unforum

[SpghEddy]

[PUZZLE] AXONS GO HOT: Encrypted Message

[SpghEddy]

If each coordinate is taken to identify a city, a pair of locations from a single row makes an edge. Here is an image of the resulting graph. This might be useful in determining whether the edges can make shapes like bars, dots and lines.

[Aelith]

Someone just posted a list of just the cities and states and it just gave me an idea, wild and unlikely but here goes. In that paired list of city & states, I saw a pattern of pairs within states and pairs between states. Suppose the ''instate pairs' represented zeros or breaks between the "betweens" and these are the sub groups you are looking for.

Arbetarily I have assigned ones to pairs crossing state lines and zero's to pairs that stay in one state.


FWIW here is the resulting binary string:
11101111010110111000001000111011111001011101111011111111111111110110111101111101011110011000000001011111000010
_________________

[Dsal]

I was thinking about how this puzzle must have been made, and it got me thinking....

Say you have a message or something you'd like to convey in a puzzle like this. Say you decided to encode it somehow into distances or directed vectors, or some of the other theories people have had about the pairs of GPS points. How hard would it be to find pairs of points to express that precise (or even approxamite) distance or direction?

Say you had to somehow express part of a message in the number 2332 so you look for a pair of addresses that would be 2332 miles apart. It wouldn't be hard to do this if you picked random places on a map, not caring if they were mostly at populated areas. You could pick any point, draw the radius around it, and pick any point on the circle.

However, it'd be much harder to get all those distances designed just right so that the pairs of points almost all coincided to actual addresses inside cities and towns in America. You'd have to pick an address in a city, draw a circle around it with a radius exactly 2332 wide, and hope it hit some town. You could fudge a bit after that if you were close by moving the starting point a few miles in some direction, but you get the idea.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that it's way more likely that another method of puzzle generation was used than this one. So it's harder for me to think now that distances or vector directions are part of the "code".

What is the information of the data, and what is the noise? When you look at the information plotted graphically on a map, the "information" or ordering of these points seem to be within the cities/areas they point to more than anything else. The noise seems to be some outliers and some "jittering" around the cities. If the information was within the pair vectors, why this coincidental ordering of points mostly on populated areas? It'd be a pain to design and implement that coincidence as a puzzle maker.

Maybe we should reconcentrate on which cities have the most "clumps" around them and what they might have in common. The strays could in fact just be outliers too that could possibly be meant to be ignored, you never know.

[SpghEddy]

True, it would seem hard to encode a message using distances AND ensuring that they all still fall on street locations in major US cities.

However, let's not get discouraged or try to shoot down our theories before we've even exhausted the possiblities.

If distance or bearing information doesn't seem right to you, think of some new angles that you find more interesting. One way of forming a message is converting each row location pair into a character, yielding 110 characters. Dana may have hinted in this update that distance or bearing might be important, but let's not stop there.

One thing I've been thinking about: even if the choice of cities is constrained to major areas, or areas that the PMs think is near the players (remember, in this thread, we won't spend time speculating why they would want to do this...), there still is a lot of freedom in choosing actual points in a given city. The street names, for example, could be part of the code (and there are plenty of streets to choose from).

[Alzheimers]

I suggested this on IRC last night, but although we didn't have much success I don't think it would hurt putting this idea out to see if more eyeballs don't come up with something. One way of sending a message using only numbers involves using those numbers as a lookup table for text in a book. It's called, ironically enough, a Book Cypher.

The question would then become, what book? To this, there's a couple directions you could take. For instance, if the message is coming from the "Pious Flea" regarding his search for Truth and Law, you might think of using the King James Bible (did anyone send ladybee777 that? I don't recall). If you want to think more Halosian, maybe one of the books that takes place in that Universe would hold the key.

Remember that the tool Dana used in her blog gives back round numbers for distance. These could very well be word numbers, or (Page#)(Word#) or even (Page#)(Word#)(Letter#).

It's another direction to consider.

[Anonymous Coward]

[John Incognito]

I'm posting my Connect the dots theory for referance.

Posted: Sat Aug 14, 2004 12:11 am Post subject: Seattle Gps cords: They look like they form a arrow or X


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Hey guys. new to the whole ARG thing, but I've been keeping up the the Apiary for a while..

I'm pretty jittery as I write this.. I couldn't find any other mention of it with the search so I hope I'm right and I'm not trouting but..

Has anyone noticed the GPS Cordinates form a arrow/cross if you look at them all together?

Here are some links for my evidence.

http://www.mapquest.com/maps/map.adp?country=US&address=1021+E+John+St+&city=Seattle&state=WA

http://www.mapquest.com/maps/map.adp?country=US&address=914+E+Mercer+St+&city=Seattle&state=WA

http://www.mapquest.com/maps/map.adp?country=US&address=1316+E+Olive+St+&city=Seattle&state=WA

http://www.mapquest.com/maps/map.adp?country=US&address=1577+6th+Ave+&city=Seattle&state=WA

http://www.mapquest.com/maps/map.adp?country=US&address=1801+Harvard+Ave+&city=Seattle&state=WA

http://www.mapquest.com/maps/map.adp?country=US&address=509+16th+Ave+E+&city=Seattle&state=WA

I know this isn't all of them, but perhaps the idea that they form some sort of larger connect the dots picture as a whole is something that should be looked into.

Extra: At the very least the most of the Seattle GPS cords are very close together.. Which brings up the question why aren't they spread out more?
_____________________________________________________________

To sum up my theory is now that the GPS cords might form some sort of connect the dots picture clue in the form of a shape or symbol in a simular way the website link puzzle formed groups of words.

There are a unusal number of right angles formed by the cords in Seattle, WA that's for sure.

Does anyone want to run the complete groups of cords from each town through mapquest?
_____________________________________________________________

I made a small map showing "all?" the seattle coords at once, but I made it in photoshop and I can't seem to get all of the layers to form a single file.. I'll post it here and someone else can fix it if they want.
"The lower right picture is 1st Ave S, SEATTLE, WA, 98104"

Two more ideas on the matter.

1: Maybe the state as a whole forms the picture and..

2: If it is meant to form a pattern then perhaps it might match a star constellation.

[quin1116]

If your looking for books to check against the numbers you might want to check the Gutenberg Bible, and "Ellis Peters and the Brother Cadfael books and Alexander McCall Smith and the Precious Ramotswe books..." Some of margarets favorite books.

[Extrasonic]

HTML analysis of links.html

[kole]

here is what i found at the Redmond, WA location [5 minutes from Bungie's Offices]....

[Astald]

Wow, that is definitely pretty strange. Although, I still have a feeling it is oog. Is 14405 178 Ave Monroe, WA a coord location?

[usernameguy]

The points come in groups

[SpghEddy]

[SpghEddy]

Re: The points come in groups