unforum

[bryanflurry]

Great work guys!

[meta]
@mr.judkins - personally I don't know what am I going to do if I were in your position but what you did somehow came out something good, the story got really interesting (well for me) with Theo's possible allies scouring hte Omphalos location for the artifacts. And you didn't neglect to pass the image to Ariadne, which is vital with finding out the code.

[Weezel]

[jasper]

[Rivanor]

YOU. GUYS. RAWWWKK!!!!

[mr.judkins]

[Chid12]

You guys are absolute legends. I wouldn't be surprised if CIA or MI5 were e-mailing you right now to offer you jobs!

Here's the first page of the chapter. Anyone who can work out what the marked words mean, please help!

Chapter 16

Athletic Alignment

Imagine, that after you finish reading this, you take it off and continue your daily life! Small deviations in the position of your body accumulate, until this time tomorrow your body will be, across the many worlds, in incalculably many places on the surface of the planet.

But: if you tend to follow a routine, there will be times when you will almost be in the same place. When you lie in bed, or sit at the breakfast table, some people from your parallel selves across different universes will be in precisely the same place, making points of congruence. This is not a photographic effect. It is becoming a place, it is imprecise, and not very visible against the background of fogging of the billions and billions of worlds.

But understand, that you could align your body precisely, with the skilfulness and precision and grace of an Olympic-level athlete! Understand, that you could plan, a week before, to go to precisely the right place, and to hold your body according to precisely the right manner! Understand that you could do sport by your best skilfulness, bring about your absolute pointed (?), so there is almost no difference from one activity to another.

In this moment of athletic co-ordination, the parallel selves across very different worlds would be in precisely the same place. And suppose, that you close your eyes and that be sufficiently conscious about small pulls, small strengths which you could feel where your body and mind were coordinated, across universes, with the most points of relation! And we'd suppose that with tiny moves, you could coordinate yourself with other yous.

Two things would happen.

One is, that your body would bridge, powerfully directing strengths out of one world to another, changing the topology of the multiverse, seaming universes there.

The other is – if you were extremely precise about the place of your body, position and moves, your mind would experience a miniature version of the natural synchronisation of the worlds, co-ordinating with another copy of you yourself. Memories, thoughts, ideas could jump across the crack, so that your mind would travel from one you to the other.

During that moment of physical co-ordination, your own brain would act how the omphaloi communicates across the many worlds, while creating a navel which draws together the worlds.

You would open your eyes and suddenly there would be at least one less world in the multiverse –but without any kind of destruction, without any kind of change. Through take care of an orchestrated merger, smaller, less secure number of simultaneous worlds co-existing. Reality would remain inside from its upper limit – at least for now.

And you would suddenly have memories of another world.

This is an athletic co-ordination, that with which we recovered our memories, and so you will recover yourself. It is also how we intend to keep this world safe for now.

Thanks unagi. Maybe you could help with one more sentence? The highlighted part of this sentence is baffling me:

"Konstatu, ke vi povus fari sporton laux via plej bona lerteco, via absolute pinta efektivigo, tiel ke ekzistas preskaux neniom da diferen disde unu agado al alia."

What does it mean? I can translate it literally, but it doesn't really make sense.

[unagi]

[chaobell]

\o/!!!!!

YAY YOU GUYS ARE AWESOME.

[Weezel]

Since Ariadne asked how we did it (on her forum) , I'll provide information regarding the discoveries and what the last 4 pages of stuff meant to the puzzle solvers.

The first hurdle to overcome was getting ourselves a less blurry image to deal with. Several people were working on using sharpening tools to clean things up. The problem with those is that if its really out of focus, the sharpening doesn't have something to work with for contrast, so you have to do several other items first.

Originally, I began with the cut down image that Ariadne provided. Later, I
found the mr.judkins had additional photos from the failed recovery, long with a larger original version of the croppedimage. That was the key (several times).

I started with the large image, and then did several downsamplings of the image to various sizes (it started at 28"x?" at 72 dpi). When you down/up sample a graphic image depending on the algorithm you use, you can sometimes introduce or reduce the amount of artifacts and contrast. This is because of the math going on behind the scenes as the system throws away or adds pixels.

By downsampling the image, I was able to produce enough contrast that a
sharpener was able to get closer to being able to read text. The first thing I was able to see was the Provo words being visible. I actually wound up using a demo plugin for Adobe Photoshop called focusMagic that got me started.

I then sent my revised images up to another forum so that people had new items to work with. At first, I threw up TIFF images because I didn't want to introduce any further artifacts with JPG compression. Later, I started using JPGs but at maximum quality to prevent as many artifacts as possible.

Now, we had better images to work with. The next thing was to determine which were numbers and which were letters.

Looking at samples of the code on other artifacts, we saw that the numbers were almost always dropped lower than letters and that in 99% of the cases, the letters were in caps. gjamesgag provided some
initial samples and lhall later provided an entire image of samples for us to look at (http://lauraehall.com/codes.gif).

Even though we could start seeing the text now, we were looking at almost 20 characters of guesswork. And If any single character was off, we wouldn't know.

