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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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rose
...and then Magic happens


Joined: 26 Nov 2003
Posts: 4117

 		reserved faces
ok - we have had the ideaa to reserve faces or specific puzzles about three times now.

I will take the ones I did before - which are on j5's xls pagesas these numbers:

#1 - but can't find everything
#3 -as I started it
#5
#6
#7
#8
#19
#20

That leaves 12 more to do. I am uploading what I have so far if people want to look at or work on it. I won't be able to look at this again until Tuesday morning. I am going to resist the temptaion to stay inside on a beautiful sunny weekend or to take this on a laptop with me. Smile

So change or add anything you can find.

Have a great weekend!
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PostPosted: Sat May 28, 2005 9:47 am
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missphinx
Unfettered

Joined: 02 Oct 2003
Posts: 395

 		I'll start with page 9 in j5's excel edition (Image_25.bmp) (starts with ZQIP).

Okay.
The major words in it are
priest
rabelais
annihilation
silence
consummation
artifice
memoryeffect
betatest
pontean(jlandgr)
burrow

other words of note are possibly poet, probably nun, with the rabelais/priest theme. top and note are frequent.

I don't know my Rabelais, but it could refer to "Gargantua and Pantagruel" - http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/1200 ???
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PostPosted: Sat May 28, 2005 11:20 am
Last edited by missphinx on Sat May 28, 2005 1:49 pm; edited 1 time in total
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jlandgr
Boot

Joined: 27 May 2005
Posts: 67
Location: Münster, Germany

 		OK,
great that the reservation system is now up and running, it is probably the best way to go!
As for colors, I have used different colors depending on if they are normal words or special words like towns, painters, periods of art history, references to game characters (the Benito Strawson that has already been discussed here) etc.
Also, I've noted all the words longer than 7 letters, as these words often follow a certain theme/fit well into the storyline and might contain clues ...
As I've started early this morning (your time, different time zone here) I've had a try at the various faces but will now concentrate on / reserve faces 15,14,13,12 for now.
I upload my spreadsheet as it is now and perhaps those on whose reservation I inadvertently trespassed Wink can just check if my notes concerning their faces contain by chance any additional finds. Especially with regard to long words or "special colors" (towns, names etc.)
I don't think/hope that we have to find every single word, this would be tedious and difficult (where to stop? there are so many city names if you look at a map, or first names etc.). Concentrating on the word most frequently used on a face, long words (>7 or 8 letters) and "special" words (painters, art period, towns like Kiel (Germany, harbour like Emden) and Rome (Italy, museums etc.) which "fit into the storyline" should hopefully be enough.
OK, now I concentrate on faces 15,14,13,12
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PostPosted: Sat May 28, 2005 12:02 pm
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CDub
Boot


Joined: 08 Apr 2005
Posts: 59
Location: St. Louis

 		Laughing Good thing I posted that crap on page 2

http://forums.unfiction.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=10731&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=15
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PostPosted: Sat May 28, 2005 12:08 pm
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jlandgr
Boot

Joined: 27 May 2005
Posts: 67
Location: Münster, Germany
CDub wrote:
Laughing Good thing I posted that crap on page 2

http://forums.unfiction.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=10731&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=15

Yes, sorry, I know quite a lot has already been found and posted here.
I just liked the idea of j5s Excel spreadsheet and working on it collaboratively to see if we didn't miss any more clues as Virgil seems to indicate we have (reference to Fat Lady singing etc.)
Now I'm concentrating on faces 15-12 and will of course, as will all the others having reserved faces, I presume, also incorporate all the information in this thread concerning these faces.

PostPosted: Sat May 28, 2005 12:17 pm
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jlandgr
Boot

Joined: 27 May 2005
Posts: 67
Location: Münster, Germany

 		Re: In Plane View
xnbomb wrote:

EDIT: Alright, attached now are all the diagonals that are fit to print. I won't bother trying to explain which diagonal is which ... if that looks like it is important later, we can tackle that. All the words I found (that are not from a direction that can be seen in the orthogonal planes) are in the DIAG3 and DIAG4 directions.

