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[Danives]

Oh, and entropy anagramed is "TRYOPEN"

Dan

[Stiltskin]

Not got the card, but I wonder if the comment to the Djinn is a little nod at 'the Beast'?

[Jakeo]

my understanding of solitaire is that the cipher text has no inherent distribution properties associated with it. Roughly speaking that means that each letter should occur with equal opportunity.

the purpose of the starred joker in solitaire is to provide a unique set of 54 cards (27*2)

with the heat sensitive characters removed there are 108 chars. It is impossible to encode a deck of cards with only a single character, but a complete deck could be encoded in 108 characters.

What am I getting at? I don't believe its a solitaire cipher. Within the 108 regular characters the letter 'D' *never* occurs. If it were a solitaire cipher it would occur roughly 4 times.

There is an uneven distribution of letters in the ciphertext. Its not enough to be a monoalphabetic substitution, but it could certainly be polyalphabetic. At a guess it could be a period of 4 or 5.

I'm looking at a few other ideas based on some of the more famous crypto puzzles around, but I'd encourage people to consider possibilities other than the solitaire cipher. [/b]

[ramsfan]

Oh good, that saves me a job. I was going to ask if anyone wanted me to transcribe the Perl script from Cryptonomicon. That was more out of general interest, as we've been told we don't need extraneous info. Neal Stephenson's own website suggests I might be infringing copyright and that it's unnecessary as you can obtain the solitaire cipher off the web as we have. It would also be a bit of a slog. Even the first edition of the book got it wrong. I did wonder however if it would help with the business of reordering the initial pack from the usual starting order to that in the top of the card. I can't rearrange the suits in the applet, so I've been trying passwords like made in china, hongkong (like empire made, made in hong kong used to be interchangeable with made in china) and shanghai with the original pack order. I don't understand anything about perl so can't do it myself with the book. I tried scanning in the page, but it was too big a file and OCR didn't recognise the symbols.
Inspired by the above I googled chinese ciphers. I found an interesting page about unsolved codes, including gold bars with chinese cryptograms and buried treasure in a lake in Nova Scotia. I got excited about the columnar transposition cipher as it seemed to fit. However using made in china as the password didn't reveal anything. I did think it might generate a load of rubbish with the name of the djinn worm inventor in the middle, but no such luck. Interesting though.
I've been going off the idea of the significance of the bikes. If you look at the original card design the corners are a bit like swastikas. I wondered if the designers wanted to avoid those and a bike image seemed the most appropriate. Of course they didn't need to use the bike design at all, so that might be of significance. I'm increasingly inclined to think that made in china is a pass phrase and that the outside letters hide the message length as described in the transposition cipher site.

[Danives]

Just to those who think shuffled can only be solved with other cards (e.g. the cards with playing card numbers on em):

[angelsk]

What email did you use to ask questions about the cards?

[Jakeo]

[Danives]

In response to both posts, I used the email "cards@perplexcity.com" to send them the following message:

[padge]

Has all this been covered?

[Jakeo]

Yes.

This was our very own Scott issuing a rebuttal to a letter that complained about how easy the scribes were making the puzzles. You should be able to find that letter in earlier sentinel archives.

[padge]

summary

[doomsdayred]

I've been doing a little research on the card author Garnet and during the leaked emails there is a conversation that refers to a rambler x50.

Have a look : http://wiki.incognitus.net/ppc/index.php/Leaked_E-mails

I thought maybe this could be some sort of key or perhaps even the link to the motorcycle but I don't know anything about bikes so...

The trasncript is pretty much as follows:

[doomsdayred]

Re: summary

[padge]

Re: summary

[doomsdayred]

Re: summary