All of this coordination was happening in IRC chat as well as quick forum posts (with attachments)

So the next breakthrough (without which I doubt any of this would have been possible), came from chaobell.

She determined that the omphaputer gave you different responses if you had a totally wrong portion of the code, versus a correct portion. Its as if the code were actual directories that were being parsed into the final filename.

For example:

You take a direct link to a previous part of the Codex, like so:
http://164.109.150.213/PRUVO/AI7P/I5DB/J2L4/N2IR/I80T.PDF

And lop off everything past the first four digits of the code:
http://164.109.150.213/PRUVO/AI7P/

...and you get this:
Error 404: SRVE0190E: File not found: {0}

Which doesn't seem all that helpful. But try just feeding it any old thing, like
so:
http://164.109.150.213/PRUVO/whee/

And you get THIS.
Error 404: SRVE0190E: File not found: /PRUVO/whee/

So that meant, as we identified each section, we could test a PORTION of the code and look for a {0} response. If we knew for *sure* what a single digit was, we could try various combinations of the other digits till one hit.

So using the tools we had, we started matching the baselines (to determine number versus letter), weight (was the character darker on the top or the bottom), etc against our sample codes we already had. We also found that the codes on the artifacts were often 'lighter' towards the bottom as the keys struck the paper. I provided an updated image with a straight line showing where the characters 'sat' in relation to others.

So in the course of 15-20 minutes, we went from having NOTHING to having 4 of the 5 codes. As soon as one person got a section, everyone could start working on the next section.

Then we hit a roadblock. Section 5 was very very difficult to read. Because of the angle of the paper being held, it was going both away from the camera and down from the camera.

Additionally, the characters had graphic anomalies in them that were causing identification problems. This is where having the full size image came into play again. We determined that the drawing on the artifact was actually encroaching into the code and what were seeing wasn't part of the code but part of the drawing. This was affecting recognition of (primarily) the first three characters.

As we continued to discuss that what ifs of various characters, I provided
several more sample images of the last section of the code. Each of these images tackled the blurred section with various techniques. Sometimes I through out colors (like in an RGB image only providing the Red channel, or the Green channel). Sometimes I sharpened the lightness values, or even added back grain into the image before sharpening, kinda like dusting for digital fingerprints.

In each of these cases, we sometimes saw a slight 'hint' as to what the
character might be.

Simultaneously, other people were trying alternate methods to clean up the last section.

We tried various patterns of number-letter-letter-number, or switching them, etc, as these 'hints' led us to different conjectures of what the digits might be. Since it was the last section, we knew we had to append .PDF to the URL and if it was correct, we'd find the PDF file needed.

We hammered away in discussion and testing for several hours. We had come so far, so quickly, and then got stumped. I finally went to bed at 12:15am EST and left the channel still buzzing with possibilities.

Then about 2 hours later, lhall came up with the answer.

http://164.109.150.213/PRUVO/5474/WAS8/541S/9424/50MJ.PDF

The last digit killed as all night. It was dropped, just like all the numbers
were. However, it was a letter. Remember that 99% scenario with capital letters? Well here was a another 1%. We actually joked that if it was a lowercase letter we were in trouble, and that the lowercase "i" found in another code was likely a typo. It wasn't. Here was another lowercase letter which derailed all our pattern discussions.

lhall got some help from a friend and actually scripted the last section of
possible codes. Using the digit recognition we had so far, we decreased the number of possibilities from close to 36^4 (26 letters, 10 numbers, 4 positions). If we were sure a place was a number or a letter, that cut the choices down.

It was a real treat to be part of the active 'hive' mind. Several people
listening in on chat offered support but elected to 'stay outta harms way'. In the initial flurry, answers were coming almost as fast as you could hit refresh.

When we first started I thought it impossible. 20 minutes later I was on the
edge of my seat unbelieving. The next several hours were a rollercoaster of adrenaline and anticipation and defeat.

I don't mean to leave anyone out. I don't have a log of the IRC chat, so I don't mean to skip anyone. As the hive mind worked, discovery was all about 'it could be this, here's why.. it could be this, here's why.. oh look, some new information.. start over playing what if again...' I tried to hilite the key milestones that made the discovery possible: 1) The pseudo-unblurred images 2) The omphaputer response 3) The existing codes and sample graphics, but it was really a group effort.

[jasper]

I think at one point it is saying the writers of the codex recovered their lost memories through deliberate athletic alignment. Our six should be trying this. They are doing it already- because it is in their nature to practice sports- and so they are getting bits of memories (they interpret some of these bits as dreams.) They should take this on actively and deliberately and maybe they will soon clearly recall their identities and their task.

[DavFlamerock]

Wow you guys, that was like... beyond amazing. That was.... just... wow.

[AUZ505]

And another thing, which I understand now. It is not just that the labyrinths hae to be at the same place and that the event have to be at the same time, it also has to be performed by the same runner! The same person across the 6 parallel worlds, making absolute aligned movements.

Not a sport for me: One of me is always to late

[Guest]

via absolute pinta efektivigo

[runeix ftlr]