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[Jakeo]

 [Puzzle] #243 Silver - Shuffled Part 2 (Read 1st Post!)

[modern_hero]

Thanks for the mention

Anyway, this looks cool. It's a good idea to have it in such an organised way, as opposed to the randomness of 43 pages.

Thumbs up.

[maniacfive]

That was good, Nicely done. It reminded me to to try to find out more from Garnet re: Did Sente give him the deck. Cagey felows aren't they.

[N00bieW00bie]

NEW IDEA OMG NOBODY THOUGHT ABOUT THIS

[Fuseunderground]

This topic seems to have gone fairly quiet,
I suppose this could be because everyone is busy finding a solution,
or possibly because, like me, you've exausted all your ideas.

I thought the 108 characters could be both the order and the message,
which would be very clever of MC and might explain why we haven't been
given (an apparent) deck order, when unshuffled decks don't work.

Ignoring what the letters could represent etc.....

I have tried ordering the deck based on the 108 letters,
using pairs of letters then assigning the numbers 1-54 to the pairs,
then arranging the pairs alphabetically, then assigning a new number 1-54
to the new order. Therefore obtaining two possible orders.
I the repeated this process for the reverse of the letters.
Then did the same thing for the 'vertical' pairings.
i.e. when you put the two lines of 54 characters on top of one another.

This gave me 8 deck orders, with which I tried to decode both the vanishing text and the 108 characters.

Now obviously this didn't work, I just thought it might spark an idea in
someone else. I have included the 8 deck orders incase anyone wants
to play with them.

Also did we ever find out from the person who thought they found 'Sente' in the text,
which part of the letters they were decoding?

Rich

[doomsdayred]

It's not much of an avenue but I picked up a booked called the solitaire mystery, which is all about an unusual deck of cards and a joker that goes wild. It's probably a dead end but I'm having a butchers anyway.

[Jakeo]

I did some maths on the entropy of the deck of cards (not because its in the clue, but because I wanted to see how random it was).

Its not a huge sample, but the distribution of letters is significantly non-random, while the solitaire cipher is likely to produce something much closer to straight random text.

I say this only to ensure that people consider other possibilities, and not to ward people off solitaire itself (solitaire *could* produce AAAAA... as its output)

[hexDa3m0n]

OK. Read the Wiki, and the section of the old topic that related to this, but couldn't see this actual line of reasoning.

Something someone said in 13th Labour thread got me thinking. (To do with the poetry card that has "The Password is Yi istia on")

I know that we have been told we do not need any other cards to solve this and therefore using the playing card symbols on some cards has been discredited.

However, just cos you don't need other cards, does not mean that there are not clues on other cards that might make it easier to solve.

i.e. the deck order can be worked out from just the card alone, but it is acutally hidden accross several other cards.

This comment is not meant to fill 14 pages of thread with mindless discussion, and if people think it it not a valid point, fine, also, if a definite purpose for the card order has been found fine, like I said, I was actually looking at a different topic at the time.......

I'm going back to my 4th nice pot of coffee, ready for another all nighter......

[XXX]

exactly Hax ...

Dont close a box because somone said you dont need whats inside.
Whats inside may not be needed, but it may be helpful.

And we need all the help we can get.

[poozle]

I agree hax, I still don't think we should discredit:

[Guin]

Just to post an update - yep Im still working on this and nope I havent got any further.

I have however made an interesting discovery which goes like this - it is possible to run 108 characters (I made up a random sentance) through a solitare (i used a standard keyed deck) and the resulting cipher text does not contain all 26 letters of the alphabet!!! This has now thrown me a little as I had assumed this was pretty much impossible. So i tried it again with another random sentance and produced a similar result.

So lesson to be learnt here is that I should have tried this first

So now I will be testing both groups of letters but will need to rewind about a week and reuse my efforts on the 108 characters

Im such a muppet

[Stratman]

Just looking through the Wiki and it suddenly struck me
Prof Kiteway's first name...

Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven

Can it be relevant? An interesting coincidence nonetheless...

[stuart437]

I dont know if this helps but i have a deck of these cards from uni days and on the top of the pack is a code its the same as in the pics on line. I see no one has mencioned it so i thought i would it reads

CSYJ-8418

as we are all looking for an unlock for a crypto greater minds may have more luck

[beglee]

[stuart437]

I stand corrected teach me to skim postings oops my bad