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[doomsdayred]

Apologies in advance for the long post.

I've sat with the deck and followed the Solitaire cipher step for step, the following represents my results to date.

I named the 1st ten heat sensitive letters set "1" the last ten heat sensitive letters set "2" and the 1st ten letters after the heat sensitive letters set "3".

Keying the deck:

I hit a couple of initial problems.

#1 - When moving cards i was dealing and not cutting. A deal is when you remove a card from the deck and form a 2nd smaller deck placing the cards in reverse order. A cut forces you to count the cards in the deck keeping them in order and removing them as a whole.

#2 - Each card has a value from 1 through to 52. The value of each card is determined by the deck order. However, during the keying stage I couldn't decide whether to count the deck by face value (Ace = 1, King = 13 etc) or by cipher value (Ace of Spades = 13, Ace of Hearts = 26 etc)

After several restarts I managed to cut properly and went with the face value of the cards. The first 10 outputs were as follows:

[Guin]

just to update and save anyone trying the same here are a few more methods I put into practice - again with no result

Using the idea of shuffling the blocks / letters of the coded text I looked for significant patterns by:

using standard deck key (I am going to repeat with the actual deck order) I took each block and moved them one at a time so WBBMC moved to end of text reading ......LULWBBMC and repeated with each block until I was back to the start.

I took each letter individually and repeated the process

I took the whole text, including the "hot" letters and repeated leaving the block EODMFXRUTH at the start and FHURGIFULP at the end both with blocks of 5 and individually.



I know i will kick myself when we finally get this

EDIT

just to clarify I am now keying the deck according to the order it arrived in. This being:

53, 54, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52

This produces the key stream letters (I generated 150 as it was better than having not enough)

DLGSE QNBWS PSSCZ JLDPJ OMYIL FRSIX LSSMA LFWBH YXDFI XJDFE GTSWI XOVRS OZVBC QIAWA VQKOA DFPKA MHPWC FUWAF YGDFF QPICA YMZBI IFURC CJWKK MXYFC UBTDS ZMHMQ COSXU OHZOI VTJCK XAGZX

i am using http://cif.rochester.edu/~la002k/solitaire.htm#fields as I am being lazy.

still no luck though

[anon]

[locqust]

Ok something Im gonna try.

Im going to take the heat sensitive letters and treat them as a seperate code we can use to crack the other one. Those 20 letters when applied to the rest somewhere along the line will start to reveal the plaintext. (ie A+K = Q thinking) Personally I think the majority of the non-sensitive text is padding to throw off any decrypting attempts, so as the program or manual decode goes through the process its always a few letters off and giving back gibberish.

That probably didnt make sense but hey ho gotta try somat.

I could always microwave it.....

[Guin]

OKIES (oops caps) have tried a variety of methods this morning (4 hours in total!) have keyed the deck backwards, forwards moved the text and now Im gonna go sit in the bath and scream (actually get ready for work!)

I feel like I am missing something but I cant put my finger on it. the 108 letters seems to imply 54 pairs, but how do we associate them with individual cards - thinking back to COH we went way off the track and it was way simpler than we had put it out to be - there is no clear indication that these 108 make up anything other than the code.

The card and clues seem to simply show us a deck of cards, which we now have, this provides the order of the starting deck to which we can then generate the letter stream and the keying of the deck, we know that if entropy wins outward looks should leave you cold - heat the card the first and last 10 letters dissapear - seems reasonable to me - then we are left with the 108 letters which quite simply do not make any sense once deciphered using the keystream - AAAAAAAARRRRRRGGGGGG

deep breathes

right need to get ready for work and then eat

[doomsdayred]

Guin, how did you manage to get that combo of letters "AAAAAAAARRRRRRGGGGGG"

Personally i think we are over complicating things. The 108 charaters IMO is the message we have to decipher and just a deliberate coincidence that it correspondes to 2 complete decks.

The 20 heat sensitive letters can't be the message, again IMO after we get the name the remaining message would be too short to be significant, after all we know Sente was invovlved so is probably part of the message

sente kiteway = 13 characters including space, leaving 7 characters for the rest of the message and that must include at least 1 more space. Seems unlikely.

[AngusA]

I've been working on the assumption that the 128 characters weren't on the deck handed to Garnet but were added by him for the puzzle as he makes no mention of it in the text. But it is a pretty big assumption. If they were on the original deck then I would agree that it isn't the card order. Can't get my head around the purpose of the first and last group of 10 characters.

[Guin]

[cheesey]

Guin

Do you think then that the 'If entropy...' quote is only telling us to remove the heated text, and we dont need to use it as a key, or as any other clue?

If thats the case and we are throwing away the heated text and the 'If entropy' quote, the only information we are left with is the WBBMC...., the Joker with the Star and maybe Made in China and Five of Cups.

Now its gone from too much information to not enough!

[Guin]

Sorry long post btw.

I hear what you are saying Cheesey. Ive put my thought process below.

[anon]

Minor correction to your post Guin... the number of possible deck orders is more like 2.3E+71 which is 230,843,697,339,241,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 combinations. If it were 26 million I would have done it a long time ago.

But your point that it's not gonna happen is spot on. Not just for the computing power it would take, but also for the massive amounts of outputs that would seem to fit the puzzle.

[Guin]

[Stratman]

Just my TC
Like most of us I thought the Motor cards order would have cracked it. I join you all in a collective sigh...
I still assume we are looking at Solitaire because of the star on the joker.
Going back to basics...if the cards were handed to Garnet hoping the cipher was secure, then what we are looking for is a secure deck order or a secure keyphrase.
1 Secure deck order - If the deck was keyed first and given to Garnet, he does not tell us the deck order as he was given it. So we are left with Motor cards new deck order or the Solitaire 1-54 start deck order.
2 Secure keyphrase - 'If entropy etc' could be a keyphrase, but according to the Solitaire site it is too short to be secure. But if the deck were grabbed by the 'secret police', it is the only thing Garnet knew that they would not know. So it must be the key to the security, whether that be using it as a keyphrase, solving its cryptic wording (code as opposed to cipher - the card, Von's clue and Garnet's email may be using the words code and cipher very carefully) to produce something else, or taking it to just mean ignore the heat sensitive letters.
3 Of course 'WMMBCH etc' could be the keyphrase - it is certainly long enough. But what then do we decipher? Surely 'EODMF etc' is too short for a message. (SENTECREATEDTHEDJINN, I suppose...doesnt work!). 'WMMBCH etc' could also be a deck order, but I cant seem to get away from too many doubles no matter how I try to number the pairs - and it still leaves a problem with what to decipher.
I am sure, like me, you have all tried every keyphrase you can think of, all manner of deck orders etc. I am rapidly running out of ideas in which direction to head next.
Sorry if this was a bit long - just putting my thoughts together...I feel it is so close to being solved...so frustrating!

[doomsdayred]

I'm having a few problems keying the new deck order, does anyone else have one I can match to purely for reference purposes?

[Guin]