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 Forum index » Archive » Archive: The Art of the Heist » The Art of the Heist: Puzzles
[ Please - Do We Have It Now? ] The Evil Cube
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Merrill
Greenhorn


Joined: 24 Apr 2005
Posts: 9
Location: Boston, MA

 		Following Scott's suggestion, I took board #16

Spoiler (Rollover to View):
Ouroboros is the big, obvious interesting word. (It's preceded by the letters IAM, which may or may not be significant.
Other things of possible interest include:
Downfall
Bereavement
First Person Shooter
Slashing Swords (Word/s)
Grace (Race)
Ceding
Bad, Cool, Gun

I AM occurs at least 5 times. Pot/Top occurs at least 3 times, Mom twice, Now/Won twice. JKSUTY appears twice but that may be a function of how the puzzles are made.

Also, it might just be random, but LRR is in there.


PostPosted: Fri May 20, 2005 8:10 pm
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rose
...and then Magic happens


Joined: 26 Nov 2003
Posts: 4117

 		virgil's site
Since many of these words appear on Virgil's site, what does that mea, in terms of the solve?
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I love this site for being free, in every sense of the word~Spacebass

Mankind was my business, the common good was my business.~ Dickens

PostPosted: Fri May 20, 2005 8:16 pm
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CDub
Boot


Joined: 08 Apr 2005
Posts: 59
Location: St. Louis
Spoiler (Rollover to View):
Image 27
(There are many 3 letter words, a few names, etc. I won't list everything)
1. Confound
2. Point
3. Dark (5) / At Dark (1)
4. Patch
5. Art
6. Bad
7. Zen

Notes: From what I've found, "Dark" appears 5 times by itself and 1 time in "At Dark".
I think some of the words found in one puzzle are found in other puzzles, overlapping words.
I also remember seeing "Nisha Chronicles" in another puzzle, so it does seem as though most these words are found on Virgil's site.

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PostPosted: Fri May 20, 2005 8:35 pm
Last edited by CDub on Sat May 21, 2005 1:48 am; edited 1 time in total
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Merrill
Greenhorn


Joined: 24 Apr 2005
Posts: 9
Location: Boston, MA

 		And because it's addictive, here's board #15 (Image 37)

Lost x2
Insincerity (Or Lost In Sin. It IS Virgil, after all.)
Inventive
Simulacrum
Mastery
Termination
Wheat
Bugs
Lord
Lark

Random, but Volli appears twice (Ill?)

PostPosted: Fri May 20, 2005 8:40 pm
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rose
...and then Magic happens


Joined: 26 Nov 2003
Posts: 4117

 		crossed -eyes from looking at these
I am thinking that either the repeated words, or the numbers of the image files are the clues here? How do the image names and the board #'s compare?
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I love this site for being free, in every sense of the word~Spacebass

Mankind was my business, the common good was my business.~ Dickens

PostPosted: Fri May 20, 2005 9:03 pm
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CDub
Boot


Joined: 08 Apr 2005
Posts: 59
Location: St. Louis
Spoiler (Rollover to View):
Image 29
2. Destruction
3. Bamboozlement
4. Hoodwink
5. Toil
6. Casualty
7. Duplicity
8. Defalcation
9. Lie
10. Joystick
12. Mat (Master of Art in Teaching)
17. Zoo
19. Map
20. Coy

Notes: "Zoo" appeared in Image 27 as well.
2 sets of re-occuring letters popped out at me:
* Purng (2)
* Mrokd (2)

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PostPosted: Fri May 20, 2005 9:55 pm
Last edited by CDub on Sat May 21, 2005 1:47 am; edited 3 times in total
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CDub
Boot


Joined: 08 Apr 2005
Posts: 59
Location: St. Louis
Spoiler (Rollover to View):
Image 31
2. Liking (1) King (1)
3. Facility
4. Ruination
7. Expertise
8. Hypocrisy
10. Nisha Chronicles
13. Mount
14. Bank
15. Tail
16. Sedate
17. Tortured
18. Oriented
19. Zen
23. Monk
24. Ping
25. Hex
29. Bee (2)

Note: Found more names, nothing I think is worth diddly. Also another set of letters repeating caught my eye.
Wlool (2)
Sue
Jan

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PostPosted: Fri May 20, 2005 11:38 pm
Last edited by CDub on Sat May 21, 2005 1:46 am; edited 2 times in total
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toongoon
Decorated


Joined: 25 Sep 2002
Posts: 217
Location: SF Bay Area, CA

 		Just arrived on the word search thing. As I see it without a defintie word list we could be pulling 2 and 3letter words out of these for quite some time.

1. Do a set of the more complex (ie likely not random) words from a single puzzle match up with any single entry elsewhere on his site?

2. What does ITSBTCTHT mean? BTC = Big time comedy? or TTT B!TCHS? Tried ROTing but didn't try un scrambling all the results

PostPosted: Sat May 21, 2005 1:21 am
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CDub
Boot


Joined: 08 Apr 2005
Posts: 59
Location: St. Louis
toongoon wrote:
1. Do a set of the more complex (ie likely not random) words from a single puzzle match up with any single entry elsewhere on his site?

I'm with ya there, but I started seeing a few 3 letter words that could possibley apply - so I just decided to add them to be complete.
I doubt they're needed.
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PostPosted: Sat May 21, 2005 1:43 am
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xnbomb
Unfettered


Joined: 13 Oct 2003
Posts: 660
Location: J302B S8JDC

 		OCR
I took nhansard's individual .bmps and wrote some code that remapped the color palettes appropriately, removed the grid lines, and wrote the images out at 10x the size (3610x3610 instead of 361x361) as black and white .tifs. I then fed the images into a nice piece of optical character recognition freeware (WOCAR 2.4) in batch mode, and assembled the resulting text in a text file that I have attached to this post.

I present, for your algorithmic analyzing pleasure, the wordsearch letter grids as text data. They are in the same order in the attached file as they are found in the Flash. I cannot guarantee that all 8000 characters are perfectly correct, but I wouldn't be surprised if they were. The WOCAR software has a quality control indicator that shows when identified characters are less than certain, and there were none of those here ... the process I used produced some pretty ideal inputs for OCR.
vkocwordsearch.txt
Description 
txt

 Download 
Filename  vkocwordsearch.txt 
Filesize  8.63KB 
Downloaded  443 Time(s) 
_________________
My location is a little tricky, but sooner or later, you'll get the knack.

{J302B S8JDC, 8996N M8L4W, 92D40 Q1JX5, 4PPRN R2B97, 8DC7C NZJNV, 8CH7V Q891H}

PostPosted: Sat May 21, 2005 5:46 am
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nhansard
Decorated

Joined: 07 Apr 2005
Posts: 159
toongoon wrote:
2. What does ITSBTCTHT mean? BTC = Big time comedy? or TTT B!TCHS? Tried ROTing but didn't try un scrambling all the results


That string was the first letter of each of the answers to the art puzzle. it was how they hid the link in the flash code so we couldn't just skip over the art puzzle part to the next part. I don't think there is any deeper meaning to it (but i could be wrong, maybe it's encrypted like the .kgb filename).

-Nick

PostPosted: Sat May 21, 2005 2:34 pm
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toongoon
Decorated


Joined: 25 Sep 2002
Posts: 217
Location: SF Bay Area, CA

 		Thanks, nhansard. Embarassed

PostPosted: Sun May 22, 2005 1:04 am
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xnbomb
Unfettered


Joined: 13 Oct 2003
Posts: 660
Location: J302B S8JDC

 		Coming at it from a different angle
Following on from last night's effort to get the word search data into text form, I started playing with it tonight as a three-dimensional 20x20x20 cube of text. In particular, I spent some time looking at the cube from other directions, effectively creating new 20-character strings from across the original planes of text. I wrote some software that reads the 20 planes of text, and allows me to look at the cube from any direction and rotation (note that rotation is useful because it is much easier to scan for words in the normal reading direction of left to right, so by taking the same plane and looking at it four times, you can easily scan all the available directions). My code runs inside the ArcView GIS, so I'm afraid it's not something I can share usefully with most of you (although if you have ArcView 3.X and aren't afraid of some Avenue code, I'll happily send it to you).

Here's a description of the nomenclature I'll use below to describe the direction in which I'm looking at the cube: Take the 20 planes of text we have and stack them one on top of the other, like sheets of paper (with the very first sheet you see on the Flash on top, and the last on the bottom). Then, imagine picking up this stack of paper and standing it on its end on a desk in front of you. Now rotate the stack of paper 90 degrees clockwise. I'll refer to this as the side plane.

