Return to Unfiction unforum
 a.r.g.b.b 
FAQ FAQ   Search Search 
 
Welcome!
New users, PLEASE read these forum guidelines. New posters, SEARCH before posting and read these rules before posting your killer new campaign. New players may also wish to peruse the ARG Player Tutorial.

All users must abide by the Terms of Service.
Website Restoration Project
This archiving project is a collaboration between Unfiction and Sean Stacey (SpaceBass), Brian Enigma (BrianEnigma), and Laura E. Hall (lehall) with
the Center for Immersive Arts.
Announcements
This is a static snapshot of the
Unfiction forums, as of
July 23, 2017.
This site is intended as an archive to chronicle the history of Alternate Reality Games.
  

The time now is Mon Nov 18, 2024 7:15 pm
All times are UTC - 4 (DST in action)		 View posts in this forum since last visit
View unanswered posts in this forum
Calendar
 Forum index » Diversions » Perplex City Puzzle Cards » PXC: Silver Puzzle Cards
[PUZZLE] #251 - Silver - The Thirteenth Labour - READ POST#1
Moderators: AnthraX101, bagsbee, BrianEnigma, cassandra, Giskard, lhall, Mikeyj, myf, poozle, RobMagus, xnbomb
View previous topicView next topic
Page 55 of 73 [1087 Posts]   Goto page: Previous 1, 2, 3, ..., 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, ..., 71, 72, 73  Next
Author Message
groovygirl20
Veteran


Joined: 04 Jan 2006
Posts: 100
Location: Lincolnshire! ENGLAND!! WOO!!
Misroi wrote:
No! The more people logged in, the smaller the chances are of me winning teh phat lewtz! Razz

Seriously though, the more clients we have running, the quicker we'll have the solve. Smile


you missed something off the end of that...

"Seriously though, the more clients we have running, the quicker we'll have the solve"... but make sure none of you get the right key cos i wanna win "teh phat lewtz"

XD
_________________
To the query, ''What is a friend?'' his reply was ''A single soul dwelling in two bodies.''

PostPosted: Mon Jul 24, 2006 1:21 pm
 View user's profile Visit poster's website
 Back to top 
Guin
Unfettered


Joined: 11 Jan 2006
Posts: 400
Location: Antartica

 		New LJ puzzle guys.

Keep up the good work Smile - shouldnt be long now

Puzzle of the week...
_________________
So long and thanks for all the fish! Trout

PostPosted: Mon Jul 24, 2006 1:58 pm
 View user's profile Visit poster's website AIM Address Yahoo Messenger MSN Messenger
 Back to top 
Austin
Boot

Joined: 28 Feb 2006
Posts: 53
Location: uk

 		Er,

shouldn't we get work units sort of sequentially? Mine has leapt from early lower case letters this morning to zwp2xxxx at the moment.

Austin.

PostPosted: Tue Aug 01, 2006 10:07 am
 View user's profile
 Back to top 
mac_monkey
Decorated

Joined: 25 Feb 2006
Posts: 250
Austin wrote:
Er,

shouldn't we get work units sort of sequentially? Mine has leapt from early lower case letters this morning to zwp2xxxx at the moment.

Austin.


Hi Austin,

Nope, they don't necessarily come sequentially as some are expired they are redistributed.

But as far as your keys go, going from lowercase to 'zwp2.....' as that key there is lowercase Wink
_________________
Now Playing: Super-8

PostPosted: Tue Aug 01, 2006 10:52 am
 View user's profile
 Back to top 
chimera245
Decorated

Joined: 09 Mar 2006
Posts: 209

 		I have also, as I mentionned some posts back, flipped the assignment algorithm to start from the end for a while Smile.

I'll probably keep it backwards for 10% or so (just to see if the answer was in the last few percent), before reverting to normal programming Smile.

In actual fact we can sort the WU's in just about any order we like.

PostPosted: Tue Aug 01, 2006 11:21 am
 View user's profile Visit poster's website
 Back to top 
mac_monkey
Decorated

Joined: 25 Feb 2006
Posts: 250

 		Can we have a q then go to the p please Chimera?

Hahaha just kidding. Makes no difference what order we do it in. Cool
_________________
Now Playing: Super-8

PostPosted: Tue Aug 01, 2006 11:32 am
 View user's profile
 Back to top 
josiah
Veteran


Joined: 29 Sep 2005
Posts: 97
Location: Blackpool, UK

 		hehe....

Was running 4 copies of the client for a month or so on a quad processor server lying around at work that no one was using... we rebooted it the other day and now it doesn't work any more.

