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[youcantseeme]

iv got someone looking into that for me now, see what i can find out.

[youcantseeme]

just recived this from my friend in oxford

[Dorkmaster]

I would say that I have a copy of "The Difference Engine" By Sterling and Gibson (DM <3 Gibson : hence the sig) But I take it you are all hoping for something like the New York Alice in Wonderland thing... and while I certainly extend an invitation for anyone from Perplex City and/or Mind Candy to drop on by whenever they please for coffee and cake, I somehow doubt that someone snuck in and got some kloo stuck in my copy. But if you need someone to check out something in that book (text-wise), lemme know.

[kelsey_requiem]

I have the difference engine in e-book, what hidden part should i be looking for?

[BrianEnigma]

It may not be relevant and did not affect my anagram experiments, but here in the states, #2 was called a Timex Sinclair 1000. The keyboard was horrible and even managed to be worse than that of the Atari 400, mostly due to smaller buttons.

[Macavity]

So, uh, is geek Antiques solved or not?

*perplexed*

[Leeravitz]

Depends on how you want to look at it.

One train of thought says: Essentially, the very basic task appears to be naming the computers. We have meaningfully identified all of them. Hence, the card's solved.

Another says: This is a blue card, and that seems too easy for the level of difficulty the puzzle is pitched at. A number of other cards work at more than one level of reference (Bar None, where the answer to the puzzle doubles as a phone number, Master of Secrets where once the passage is translated, you still have to work out the answer to the riddle etc.), and so, it's natural to assume that most of them do. So, it feels like it's half - solved.

Most of the puzzle answers deduced so far do not appear to mean very much: A + 2; LIBYA; SIR ALAN GARDINER; PARALLEL LINES etc. and it remains a bit of a mystery as to whether they are meant to signify anything in particular. Some players are of the attitude that there are just correct answers and wrong answers, and if you're getting answers correct, then you'll win leaderboard points. Even by these standards, however, it doesn't feel like 'Geek Antiques' has been reduced to its basic level as answer yet - after all, the names of 9 separate computers are not nearly so 'neat' as the answers listed above for other cards.

But no - one has come up with a clear breakthrough as to what can be done with these answers: we've had it suggested that we have first letters for an anagram of 'ANNA'S ABC'S' - I spent a while trying to work out if there's was a 3x3 'Magic Square' element involved, and some have tried considering the first letters (of which there are only 5 separate letters - A, N, B, C and S) as algebraic symbols - without much success. Lots of people have got hung up on Kurt's mention of a Difference Engine, but, frankly, it's hard to see what clue that gives us.

So, in that sense, it probably isn't solved, and we're sort of throwing our hands up at it at the moment. (but then, you could say that about a lot of the 'solved' puzzles - which smack to me of 'halfway' solutions).

[buff]

Musings:

As all the other cards has been quite upfront with their solution once it has been found (meaning that we've known when it was solved) - it seems unlikely that this card would be so different...

Or am I out in the cold?

[Mikeyj]

Seems quite right to me Buff and Leeravitz. As there's nothing obvious in the names so far that indicates what should be done with the results, then the extra text on the card may be the source of this. Hence why people have been tinkering mentally with difference engine.

[Leeravitz]

As I said in a rather garbled fashion in one of my previous posts (a long way back), one of the most interesting 'correlations' between the card structure and the Difference Engine that I could see was that: the card is divided into nine segments, and the calculating wheels of the Difference Engine were based on units of nine. Except I then looked closely at a picture of one, and realised that, of course, they actually work in base 10, going from 0 to 9, with 0 doubling as 10. So, that was another idea out of the window! Sorry

I still find it hard to see any meaningful connection between the Gibson/Sterling book and the card, nice (and very ARG -y) as that possibility might seem.

I did consider for a little while that, as there is now a working model of the Difference Engine in England, whether we would be called upon to visit it in some capacity. I doubt we could actually *do* anything with it, but another message/clue *could* turn up there. Maybe. For a time, I was working on the notion that one could turn the data on the card somehow into a punch card pattern, feed it into the Engine (hypothetically) and deduce a new answer, but then I realised I needed to have a lie down!! (It was the Analytical Engine, not the Difference Engine, that was to be powered by punchcards anyway...).

But I still wonder - an algebraic pattern encoded in the cards might (sort of) make sense, as algebra was so important to Lovelace and Babbage as they worked on the theory of the Engine. But if it's there I can't see it. And, sometimes, this does all smack of thinking too hard, for what is only a blue card, when all's said and done!

[dusty2229]

To be neat and tidy here's the map on the back.
Also #138 Blue - Geek Antiques isn't on the card catalog either.....?

[questionboy]

[SPEC]

Several people here have spoken of the language used by Kurt.

one that jumps out to me is "AMASS"

just a thought
the spectrum #8 is the 48k version
the nintentdo #6 is 16 bit (in japan called the Neo Geo)

also i wouldn't dispute anything here and correct me if im wrong but didn't Acorn make the electron for the BBC and therefore we could use "E" or "A" instead of "B"

if we look at using first letters we get
1=A
2=S
3=A (ACORN)
4=A
5=C
6=N
7=A
8=S
9=C or N (Cube) or NeXT

we are now left with 3 letters

does this look like a ceaser shifed web page????? using AMass as the key (sorry my code breaking isn't up to speed yet) but working the grid down 1,4,7
2,5,8
3,6,9
let em know your thoughts

[Kalt]

Hmm. Microwaving (for about a second) and heating this card doesn't seem to do much to reveal the hidden text/designs on this card. If you look carefully in boxes 1 and 8, there is definitely something there--Can anyone figure out any "geek antiques" or any other clues in Kurt's writing that may help us better read the watermarking/special ink?

[buzman]

Something I've noticed is that most of the pictures seem to have a photographic artefact (left side of 2, middle right of 5, top right of 6 etc)

I'm not a photographer so I'm not sure of the correct terminology, but they look like an overexposure, or a reflection of the flash.

I was idly wondering whether this was supposed to be an indication of what we need to do to the card to reveal the hidden text (if that's what it really is).

Of course, it could just be there to make the pictures look more artistic ...

[Sentinel]

Has anyone had a solve for this card? i've input my answers (as we now know that we need to input 8 names) which are the same as in the original post for this topic, but was notified that I am incorrect, can anyone help?

Also, has anyone tried any alternate ways of looking at this card, i.e. blacklight, IR etc. to explore the 'photographic glitches'?