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[missphinx]

Attached is Image_15 (#4 in excel)
big words:
giver
console
exhaustion
disinformation
babybandit
intrusion
polygon
wretched
masterwork
dissimulate
synth?

EDIT: ...and tergiversation! (thanks to helper), although it's not marked in the attachment.

and for the life of me, I can't find a repeating 4 letter word. LOL and RUR both show up 3 times. Letters H, U, R, are frequent. I must be missing something.

[missphinx]

Image 29 (excel #11) (work on this started by jlandgr).
Long words:
defalcation
destruction
bamboozlement
duplicity
cryptograph
joystick
hoodwink
comeuppance
casual
pretender

again, I give up on any repeated 4-letter word. Lie was repeated 3 times, though. ???

[rose]

4 letter words

[helper]

Hi again!

Did I mention how hard it is for me to resist things like this game?

As it happens, I spent much of this holiday making a better dictionary, and then re-ran cube - just the short vectors, nothing fancy. I found a lot more words! Many, of course, were sub-words of longer words, and some were too odd to be meaningful - medical terms, for example - but I did find some very disturbing words as well:

cozenage - The art of persuading or obtaining by deception and cajoling (at (2,15,9) (1,0,0))

tergiversation - To equivocate, change side; apostatize (at (0,3,3) (1,0,0))

defalcation - To misuse funds; embezzle (at (2,4,10) (0,1,0))

and

dereism - so absorbed in fantasy as to be disconnected from reality (at (13,9,9) (1,0,19))


At least the first three of these rather exotic words (I, at least, had to look them up) are backed up by several other similar words.

I plowed through the list, and categorized many of them. I got rid of most of the words that seemed accidental (again, IMO), but there are still quite a few longish "random" words at the bottom. If you want to take a look, the interesting part starts with the section "Unhappy Thoughts?".

I don't know if there is anything worth doing to do next. Maybe warn Nisha to check into Virgil's past business dealings? That might be telling grandma how to suck eggs, though. After all, she is an investigator, a detective of sorts. Surely she did the background work before she went into business with him...

[missphinx]

[johnny5]

I wonder if, in our quest to discover all the words, we're mssing something.

Does ecah page contain a theme perhaps? I looked at the first page and it seems to point to Naoko's death/the death of her killer with strings such as "internalbleeding", "obliteration", "eradicationjob", etc.

Can the hilighted words form a pattern in space? Something more must be there that we can't see with raw decodes.

Oh no! I'm turning into Virgil.

[Kha0S]

helper --

Did you try analyzing your vector space in a toroidal map instead of a flat euclidean map? That is, that individual layers in your map can wrap from top to bottom and left to right (and the inverses), and that vectors traveling between layers can wrap to the other end of the stack?

Virgil seems to talk about the snake eating its tail... it seems as if our stack might need to do the same thing to find some hidden words.

/Andrew

[helper]

To missphinx: Well, maybe not so happily, if all the effort merely leads down a rat hole. But I appreciate the devilish smiley!

I'm glad that I wasn't the only one troubled to find "givers" in the cube. I did manually lookup "giversation", which was nothing, but didn't recognize tergiversation until it was found for me by a larger dictionary. How much of a geek am I if that actually gave me a thrill?

I certainly understand alphabet soup syndrome. I'd like to find the login, but unless some radical transform of the cube data spells out, "this is the login, dummy", I might not even notice it at this point. I think my final score is: vocabulary practice 1, puzzle solving 0.

To johnny5: I've looked at both content and layout for both "solved" cubes and "unused" cubes, and I haven't found a pattern. The problem is that there are so many possible words. If the cube is supposed to form a maze or something, you'd have to limit your "found" word list very carefully. As it happens, almost every letter in the cube can be eliminated if your dictionary includes just the words (even two letter ones) from Virgil's website alone. And, no, the remaining scattered letters don't seem to have a pattern either: mostly q's, x's, and k's, very few vowels, and no shape or order that I could see.

To KhaOS: Sure, I wrapped the indices. 17, 18, 19, 0, 1, 2, 3... I too hoped that that was what the circular snake reference meant.

To Virgil: a clue would be helpful about now...

[helper]

I hesitate to mention it, but there is one more word in the cube that I found interesting: "uffizi". It's at (14, 4, 5) ( 0, 0, 1) in the notation I use - a side view of the cube. But you can see it on one of the gifs that xnbomb posted on the 22nd, in the sixth line from the bottom: http://forums.unfiction.com/forums/files/side16rot0_924.gif.

It could be a coincidence, or it could be somewhere on Virgil's website that I missed - maybe he went there on vacation or something - but it seems odd. I tried to think of some more heist-related words to look for, but the few that I tried didn't pan out. No gunther, no myke, no trent, no florence.

By the way, while scanning through this topic to see if anyone had mentioned this, I noticed a lot of the words that I'd recently mentioned had been reported before. I wasn't claiming those, I was just reporting on the attack I was using. But I didn't acknowledge that work, and apologize if anyone took offense that I didn't.

[Kha0S]

Any instance of 'firenze' instead of Florence?

/Andrew

[nivra-not logged in]

[GateKeeper]

[jlandgr]

[GateKeeper]

Maybe we should be looking back to the shockwave, rather than just the dumped images? Virgil has talked about shortcuts in his rants, and extracting the images from the flash was obviously a shortcut.

Can anyone remember the password to get to the flash site? I can't seem to find it, and i'll confess to having never actually viewed the original site.

[helper]

To KhaOS: SOrry, didn't find it. Nice thought, though - thanks!

To nivra: I thought about it, but what's the rush? Let Nisha and Ian break up completely, then (slicking back hair) ol' helper can sliiiide right in!

To Gatekeeper: Maybe you're right, but why put the word in the cube? I think that's a reasonable question.

But if I were writing Nisha, I'd suggest asking about finances and business practices. I'd point her to Virgil's instructions not to send paperwork to her, and I'd suggest that there are rumors about embezzlement and fraud in Virgil's past.

Maybe I'd also try to get her to ask about Pidelko. His name is also in the cube, and Virgil kept a transcript of his call even though he pretended to barely remember him. Who is he, and why is he that important?

It seems likely that Emile's call is a hint to us. After all, why should Emile call Nisha to offer help? Isn't he just Virgil's code monkey? Does he have any prior connection to Nisha? By similarity, maybe we're supposed to stop being code monkeys and contact Nisha with dark hints about Virgil too.

In a maybe unrelated note, I happened to notice that Virgil and Gunter share some traits. He're about the same age, they both dropped out of sight around the same time (while Gunter was in prison), both just recently became active again, and both seem to loves puzzles excessively. I'm not saying that they're the same person - they apparently have very different mothers, for one thing - but is that all coincidence? Maybe while Nisha is sniffing around Virgil's finances, she could try to verify Virgil's life story.

To jlandgr: Hi! Good point - "heist" is suggestive too. One question: where is the other "uffizi"? I can't find it. All I can find is the one that is horizontal in xnbomb's gif. I hope I'm not missing things because of a bug in my code!