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[arnezami]

Back to basics:

I'm trying to go back to basics here. This is what my most basic approach would look like.


The whispered hint is clearly vital. My most intuitive way of translating the phrase:

[miamo_tutti]

This is more or less my thought process on the card from the first day I started working on it.

One of the first things I did was order the cards in the way they come out of a Motor deck and perform several perfect shuffles, each time looking for some particular arrangement of the three "outward-looking" face cards. All I got from perfect shuffles though was a bunch of peculiar ordering patterns that would seem to indicate the opposite of playing card entropy.

Later I wondered whether it was faulty to assume that "outward looks" were the three one-eyed face cards. A case could be made that every card but the one-eyed face cards is outward looking, or that every face card contains an outward look.

Still later I started having trouble believing that solving this card requires you to know the out-of-the-pack order of Motor playing cards. From then on I went with the bridge ordering that seems more tied to the solitaire cipher.

Then came a bunch of ideas for passphrases that got me nowhere in decrypting anything.

Recently I've tried inserting the ten disappering letters in the 10 spaces between the regular cipher text on each row, but it hasn't turned up anything. Also I'm wrestling more with the hot-and-cold theme of the card. When I got the card the 20 letters at the beginning and end of the cipher text were visible, then I applied heat and they disappeared and pretty much stayed that way until I stuck the card in my freezer and they reappeared. So I'm wondering if we should be thinking of the letters more as appearing in cold rather than disappearing in heat. Or both.

So there you are, portrait of a Shuffled failure. Avoiding overcomplication worked with Mother Tongue, but here, who knows? My problem continues to be the abundance of information here that needs to be harmonized to reach the answer. The mysterious clue that could mean any number of things, the heat/cold disappearing/reappearing letters, the other 108 letters, etc. Any method I try to attack this thing with always seems to be ignoring something.

[arnezami]

Ok. I've just tried out all 128 combinations of 7 inner and outer perfect shuffles. Sadly they all seem to produce random plaintext. No luck.

I've also tried doing less than 7 shuffles. So in total (128+64+32+16+8+4+2+1=) 255 combinatons. No luck.

I've checked all "by hand" so I might have overlooked it though.

I've attached the text file containing all decrypted messages using 0-7 shuffles with all combinations of inner and outer perfect shuffles. The used inner/outer shuffles are represented by 0's and 1's and the deck ordering (after shuffling) is also included for each combination. Please check a few to see if I have made a mistake.

Its also possible the resulting plaintext is encoded with a simple ROT (or some other simple coding). So you could use this textfile for statistical analysis if you like.

arnezami

[Bendover]

To go even more basic,Do you think MC is devious enough to put all the elements of a Solitaire Cipher in front of us and let us hang ourselves trying to solve as per Solitaire and it really be a simple kind of cipher? We have been burned on these silvers a lot lately.

[miamo_tutti]

[e_nygma]

[Stratman]

Ive been quiet for a while. but still been following the thread and still struggling with this card, but getting nowhere - nothing worth a post anyway.
One thing bugging me...the if entropy phrase and Von's clue both seem to relate to the disappearing text...as if Mind Candy didnt think we would notice it easily. Well on my first wave Shuffled the letters are clearly visible at room temperature (even on a hot day) and disappear easily with heat from a finger behind the card. I noticed it within seconds of having the card. That means they used up two major clues on something so obvious?. Perhaps it was yet another mistake and the change should have been less obvious...ie the letters should disappear at a higher temperature.
Can anyone with a Wave 3 Shuffled confirm that the letters disappear with just a touch of a finger at the back of the card? If it was wrong in Wave 1, presumably they will have fixed it by now.
I would just like to know.
Thanks

[miamo_tutti]

[jbd]

Possible trout, but I haven't seen this while poking around the thread.

I interpret the 'entropy' quote as starting from the 'center' from the text and working outward. Entropy as expanding universe, that is, and you 'start hot' (the very center) and 'end cold' (where the letters disappear).

This would also explain why the missing letters are at both ends rather than at one end -- we aren't trying to read the letters in order.

So text we would be working with would start MRVXUIFHIGGU... and the point where the letters disappear marks where the coded message starts.

EDIT: I should also add this would explain the lack of X padding -- it would foul up the text since you aren't reading in order.

[jbd]

Just for reference, here's what it is like if you read it from the inside outward:
MRVXUIFHIGGUORIABGJXYHGNNQYHYRTSOXJALWYJWUKFTJETYAWMH
SFMLMJOPSHMTVIBLAFAZKEPWGYVQVCWXXLOBVIMFYGKHZCPMLBLBU

With the disappearing text at the end:
WLHFT HUURR XGFIMF DUOLEP

[noobie]

anagrams

[manleym]

[Sh1ft]

[Lilian]

HELP cos i'm a beginner at this crypto lark i need to ask the question if you get the right passkey would it generate the message right away or would i have to keep shuffling till it came up
*edit* also are we keeping the outer letters in or out of the equation

[manleym]