unforum

[FranG]

Perfect shuffles

[noobie]

Well i think the entire entropy quote is supposed to lead us to the fact that the outer groups of letters disappear. However I do believe there is an underlying message in the entropy quote due to its awkward wording. It is possible it oculd be refering to one eyed face cards but thats seem like too much of a stretch to me (although I havent gotten anyfarther that everyone esle). As far as the entroy statement being an anagram, I dont think that it is very likly because it was whispered to garnet rather than written not to mention the statement is quite long and there are probably numerous complete sentances that could be created from it. Nonetheless I think we are missing something crucial from this statement but i just cant seem to put my finger on it.

One other thing about solitare, it seem that everything points to the fact that it is indeed a solitare cipher yet we have been working with that assumption for nearly 10 months and have nothing to show for... i wonder if we should consider another decryption method although nothing fits this problem quite like solitare does. very puzzling

[Joe_the_OOF]

Belaboring the (probably) obvious

[miamo_tutti]

Re: Belaboring the (probably) obvious

[neopuff34]

Re: Belaboring the (probably) obvious

[Carma1313]

[Rand0m]

[Carma1313]

[Rand0m]

Am just looking through search to make sure the card's definition hasn't already been posted...

It might be a clue - it might be just background colour, I'm sure the bar comes up elsewhere too.

Edit: yes, its meaning was given at the top of page 14 of the first Shuffled thread here.

[Carma1313]

[Guin]

[BBuck]

*BBuck dons protective clothing

The more I think about this card, the more I think we are missing something simple. Taking the clues we have, including the whispered message, I'm increasingly thinking that "Made in China" is central to the solution. My reasons:

i) Von's clue - "Examine the card....As for the code, everything you need is there."
ii) The angle of the pack. It's very easy to miss the letters on the side, particularly with the colours.
iii) Outward looks - side of the pack?
iv) I'm moving back to Beijing in December. Erm, that's it.

"Made in China" is pretty fertile ground for an anagram. I've been trying combinations involving "ice" (because of "leave you cold"), but I also wonder if it might be something more cryptic, like "tea".

Plenty to trout above, I know, but I've been following all the ideas closely, and still keep coming back to those letters on the side.

[Misroi]

If "Made in China" was meant to be anagrammed, then I personally hope the correct unscrambling is "Machine and I"!

By the by, this is a good idea, since a deck of PxC cards in the City wouldn't be stamped "Made in China." We should expect to see a pack labelled "Made in Viendenbourg" before we see cheap Chinese labor making playing cards in the City!

[Sh1ft]

Well, many posts in this thread have been mentioned in the original shuffled thread, including the extra steps of keying the deck with the last two characters of the passphrase and the Made in China connection.

As mentioned before, the original story of Alladin was supposedly set in China, but culturally the story didn't really match reality.

As a side note, I can confirm that systematically removing characters from either end of the 128 characters shown on the card with known deck orders (native solitaire, and motor order (including joker a first and joker b first)) and related passphrases yielded nothing appreciable. Note that this also included encrypting as well as decrypting steps. (Just in case the 108 characters was actually an encryption. Also, I didn't try removing just one side, always the first and last character as a pair.)

The chosen plaintext attack also revealed nothing, this involved trying to decrypt subsequent padding of the word virus with various deck orders and passphrases. So I tried:
XVIRUS
XXVIRUS
XXXVIRUS
XXXXVIRUS
XXXXXVIRUS
and so on until I reached 128 characters, and searched for any and all of the characters on the side of the deck, still nothing.

If there is anything that the silver cards should have taught us is that many of the initial suggestions that smart forum members made upon first seeing the cards have contributed to a lot of the solves.

[Flatulent]

Hello all. I have read through all of the second part of this thread and the wiki page so if this has been covered in the first thread on this topic and not worth mentioning in the wiki summary please forgive my ignorance.

I sitting around thinking, it occurred to me that if I was going to send a cyphered text to a friend that required a passkey that I would have to be able to express the key in plain text as has been discussed extensively.

I came up with the fact that I would want it abscured but not too difficult to figure out. I was concerned about the very specific wording that was given from the guy who delivered the message. I found that if you take the first letter from each word in the entire phrase (IEWOLSLYC) and anagramed out a phrase that was very interesting.

I think that the target area on the pack to find the passkey may be on the top 1/3 of the pack where there seems to be some scratchs that may form letters. Maybe using the above anagram as a method to reveal this text better. I have tried a bit and can't quite make it out so I figured I would share with you all to see if we can crack this thing.

the anagram that I came up with is: