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Forum index » Archive » Archive: General » ARG: (Mnemosyne and) The Widow's Son

My work on "1 to1d y0u n0t t0 get 1nv01ved"

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Perko
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Joined: 16 May 2003
Posts: 103
Location: Ottawa, Ontario, CANADA

My work on "1 to1d y0u n0t t0 get 1nv01ved"

Twice Warned

To the little people / To pest

1 to1d y0u n0t t0 get 1nv01ved in this;
i t01d y0u y0ur inv0lvement was y0ur death.
100king f0r the b0y 1eads n0t to b11ss
-- 1`11 make y0ur neck hairs tingle with my breath.
imagine my surprise t0 f1nd you there
goss1ping like hens bereft 0f facts;
1 th0ught 1 made my warn1ng very c1ear:
kn0w pri0r to the p1uck1ng comes the axe.
that 1 w0u1d f0110w her to there she knew
(w1th a br0ken 0ath i at last g0t her) --
she can scratch stick pe0p1e 0n the ground ti1 b1ue
0r t1l v0ice ech0es back 0ver water.
un11ke the hens, y0u have no eggs to show;
1f y0u d1d they wou1d n0t be go1den th0ugh.

thr1ce bl00d fr0m bl00d *101*
======================================

The poem is an English (Shakespearean) sonnet, with a rhyme scheme of ABAB CDCD EFEF GG, i.e. 3 quatrains and a rhyming couplet. I doubt this is important.

Here's the raw "bit" stream, line by line. Note that there are i's, o's, and l's in the poem that aren't 0s and 1s.

11000101
010000
100001011
1110
01
10
10111
0011
1010110
1000
01011
01000
110
1011010
100000101

# bits per line is: 8,6,9,4,2,2,5,4,7,4,5,5,3,7,9. I doubt this is important.

The # of characters is 80. I think this is highly significant. It's a nice round number, and can be factored into groups of 4 or 5 bits: 4x20 and 5x16. Other possible breakdowns are 8x10 and 2x40. (Trivia: At one time I was highly distracted by the apparent coincidence that the then unsolved letter cube puzzle also had 80 characters, and spent much time considering various "mask" schemes involving reading only letters corresponding to 1s or 0s).

The author is the Red Queen, and we don't really know very much about her. It should be noted that the RQ's first binary message was decoded as "entrapped", a phrase which has not been of any use thus far. It's conceivable this solution is a continuation.

Importantly, we now have the following recent hints from Munin:

1) "Red is not very creative; any new code would be essentially the same as the last." I take this to mean that the binary code should again be converted into numbers in the range 1-26 which represent that letter of the alphabet. That is how the Red Queen's first binary puzzle was coded.

2) "Anagrams, even, would be too much for her I'll wager." - I take this to mean there's no anagramming involved. The letters you decode should be read in natural sequence, no rearrangement is required.

3) "She's used to reading from narrower parchments and in different directions though. Take that as you will." I take the second part to mean that the bits should not be read left to right & up & down, but most likely right to left and/or top to bottom. The first part is probably, but not necessarily, just pointing out that we should rearrange the bits into blocks of 4 or 5 bits.

Munin made some other remarks via the land of Mumu about this, but I think they're too vague to make any use of.

Chunks of 5 bits are required to encode the whole 26 letter alphabet. But I've also considered the somewhat unlikely possibility that the code could use 4-bit chunks by avoiding the use of the last 10 letters (QRSTUVWXYZ).

I think there are 3 ways to read the bit stream:

A) The obvious way, left to right and top to bottom, has already been heavily analyzed and seems unlikely to lead to the solution, since the RQ reads "in different directions". The obvious variations are reading the bits backwards, top to bottom & right to left.

B) Vertically across columns. You'll want to change the text into a non-proportional font such as Courier so you can line up the letters properly in columns. This more difficult approach seems promising given Munin's hints, but I haven't had any success in my limited effort at this.

C) The third way would be vertically across the bit stream, i.e. first all bits in the first position on the line, then the bits in the second position. Because the line of vastly varying lengths, this seems rather inelegant and unlikely, and I haven't seriously pursued it.

Knowing all this, it seems that it should be easy enough to try out the various possibilities until a coherent solution emerges. Unfortunately I have tried all the most likely & reasonable approaches, and come up empty. Most of my work has been in 5-bit chunks. I also did the most likely methods using 4-bit chunks. In 5 bit chunks you will often generate the #s 0 or 27-31, which presumably indicate you're on the wrong track.

As a veteran programmer, I'm pretty comfortable working with bits and binary coding, so this has been frustrating. RQ's first code was several orders of magnitude simpler, it seems. Perhaps I'm just missing something rather obvious.

I'm also attaching my work file for this, it's a bit raw and undocumented, but if you've followed the above and worked on this, you should be able to figure out what I've done there.

If anybody has any bright ideas, or feels like doing more thorough 4-bit or vertical analysis, let me know.

thrice blood.txt
Description	Thrice blood binary code work file	Download
Filename	thrice blood.txt
Filesize	4.23KB
Downloaded	333 Time(s)

_________________
Perko

Posted: Wed May 28, 2003 12:59 am

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