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[BBuck]

I'm pretty confident it's been tried more than once (I did, so I can be very confident). But feel free to try again: several cards have been solved by people going over old ground and doing something minutely different.

It sounds like you are keying the deck manually. There's a very handy app here to do it automatically. Saves a lot of pain.

[Kradlum]

Thanks! That was a much more efficient way for me to disprove everything I had thought of, and a few new theories too.

[theycallmejess]

hi guys.

what if there are two codes being used with the same keystream?
so if we say "if entropy wins outward looks will leave you cold" is the true text and some of the jargon on the page is what its coverted to then we can work out the keystream, then decode the rest.

but what I cant figure out is what bit belongs to what. any ideas?
I have never come across a solitaire cipher btw so please tell me if I'm completely wrong.

[cwmajors]

I've looked back in the thread a bit, but I haven't seen this idea put forward yet. (Although I'm certainly prepared to receive a trouting if one's warranted.)

Now that we have all the cards available to us, how about trying the order of the playing cards on the prime-numbered cards? In other words, setting the deck in the same order that the cards appear on the prime numbered puzzle cards:

8s, 7c, 7h, 6c, etc... and trying it from there?

I'll have a look at some of the solving webpages and see if this idea holds promise.

Edit: Looks like it doesn't, at first glance (and further searching shows that people have emailed MC about this idea). I must say that I'm not too good with the Solitaire cipher yet, so I might be missing something. However, I also think MC might have been artfully dodging the question. The Shuffled code might be solvable without any other cards, but they don't seem to say that information on other cards will not help. It just tweaks my clue-o-meter that they would go to all the trouble to create a meta-puzzle that gives us a whole deck of cards with 2 jokers and -not- use their order somehow.

[Kradlum]

[Kalt]

Possibly closed one line of investigation.

[EvilGenius]

Thank you for excluding the other cards as needed! A solution must be at hand

[arnezami]

Just wanted to mention that the bar "Five of Cups" can now be seen on the map:



Although it seems to have been destroyed...

arnezami

PS. I believe its on "Translation Approach" (streetname).

[OliLu]

Is it possible to work out the card order from reverse? if you know what the key stream was to encipher the plain text ie:

assuming that the plain text starts THE... then using the solitaire cipher method the keystream would be CTW. Is there any way of getting the card order to get that initial keystream?

[themandotcom]

No, not really Oli. The Solitare Cipher has too many different combinations to do that. Say if we get the number 21. First of all, that can be one of two cards 9 of Spades of Diamonds, but we do not know where in the deck it is, the positions of the jokers, and the top and bottom cards. This is a really hard card man! And we don't even get a hint (Watch Ask Mind Candy) I wish we did, this card may be really hard. But to tell the truth, I think that the 2 messages encoded with the same keystream seems that the only logical path to take, then we are reduced to a polyalphabaic solution! Awesome, if i have time I'll totally get on that

[BBuck]

I think it might be possible to reconstruct, but only if you had a very long bit of plaintext. This would cut the combinations themandotcom refers to down considerably. It would be a lot of work though, and we don't have a long bit of plaintext.

[Kalt]

More Potential Leads

[Teebor]

I've been working with the idea that the garbage that comes out from an unkeyed deck is actually correct, but still encrypted.

During the decoding process I have picked out some words that have appeared but no real actual sensical phrase or full sentence, just occasional words.

including :- served, scared (I think it was) and a couple of other I don't have to hand.

I'm trying a monoalphabetic cipher to try and decode it, but no results from that till tomorrow.

Tried viniegre (sp??) and simple caeser ciphers but they output nothing.


I was wondering if reversing the text string before decoding gives anything? I have also noticed that breaking up the text before deciphering can give some words back out, this is becuase the website I used to decode the text string will convert blank spaces (incorrectly of course) but this does produce some usuable words, although not a whole sentence.


Of course if someone has already tried something like this in the 80 odd pages that make up both these threads (which I have tried to read over at least a week, so probably forgot some of whats been tried) then please feel free to send me a free fish lunch

[OliLu]

Yeah i thought as much! So basically we either have to punch words in to the box and hope or work out where the two messages are. maybe the letters themselves are shuffled, or the groups, either way i dont think that MC would have designed the card to be solved by trial and error. there has to be something in the card to point us in the right direction.

[themandotcom]