Oh well, lets just call it load testing!
_________________
Currently Playing: PPC / TLE

PostPosted: Tue Aug 01, 2006 7:15 pm
 View user's profile MSN Messenger
 Back to top 
SteveC
Unfettered


Joined: 05 May 2005
Posts: 381

 		Thoughts on the future...
The search for the key to the 13th labour has now surpassed 60% of the possible combinations. All is going swimmingly and the early teething problems have now been extinguished. All in all, I think everyone should send a message to chimera to tell him how absolutely fabulous he is. I'm sure wave4 silvers wouldn't go amiss either Wink While you're at it, the work by GuiN and other contributors to the website and blog in drumming up support have been outstanding too, so three cheers!

However, the downside of reaching 60% is that the statisticians amongst you may be starting to wonder where it might end. Also, those who keep an eagle eye on the world of PXC might wonder exactly what Kurt was talking about when he mentioned cryptography and punctuation in a message to Karen at Crypto. There are no co-incidences. Well, not in heavily plot driven universes anyway.

Neither are reason to panic, but they are a reminder that what we're doing is not exactly brute force, more "intelligent brute force". We're making a lot of assumptions in the current attack. We're assuming that essentially, the key to it all would be guessable by a human. To that end we've only looked at keys that contain the numbers 0-9 and the letters a-Z.

To ensure continuity I think it's time we started looking to the future expansion of the search space. We've got some good ideas of where to go next, what combinations to try.

That's all for now, but I just thought I'd put it out there that these things are being thought about. Over the next couple of days, I should be posting an update as to what exactly all of this might entail.

In the meantime, lets try to redouble our efforts to get through the current search as soon as possible. Anyone out there who has a computer running for some or all of the day can help by getting the client running. The prize pool is now worth quite a lot, certainly worth the 5 mins it takes to set the client going on your computer!
_________________
...and no, I didn't reverse engineer or bruteforce anything to form this opinion.

PostPosted: Thu Aug 03, 2006 7:53 am
 View user's profile
 Back to top 
SteveC
Unfettered


Joined: 05 May 2005
Posts: 381

 		14th Labour contingency...
DON'T PANIC

Right, rather sooner than I'd expected.. the future outlook...

All in all, the god we like to call chimera245 has decided that he is happy to complete his mission of either finding the key within, or completing a search of all ascii translated alphanumeric keys (keys that are composed of every combination of 0-9, a-z and A-Z).

That means that in about about 40 days (and 40 nights), there's the possibility we'll need to have a new home, and a new plan for the keyspace. Rather than waiting for that to hit us, we think it's worth having something else in place to continue responding to the community effort.

chimera has said he'll help with the re-molding of the client to cope with this, and lend/license us on the server application in it's new home. That means we have two issues.

1/ What changes should we make to the keyspace
2/ Where is the project going to live

Any suggestions for #1 are welcome. But more urgently we need a solution to #2.

The spec for what we need is:

1/ One computer. Spec should be greater than Pentium IV 2.4Ghz with 1GB memory.

2/ One reliable Internet connection to the tune of about 1Mb synchronous.

Both will have to be available for possibly one year. Though hopefully a lot less, and a key set of admins will need RDP or vpn access to them. So Mr. and Mrs. PXC community...


_________________
...and no, I didn't reverse engineer or bruteforce anything to form this opinion.

PostPosted: Thu Aug 03, 2006 9:32 am
 View user's profile
 Back to top 
Guin
Unfettered


Joined: 11 Jan 2006
Posts: 400
Location: Antartica

 		Key space
Hey all.

A few thoughts on the keyspace etc.

Assuming that the key is punctuated it might be a reasonable assumption to look at additional keyspaces that start with capitals and we then integrate the new characters ,.? ! into the attack (as examples). Its quite hard to comprehend how you would punctuate an 8 character key!

obviously there are a great deal more to consider but I am assuming that the comments made to kurt infer that its a space, comma, fullstop type of puntuation and the key could be something like I am key or (actually cant even think of another!)

it might be worth considering in what order we would integrate them too. It might be less likely that the key contains ^ or * so we could move them to the back of the search.
_________________
So long and thanks for all the fish! Trout

PostPosted: Thu Aug 03, 2006 10:27 am
 View user's profile Visit poster's website AIM Address Yahoo Messenger MSN Messenger
 Back to top 
Scribe
Unfettered


Joined: 09 Jun 2006
Posts: 300
Location: Brighton, UK

 		Coming into it later than most, it'd be interesting to know what's hints we have (if any...) about the origin and content of the key - can't see any particular summary over at the wiki page.

