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[ALISDAIRPARK]

I think it has been mentioned before Langley, but it's maybe worth a try. I'd looked at the phrase, but dropped it as an idea as with the spaces and punctuation out the number of characters isn't significant...

[Langley Moor]

Having played with it, there's no parity between the letters - an i at one point might match up with an n, then later with a t. Also, looking at the number values of the letters (a=1 through to z=26), there's no obvious patterns in the differences.

Just thought it was worth checking out - the whole thing of so many hints towards solitaire seemed as if it might just Perplexian humour giving us a rather obvious lead as a red herring. Maybe getting too far into it though, given the simplicity of some of the silver solves.

[ALISDAIRPARK]

know what you mean, but I'm still in the camp that thinks it's as simple (rofl @ simple) as the 108 = the deck then the 20 heat sensitive characters = the name/ answer

[BBuck]

Yep. Simple...

Been thinking about how we can make some progress on this one. I thought of sending an e-mail to Violet along the following lines:

[locqust]

I remember reading earlier that some1 thought the enigma machine code may be "it" did anybody try that?

[Danives]

Unfortunatly I did try the enigma coding a very long time ago. I got my father in on the puzzle as he claims to be be clever , lol. He said he thought it could be the enigma coding because of the three letters at the end of the code (ignoring the heat sensitive letters). He said that the 3 letters might be the posistion for the wheels to be moved into, yet when I tried I didnt get much luck, or sense, out of it. However if anyone else wants to try, maybe I was doing it wrong.

On a side note, here is the program that encodes a message into solitaire, and THEN looks to see if it has your keyword. Works exactly the same as my last program, apart from the code you type in is encoded now.

[hairysocks]

I just did a search for "five of cups" and came up with a book called "The Five of Cups" by Caitlin R. Kieman. The review on Amazon ( http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1931081808/103-0044072-8602278?v=glance&n=283155 ) mentions that the main character in the story is called Gin (sounds a lot like Djinn!!). Have I hit on something, or just added to the confusion?

[padge]

I've been following a few suggestions that people have made earlier on. Here's where I am currently....

I'm pretty sure that the solitaire cipher is the one to use (clues: deck of cards, one joker marked, ciper text in 5 letter blocks)

The outer 20 chars is what we need to decrypt to get the answer.

Solitaire needs the deck to be 'keyed' before decrypt, and the middle 108 chars must represent (somehow) the initial deck key. 108 chars can be used as 64 2 letter codes to represent a deck. The problem is that if we put the 108 chars into double letter pairs, we don't get a set of unique pairs, some letter pairs are in there twice (i.e. VM) so we can't get a unique deck representation.

[ALISDAIRPARK]

Good work Padge, I'd started looking at some sort of grid cipher for the 108, but this looks promising, especially with the unique pairs.

I just tried duplicating it though and got a different list of letters. I've been using the javascript app off the Bruce Schneier site, but this could be wrong...

[padge]

Sorry about my 'revelation'. You are right, the software I was using had a bug and I wasnt converting the passphrase to uppercase before decrypting. The correct output is:

[BBuck]

[padge]

Spot on BBuck! That's what I think too (especially as the middle 108 chars are also in groups of 5 and quite evenly spread, letter wise). However I've decrypted the 108 chars using solitaire, and CHANGJIANG passphrase and got the letters above.... still gibberish.

Someone else suggested that we don't have to get anything meaningfull in the decrypted test (i.e. AC 3D JS etc). As long as we have 64 unique pairs we could get a unique deck 'order' out of them. The trouble is that the CHANGJIANG decryption doesnt give 64 unique pairs.

[Sentinel]

I've been keeping pretty much on the background on this 1, basically because I don't have a clue!

but wouldn't it be 54 pairs not 64 and not all of them unique, as in 1 duplicate for the jokers?

apologies if i've missed something and this is wrong.

[addybobble]

Hi everyone,

I hope you lot don't trout me for this, as I can't see it earlier in the discussions...

I've been doing a bit of background on the Solitaire cipher,
checked these posts and can't see any mention that there is a
flaw in it. You should never use the same key
to encrypt 2 different messages: If you do it breaks it completely
(eg the difference in the sequence of the symbols reveals the key).

[edit to clarify what I meant ... The difference between each symbol in the encrypted
sequence reveals the key (for each encrypted character {symbol a - key} - {symbol b -key} => symbol a - symbol b , so you need to analyse the difference statistically, which is straight forward to derive either the key or the symbol, and there's enough characters there to prove it. Unfortunately I've got a day job...)

Just a thought, but maybe we're looking at 2 messages from the
same key (eg. the 'heat' version is 1 message, the non dissappearing
one the second)? This would support the 'twice as hard as it looks'
hint, and we should then be able to extract the key.

Haven't had time to try this out today. Hope it inspires someone.

[bertyb]

I have been playing with this card mainly for months now and to say it is a little frustrating is a major understatement now.

I like the way the thought patterns are progressing at the moment as that would make sense as to what we are looking for, but ever since day 1 of this card I have believed that there is something incredibly simple that we just cannot see about this card. I know this doesnt help much but I am at that point now.

I ran a few different ideas through with these letters and although most of the letters were still gibberish - barring a few letters I could make out nearly the words Sente Kiteway a bit jumbled. I am not 100% sure how I got this result and have not been able to replicate it which again has annoyed me.

Based on this result tho, I went out on a whim and had a look at the Perplex City Academy Website which gives you the low down on all the staff, and Sente being the main man when it comes to Cryptology within Perplex City.

I sent an email to his assistant as I thought approaching Sente direct might be wrong based on the fact he might have had something to do with it. So I sent it to a person named Patrick Azardian.

Patrick Azardian forwarded the message to Garnet Reed with the following text: