about (5-char sets are convention only and to are designed to hide word ordering. convention works against the purpose for the last set as most people add X to plaintext and this becomes a crib.)
For my reasoning behind these, Arnezami has done the best job at communicating his logic which mostly matches mine (except that he seems to be hung up on the 3-character thing and I am not).

Brokasaphasia[/b]