unforum

[Rogi Ocnorb]

A LITTLE TIMEWASTER SET

[natas]

The only hamlike substitute I can think of would be spam.

Stop spamming the forums Rogi.

[Rogi Ocnorb]

You young whipper-snappers... Thinking Spam is "classic".

I couldn't imagine you being any rasher in your judgment

[Gupfee]

I'm not a big puzzle solver, but I approve of anything that implies bacon is involved.

(<--just pretend this is a slice of Canadian bacon)

[Rogi Ocnorb]

I much prefer bacon.
Just like I prefer half-and-half in my coffee to milk.

[pancito]

Great idea I-gor. In the spirit of cooperation I'll throw this out to be shot down. The only thing I can come up with is that it might be a Baconian cipher. Pluses= It fits the puns. There are a total of forty characters above the asterisks, or sixty if you count the title. You have to include the ellipse either way. Baconain uses groups of five to form letters. Minus [a biggy]= it's all the same typeface, and Baconian usually [always?] relies on typeface mismatch, though I suppose you could geek that.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacon%27s_cipher

[Oriza]

You can get a rash from potted meat?

[Rogi Ocnorb]

@pancito...
Not too much to shoot down, there.
As we're still shaking out the bugs on this and working to harmonize, I'll tell you that the counts you're trying to get at are 20 and 30.

[pancito]

Now all I have to do is figure out what a m n & z have in common.

twenty or thirty makes it the title plus 'equals DEMO' I think. Hmmmm. I'm gonna have to sleep on it. Maybe it'll look better over breakfast.

[magnet0]

Rogi,
Your idea is brilliant. I really hope that this takes off as well as the movie thread.

As a side note to another discussion, I think that the 'game' aspect of ARG's is something that is difficult for the true writer to be involved. It is that rare individual who can tell their story and introduce interesting puzzles that help to both delay progress and continue the plot.

Unfortunately, most of the puzzles that we come across have more familiar methods and solutions. This helps keeps the 'game' aspects solvable by those who are not cryptologists and über-geeks. This is why I can really embrace this thread and your idea.

We can use this thread to showcase really creative puzzles. Those PM's who may be lurking here might just find the delivery method that they have been looking for. I have a few good ones and hope that I solve some of the puzzles that are presented later on during this thread.

For the current puzzle:
I think I understand the half-and-half and amnz reference. If we split the alphabet into 2 parts evenly, it would consist of the letters a-m and n-z. I'm still trying to fit it into the rasher refernece. I'll try even/odd to see if I can get some 5 letter 'words'.

[rose]

Maybe the ellipses means that we need to use every 3rd or possibly 4th letter?

The salient thing with a baconian cypher is that the real message is hidden in the plain text. It isn't quite a simple as just finding the letters from the plain text though, because the letters then need another step of decoding.

[Rogi Ocnorb]

Hmmm.
We're at that point where the balance between participation/collaborative progress versus initial puzzle design/hints needs to be weighed.

How much hinting spoils the collaborative process? I guess it all comes back to who's in the playerbase. Some would prefer spoilers/hints and lose interest without steady, marked progress while others enjoy attempting all possible approaches and don't mind any number of dead-ends.

It will be a good learning experience over the long run, I think.

On this one, I didn't see the need for playtesting as I've seen the method used before and there is at least one online decoder tool for the cipher used. My added punctuation would have probably been questioned during testing and I would have adjusted, accordingly. In this case, probably omitting it and losing what little direction I assumed it may have been adding.

[pancito]

Still hammering away here...

One online solver is at: http://rumkin.com/tools/cipher/baconian.php

using the half and half clue plus magnetO's a-m/n-z I get:

alitt / letim / ewast / erset
AAABB / AABAA / ABABB / ABBAB
=DELN or US swapping B/A
That's 2o characters= 4 letters [note that there are a bunch of combos, eight?, starting with B that are meaningless, thus the US in the swap]

Going out on a limb...

equal / sdemo
ABBAA / BAABB
=MT or TM swapped
that's ten characters = 2 letters for Rogi's twenty or thirty.

But that looks like junk to me...

there / isacl / assic / hamli / kesub / stitu / te
BAABA / ABAAA / ABBAA / AAAAA / AABBA / XX
=SIMAG or NXTZ swapped
and five groups=25

bacon
AAABB
D

So that ain't gonna work unless I screwed something up. Someone want to check me? See any anagrams? I'm probably missing the start point. Or it's the wrong approach.

my brain hurts.

AM I SNELD?

ETA: hints vs. not. I agree that a large part of that is who is playing. I don't mind slogging through stuff as long as I get some help, from whatever direction. Many hands make light work, etc. Solves that don't work are valuable too, as they let you narrow the search. I'm not sure I would have twigged to 'Baconian' without the added puns, but I might have. I think it was on the tip of my brain anyway. Since it isn't technically a substitution cipher idk.

[dev]

[Molnar]

I think that 'classic' in the flavortext is referring to using the latin alphabet version of the Bacon cipher that combines i/j and u/v. In that case, you get

AAABB / AABAA / ABABB / ABBAB = DEMO