unforum

[UKver2.0]

Uh, I so didn't want to post again, but Ashin drew me in...

Sometimes when people are beyond the thinking that any one group is categorically better than another they use the idea as humor - a joke even. If somebody is grouping the entire USA together with all their inhabitants and saying it's better than some whole other country and all of its citizenry, it's probably a joke. We do it over here between states. I'm from a place called Minnesota - all our jokes are about a neighboring state called Wisconsin. Their women are all cows and they are all inbred etc. When I was in MD it was DE and in VA it's WV. Same jokes, different butts. This ARG was made over there in UK-land and most people playing are from the UK. If somebody from outside the UK - especially in a place where very few people play - were on top for some reason, it might be funny to pretend like it had something to do with country origin etc. I guess I could've gone with race or religion, but as I said before UKver2.0 is a team and one of the only things we have in common is that we are in the US... oh, and we each have a sense of humor. So basically I'd like to go on record as saying, while we are in fact better than you, it IS a joke. And as for the flag burning stuff, I thought it was mainly a US thing to be all sensitive about that. I mean, I did a search for flag burning and almost everything was for the US. Oops.

So back to the puzzle...

[Juxta]

[donstobbart]

Been thinking about this card all night. The star on the joker and the entropy are the seeming clues we have. Thank you for confirming that the wrapper seems to make the shading, was groping for a clue there!!! Been trying to make the entropy clue make something, along with the star on the joker. Do we know of any card ciphers which use 53 cards? What I mean is, could the marked joker mean to keep it in the deck , and get rid of the other one?

Don

[locqust]

Just found this from the wiki about jokers and the importance in colour and/or artwork differences..

[AngusA]

Something that has occured to me from UKver2.0's rant is that if the 108 characters are the deck then the key may be at least partially breakable. Because there are only 4 suits, the same 4 letters (C, D, H, S) will keep recurring.

I have started to work on this, assuming that two consecutive letters make up each card, though conceivable it could be 54 numbers followed by 54 corresponding suits. It doesn't appear to be an even length key (I've tried 8 and 10 letter lengths) and now I'm trying with odd length keys (5 to start with) which is a bit trickier.

[zaeil]

I know there's a thought running through here that the 108-char. string may imply the order of the deck, with each pair of letters designating a card. If this were the case, each pair of letters would, by necessity, be unique. But they're not--there's at least one set of duplicates. I'm reasonably certain that the long string there is a message.

Also, I keep seeing the significance of the star on the joker being bandied about. I dunno how many of you have read Bruce Schneier's Solitaire page, but it's pretty helpful. (It ought to be, he created the cipher!) Anyway, he says this:

[locqust]

Very true.

Problem is with such a long thread like this is that I remember us talking about all these possibilities before and chances are the longer this card remains unsolved it will probably go round a 3rd time!

Ok so we can safely ignore the box design as a clue (my view is that MC picked a box deck that they reckoned no1 would recognise or find)

so we have 108 characters that may or may not be the message to decode. A star on a joker (and we still dont know where it is in the pack) and a really really cryptic phrase that may or may not have anything to do with the deck ordering....

hmmmm...Ok Im gonna try to finish my uni work, MUCH easier than this!

[AngusA]

Ziell, I agree that it is the Solitaire cipher but we need a deck order to work with. The 108 chars on the pack seems too much of a coincidence to me. I think that a simple encryption has been put on those 108 chars and decryting will give the card order.

[bertyb]

How about:

We actually have to decipher all the text in 1 string by means of a solitaire cipher, but like before hand certain characters disappear (under heat) we either have to ignore the first and last parts or the middle part when reading the message?

[cheesey]

Hi all.

I too have been dreaming about this too much.

Two things have been bugging me.

[bertyb]

A completely random thought went through my head a minute ago whilst reading up on the card deck and looking at the actual packaging....could be completely irrelevant but thought I better share.

It says about the deck that it is a popular deck for poker players. Then looking at the card box, it has 88 on it.......the thought lead me to Johnny Chan, the World series winner in 1987 & more importantly 1988 - in what was possibly the greatest final, if not the most well known due to it featuring in the film Rounders with Matt Damon.

Chan is nicknamed the Orient Express - with the orient being linked to the "Made in China" and he is from Hong Kong originally which I believe if I am correct is governed now by the Chinese?

I know it is a very strange link, so please do not abuse me (UKVer2.0 especially) but I thought I would share!

[Guin]

just so you know I tried using text value in pairs to key the deck - didnt work as certain numbers repeated. The idea of pairs of letters also struck me but I abandoned it as I found there are duplicates as mentioned before.

I have to go and work now will keep trying different possibilities though

[Langley Moor]

This feels like it's getting close to a solve now for some reason, don't ask me why.... am still working away on the 'solitaire' style cipher using the deck order supplied by the kind people who ordered the decks, and have tried the following:

Allocate each card a two letter code, for example
Red joker = rj
Black joker = bj
Ace of diamonds = ad
...and so on.

Then write all these out, producing 108 characters. Then apply these to the 108 characters of the text on the card and subtract one letter value from the corresponding one, mod-26'ing as neccessary.
Have only done the first twenty characters of the message to see if anything sensical comes out, 20 being in order to ensure the disappearing section wasn't padding (as suggested by bertyb). Have also tried working from each end of the deck.

Results:

Starting from red joker, black joker, ace of diamonds:
m e b c e t x q z d q x v i j d n b d x

Not promising, too many uncommon consonants in there.

Starting from king of spades, queen of spades, jack of spades:
t v m t v e x b f o r i i t j o a m c i

This looked more promising, so I decided to look at the labelling method for the cards, and changed ten of spades from TS to 0S, nine of spades from NS to 9S, etc, and came up with:
t v m t v e r b k o o i u t w o b m e i

Again, looking promising in terms of vowels and regularly used consonants, but have run out of time and need to go in to work this afternoon. Will be back on later this evening, but if anyone wants to play around with this whilst I'm stuck at work feel free!

[AngusA]

Cheesey, I had a quick look at the Coding theory page on Wikipedia and I think it relates to error correction in things like data transmission. Not sure that's really the right direction. I take your point about code v cipher. The comment about entropy perhaps points to a code?

[zaeil]