In the direction that is orthogonal to the original planes (the side plane), I found four 20-character long messages, and a fifth shorter message that is noteworthy because its still too long to be there by chance, and it looks like encouragment. The messages are:

Code:
AFTERSIXTHEBEGINNING
SIDEWAYSSTARTATTHREE
NEWCONCEPTUALIZATION
OTHERDIRECTIONSEXIST

and

ALMOST


I don't know what the messages mean, or if they are in any way related to a solution to this puzzle, but they certainly aren't there by accident. AFTERSIXTHEBEGINNING and SIDEWAYSSTARTATTHREE sound like they are trying to tell us something useful. NEWCONCEPTUALIZATON sounds much less like an instruction and more like a 'Virgilism'. OTHERDIRECTIONSEXIST is either a rather odd admonishment or an acknowledgement of something that should be self evident, and ALMOST is just ... almost?

There were plenty of shorter words present, but nothing that seemed terribly meaningful. I think I caught all of the 20-character phrases, but its easy to miss things when you are staring at fields of characters, so perhaps there is something else in there. In any case, I'm hoping what I've found so far is going help us towards the solution in some fashion.

Below I have attached images of the noteworthy planes so you can see what these look like in situ.

EDIT: For a clearer description of 3d space.
side19rot0.gif
 Description   
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side19rot0.gif
side16rot0.gif
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side16rot0.gif
side14rot0.gif
 Description   
 Filesize   12.3KB
 Viewed   164 Time(s)

side14rot0.gif
side6rot0.gif
 Description   
 Filesize   12.04KB
 Viewed   157 Time(s)

side6rot0.gif
side3rot0.gif
 Description   
 Filesize   12.13KB
 Viewed   163 Time(s)

side3rot0.gif
_________________
My location is a little tricky, but sooner or later, you'll get the knack.

{J302B S8JDC, 8996N M8L4W, 92D40 Q1JX5, 4PPRN R2B97, 8DC7C NZJNV, 8CH7V Q891H}

PostPosted: Sun May 22, 2005 6:30 am
Last edited by xnbomb on Mon May 23, 2005 5:14 am; edited 1 time in total
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rose
...and then Magic happens


Joined: 26 Nov 2003
Posts: 4117

 		brilliant
thanks xnbomb

Personally I think this 3-d form is what Virgil was hinting about when he mentioned his game Memory Effect in his last rant. Virgil gives subtle hints to us in many of his posts.

About the messages, I think that ALMOST, means you are very close to getting this right, but not quite.

I think the phrase "Newconceptualization" is from something about the Nisha game or somewhere on Virgil's site... I will look for it.. Edit : I didn't find it, but I did get to read Virgil's stuff again, even if you don't like him, he is a good writer.
---
Perhaps:

after6thebeginning -> means to reorder the images to start with the 7th image??
sideways start at three? --> begining with the third image look at the images sideways?
---
also, thanks to my dyslexic vision, I am really good at reading backwards and upside down. Is there any way to make this viewable to those of us who have no idea have to make a really cool rotating cube out of 20 images?

----
Quote:
My wayward career path was stabilized by the 1987 release of the multi-award winning title, "Memory Effect". This text-based game was elegantly simple in its graphic interface but took off mostly because of its complex interlocking network of ciphers leading to puzzles leading to more ciphers, in a pattern that I suppose was compelling then but sure seems pretty flat nowadays. I made up a horror-movie style gimmick to publicize the game-offering $10,000 to the first person who could identify the occupant of the House of Doom, the final puzzle in the game. Nobody ever came forward and now I no longer remember who held the lease on the House of Doom.


this may explain the pattern that Virgil is using here: the network of ciphers leading to puzzles to ciphers.
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I love this site for being free, in every sense of the word~Spacebass

Mankind was my business, the common good was my business.~ Dickens

PostPosted: Sun May 22, 2005 2:08 pm
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Muskie
Boot


Joined: 02 Oct 2004
Posts: 55
Location: Australia

 		Let's conceptualise here. What xnbomb and I are thinking (for those that are confused) is a wordsearch using what is commonly known as a Hypercube, or a Multidimensional cube. it's kinda high end physichs, but it's actually quite simple to understand...

First, is a Cube. this represents a single character in the wordsearch. each side would be textured with the same letter. (1 object, 6 polygons)




Now, we extrapolate from here, and turn this into a Plane of cubes, representing a single wordsearch. (400 objects, 2400 Polygons)






Then we extrapolate further, into the third dimension, creating a 20x20x20 cube of cubes, more commonly known as a 20 dimensional Hypercube.
(8000 objects, 48000 Polygons, and this is where my PC grinds to a holt trying to render this thing!)




And there you have it, that's what we're going to have to look at to be able to solve this thing. Virgil is a genius. Razz

Muskie

EDIT: Fixed large width -Ehsan

PostPosted: Mon May 23, 2005 12:21 am
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