There's mention of Kurt's comment, but is there anything else that might be useful?
_________________
"O, there has been much throwing about of brains."

http://exmosis.net/
http://twitter.com/exmosis/

PostPosted: Thu Aug 03, 2006 10:35 am
 View user's profile Visit poster's website MSN Messenger
 Back to top 
mac_monkey
Decorated

Joined: 25 Feb 2006
Posts: 250

 		My suggestion would be to start with caps on the first character and do the whole run with just spaces to start with, expanding to lowercase with spaces. I think the important thing is that whatever 8 key combos we try can go on the ticked off list-so they are not wasted.

Personally i'd rather see the entire A-Z, a-z, " "<-SPACE first (so basically just adding a space.) I also think it's better to step through lots of little wrong additions to keyspace rather than adding all types of characters from the outset.

I.e step up the keyspace gradually in phases, of order of most likely combo?

Did that make any sense? Razz
_________________
Now Playing: Super-8

PostPosted: Thu Aug 03, 2006 10:36 am
 View user's profile
 Back to top 
jbd
Decorated

Joined: 27 Jul 2004
Posts: 295

 		Re: Key space
Guin wrote:
obviously there are a great deal more to consider but I am assuming that the comments made to kurt infer that its a space, comma, fullstop type of puntuation and the key could be something like I am key or (actually cant even think of another!)


(Trouting myself slightly, but this is a more detailed explanation than my prior.)
Keep in mind some contextual things to Kurt's comment:

1. All three logins (no ENDs, one END, and two ENDs) may theoretically be Karen accounts.

2. The login with a single END is still quite mysterious -- we can pull out single characters but they don't anagram to anything yet.

3. It is therefore feasable if this is a Karen login, that the characters represent the password that Kurt set for Karen to work on, and that's the password he talks about when he mentions punctuation. So if can finish pulling out all the characters we may have a clue for Kurt's punctuation tendencies -- so far the only punctuation we have is a single ' mark.

PostPosted: Thu Aug 03, 2006 11:33 am
 View user's profile
 Back to top 
mac_monkey
Decorated

Joined: 25 Feb 2006
Posts: 250

 		What passwords and stuff for Karen?

Did I miss something?
_________________
Now Playing: Super-8

PostPosted: Thu Aug 03, 2006 11:40 am
 View user's profile
 Back to top 
SteveC
Unfettered


Joined: 05 May 2005
Posts: 381

 		Hadn't thought about that jbd....

However, it would be rather cruel of MC to suddenly (and slightly irrationally) throw us the key after chimera has set up such an incredible effort to brute force it.

It would make no sense for crypto to have a copy of that key...

Mind you - he did know that karen had decrypted it.... Still, it would be a nasty thing for MC to do IMHO.. worth investigating though...

However, from another perspective.. After space and strings terminated with a !, . or ? I think apostrophe'd words should be next..

To put things in perspective, soely adding a space to the possibles adds 17 days (at current rates) to the project (if my maths is correct). It gets very complicated when we talk about adding characters in specific places and adding combinations of characters.

My maths for the 17 days is:

(((((63^Cool - (62^Cool) / (14.7 * (10^6))) / 1.44) / 3600) / 24 = 16.3 days

Where
63^8 is the whole keyspace including a space
62^8 is the keyspace we've already done
14.7*10^6 is the size of a work unit
1.44 is how many we do per second
3600 is second in an hour
24 is hours in a day.


EDIT...

Doing some other maths - it's not actually that much extra time to do some more intelligent attacks.. For instance, throwing both space and apostrophe in anywhere, then terminating with either nothing, ., ! or ? is just 36 days work.
_________________
...and no, I didn't reverse engineer or bruteforce anything to form this opinion.

PostPosted: Thu Aug 03, 2006 11:52 am
 View user's profile
 Back to top 
Display posts from previous:   Sort by:   
Page 55 of 73 [1087 Posts]   Goto page: Previous 1, 2, 3, ..., 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, ..., 71, 72, 73  Next
View previous topicView next topic
 Forum index » Diversions » Perplex City Puzzle Cards » PXC: Silver Puzzle Cards
Jump to:  


You cannot post new topics in this forum
You cannot reply to topics in this forum
You cannot edit your posts in this forum
You cannot delete your posts in this forum
You cannot vote in polls in this forum
You cannot attach files in this forum
You can download files in this forum
You cannot post calendar events in this forum



Powered by phpBB © 2001, 2005 phpBB Group