Hi,
as you can see by my other posts, I'm still in the phase of going through the "normal" faces, without wrapping text around, to see if some hints were missed there.
But I must say that your coding and the word you arrived at, "forthcoming" is impressive and shows that hypercubes are indeed part of the way Virgil intended us to go.
But, looking at the output of the file you attached, I have one question:
the line "TERGIVERSATIONVUFWWB" is repeated? Is this a coding error in your implementation or does this line indeed get constructed in two different ways and might thus me meaningful?
Other lines don't get repeated, at least not the few I checked.
Thanks a lot and great work!

edit: OK, taking a break for now, I'll finish (as far as I can) faces 12-15 tomorrow. I've now also read all the spoilers posted here and compared them/merged them with the already marked words in my EXCEL for faces 12-15. I didn't however compare all the lists posted here for the other faces, I'll let that work for whoever reserves a certain face.

As for repeating words, I noticed an odd thing, "insincerity" appears twice, on face 5 (I took the liberty of marking "in", too, only "sincerity" was marked) and on face 15 (backwards, in fact it might be a part of a phrase, "lost insincerity" (or "lost in sin", as others have posted above IIRC)
forthcoming_jlandgr.xls
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PostPosted: Sat May 28, 2005 2:54 pm
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jlandgr
Boot

Joined: 27 May 2005
Posts: 67
Location: Münster, Germany
missphinx wrote:

rabelais
memoryeffect

Hello,
great finds and starting tomorrow I'll also only post the reserved spreadsheets, not the whole file with 20 faces to facilitate communication/checking for differences between versions.
Very interesting, the Rabelais reference, hmmm.

Also, looking at your EXCEL sheet, there is another major European city there, this time BASEL (B2 to H2) in Switzerland (hmmm, do the art thieves do some money laundering or selling of pictures in this discrete city and country?)
This fits well with the other European cities discovered on the other faces:
Kiel (harbour city in Germany, such as Emden (->Gunther) )
Rome (Italy)
etc.

Great work that you did with the extensive word list!

I think that your "draw" (H4 to E1?) is misspelled (but nevermind, I really hope that small, non-repetitive words are irrelevant, otherwise the puzzle can hardly be solved (without a list of allowed words)

It's also very interesting to find one of the password combinations in the puzzle, as you noted: memory:effect

If only there was the password for the forthcoming page somewhere, too Smile

PostPosted: Sat May 28, 2005 3:24 pm
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jlandgr
Boot

Joined: 27 May 2005
Posts: 67
Location: Münster, Germany

 		As I just noticed, "Rabelais" is central to one of Virgil's rants, http://www.virgilkingofcode.com/reframe/reframe.cgi?url=http://www.virgilkingofcode.com/rants/000541.html&mode=rar_page , so very interesting indeed, missphinx, that you discovered a reference to him (rabelais, priest) !
The text is very interesting in itself and might hold clues.
Technically speaking, it is odd that the source contains an ancor named "more" (<a name="more">), but this anchor is not used/there is no more text below. Hmm, maybe a simple glitch.

Also, browsing through Virgil's rants, I noticed:
http://www.virgilkingofcode.com/rants/000546.html
This talks about a muskrat, and a muskrat can be found on face 15.

PostPosted: Sat May 28, 2005 4:08 pm
Last edited by jlandgr on Sat May 28, 2005 9:49 pm; edited 1 time in total
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jlandgr
Boot

Joined: 27 May 2005
Posts: 67
Location: Münster, Germany

 		Re: virgil's site
rose wrote:
Since many of these words appear on Virgil's site, what does that mea, in terms of the solve?

Hi,
as I just posted about "Rabelais" and "Muskrat", appearing both on faces and as central pieces of his rant, maybe, if there was a key word on each face that is central in of Virgil's rants (or another part of the site with a date, so that one can order them), then maybe it would give an idea on the order in which one has to "read" the faces?
Just a thought, and it remains to be seen if each face contains a key word allowing to order them by time ...

PostPosted: Sat May 28, 2005 4:30 pm
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jlandgr
Boot

Joined: 27 May 2005
Posts: 67
Location: Münster, Germany
jlandgr wrote:

Also, looking at your EXCEL sheet, there is another major European city there, this time BASEL (B2 to H2) in Switzerland (hmmm, do the art thieves do some money laundering or selling of pictures in this discrete city and country?)

Sorry for quoting myself, but I just discovered something more:
in fact, this can be completed to "Basel Art Fair" which is a well-known Art Fair here in Europe and will take place in June,
http://www.art.ch/ca/bt/kh/Lang/eng/
Also, if you look at that page, you'll notice the "36" which fits well into our 36/sixsix theme Smile

PostPosted: Sat May 28, 2005 6:30 pm
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jlandgr
Boot

Joined: 27 May 2005
Posts: 67
Location: Münster, Germany

 		Re: In Plane View
jlandgr wrote:
looking at the output of the file you attached, I have one question:
the line "TERGIVERSATIONVUFWWB" is repeated? Is this a coding error in your implementation or does this line indeed get constructed in two different ways and might thus me meaningful?
Other lines don't get repeated, at least not the few I checked.
Thanks a lot and great work!

