unforum

[locqust]

I wasn't gonna say anything....

[maniacfive]

[locqust]

I think all this may enable us to start trying this now. Thanks to Jamesays and UKver2.0. I did think it might be something like what james said but when I tried it I ended up with NFJKO (for example, I threw away the sheet in frustration) and wasnt sure how to proceed past that point.

But Ill give it another go, manually. I cant use UKver2.0's spreadsheet as I dont use Excel but never mind

[hexDa3m0n]

[Guin]

Okies something has been bugging me all night (Foolishly sat and toyed with this too late into the night and subsequent dreams tooooo disturbing to post here!)

Anyways, the 108 characters contain no D's. So I can't see anyway it can be anything other than either the deck order or a distraction (I am coming round to the deck order based on Von's hint - "as for the code, everything you need is there." infering deck order and answer (answer being the hot text))

As for this idea. I have grouped the letters and there are 2 sets of matching pairs SM and VM which is where I start going in circles as this does not allow us to create or decode the pairs easily into a deck order as 1 set of pairs could have been the Jokers. I have concidered text values again but early groups throw this idea into chaos as you get CH (3, and IB (9,2) which both equal 11. But I am still playing around.

Possible thoughts - value difference

W (23) - B (2) = 21
B (2) - M (13) = -11
C (3) - H ( = -5

But this soon falls apart (I was looking at the possibility that we would have a range of -27 to + 27 but there are more than two instances of 0 (AA and LL) as well as other duplicates.

So sorry but no further forward I will be online later if we can get together guys.

[None]

Not wanting to throw a spanner in the works from all you greats, but I was thinking earlier during lunch could it be possible that the answer we are looking for is not in English? Maybe it is in Chinese or Latin? And once we have cracked it we have to translate it into a tangible answer?

Trout away if this has been touched upon in previous posts.

[donstobbart]

Over the last few weeks I have been trying the presumption that there are in fact two messages that are both encrypted with the same keystream, and subsequently subtracting one from the other and then adding words to one to try to make anything of the 2nd message. I thought I was perhaps on to something when I found that by putting one of the words on my list in one side I came out with oaleadm in the other message, which I at the time thought may be something like to a lead, followed by me or my, but this didn't seem to come to anything.

As I say I have been spending hours and hours on end over the last few weeks doing this and I have sheets and sheets of paper with various letters and numbers everywhere, so I may well have made mistakes.

Another thing that I tried, and many people may think it is a bit off mark, was thinking of the text as 3 seperate messages. My reasoning behind this was firstly the fact that we have 3 bikes, secondly that 108 chars divided by 3 is 36, which is the exact number of black and white pieces around the compass and thirdly the fact that so many things in perplex are to do with 3 (or the power of 3, as in cubed). I didn't manage to find anything that I thought was particularly promising in this either, but it was just another path that I thought was worth looking at.

My brain has been a bit confused with too many numbers and letters buzzing around in it the last few days for me to have another look, but maybe this may trigger someone else's brain.

Don

[Jakeo]

This thread is painfully long. I've read through it (4 hours!) and summarised it all. The summary is here: http://wiki.incognitus.net/ppc/index.php/Shuffled

I've started a new thread for this point forward, its here: http://forums.unfiction.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=14301

[locqust]

Im going to add to this thread because Im going to follow on from Don here and it wont make much sense in the new thread otherwise, sorry Jakeo

Ive been playing around with it too since I mentioned it a few weeks ago and basically all I have come up with is gibberish oh and somehow managing to get the 1st line of encoded message out of the 2nd line which confused me for a while till I realised what I did!

If there is some way to do this then its beyond my skill, knowledge and paitence! (I cant spell today either apparently )
So unless the answer is a web address with the real answer to the card on, in which case its supposed to be a gibberish answer, I think we can call this path closed with regards to "hacking" the answer.

Wadda ya think??

[MNormand]

Making a mountain out of a molehill...

[GuyP]

Indeed, MNormand

And now, hie thee over to the new thread. Excellent work, Jakeo.