Hello,
to expand on my post, but since you've been online today as a new post and not an edit:
I've just been looking through the files diags_324.txt and longdiag_175.txt
In both files, I notice quite a lot of duplicate lines, especially in diags_324.txt which I have checked more thorougly as this is of course a great way of making sure one does not miss any long words in the diagonals, backwards and forward and also horizontally or vertically.
To sum it up, a great simplification compared to the Excel spreadsheets (for finding long (>7 characters, I'd say) words etc., finding the most frequently used words on each face can best be done on the Excel sheet)

My question is, as above: are the duplicate lines (
MLIOBJECTORIENTEDKKV, ZQJOONWJBASELARTFAIR to name just two, many more and I can post more examples if needed for checking/debugging) bugs or do they really occur in different places?
Either way, would it be possible to filter the list so that each line is unique and, if the duplication is genuine/not a bug and thus might indicate that words in this line are important, marking this single line with the number of times it occurred in the original diags_324.txt (or the longdiags)?

Thanks a lot, that would be great and help us tracking down all hidden clues possibly still remaining in this puzzle (such as, possibly and as mentioned above, the upcoming 36th Basel Art Fair)!
And once again: great coding and congratulations on finding "forthcoming"!

PostPosted: Sat May 28, 2005 7:44 pm
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rose
...and then Magic happens


Joined: 26 Nov 2003
Posts: 4117

 		Basel Art Fair
As I am Virgil's unofficial expert archivist, or whatever, I should point out his reference to a Basel Art Fair in Florida. I don't remember what I found out about this Art Fair when I originally read this post a couple of months ago, but here is the link:

clickety- click- click
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PostPosted: Sat May 28, 2005 9:34 pm
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rose
...and then Magic happens


Joined: 26 Nov 2003
Posts: 4117

 		rain delay
Quote:
Just a thought, and it remains to be seen if each face contains a key word allowing to order them by time ..


I thought of that as well. I am still not sure why he used references from his site in this puzzle, other than feeding his enormous ego with lots of self-references, which isn't really a good enough reason. I think it means something more, but what I can't tell yet.
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Mankind was my business, the common good was my business.~ Dickens

PostPosted: Sat May 28, 2005 9:38 pm
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jlandgr
Boot

Joined: 27 May 2005
Posts: 67
Location: Münster, Germany

 		Re: Basel Art Fair
rose wrote:
As I am Virgil's unofficial expert archivist, or whatever, I should point out his reference to a Basel Art Fair in Florida. I don't remember what I found out about this Art Fair when I originally read this post a couple of months ago, but here is the link:

clickety- click- click

Ah, thanks, OK, so he does mean the "Basel Art Fair" in Miami Beach. Will only start in December, though http://www.artbaselmiamibeach.com/ca/cc/ss/?lang=eng , so possibly a bit late (does anyone know if there is a time horizon for this ARG?)

So, even if not a place for a real life event (SD card retrieval, whatever), this might fit into the theory posted above about key words in Virgil's rants and on the faces used to sort the faces (by time?)

So far, we have: muskrat, Rabelais, Basel Art Fair.
edit: and memory effect, http://www.virgilkingofcode.com/rants/000537.html

And with that post I'm calling it a day/night Cool

PostPosted: Sat May 28, 2005 9:45 pm
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jlandgr
Boot

Joined: 27 May 2005
Posts: 67
Location: Münster, Germany

 		OK, one last post Laughing
this is probably for our expert coder xnbomb Smile :
What does the reference " P:DIAG1 L:1 (U-D) " in diags_324.txt mean exactly , how can one go about finding where a certain word is on the normal faces (or if it wraps around faces, among which ones)
I simply ask because I notices "Barometric" which is a key word in Virgil's rant at http://www.virgilkingofcode.com/rants/000540.html and thus, if found "on a face" (and not wrapping around) , it would confort the "keywords from rants are important"-theory
Alternatively: has anybody noticed/found the word "barometric" manually?
But I guess a kind of "back calculation", starting from the text file, is probably easier!
Thanks!

PostPosted: Sat May 28, 2005 10:03 pm
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