unforum

[aliendial]

This also highlights another possible solution path not fully explored - exactly what must we offer Bruce Schneier to solve this for us? Are we above bribery?

[UKver2.0]

Can anyone figure out if this guy has moved to CA? I saw somewhere once that he lived in Minneapolis, MN and worked in Bloomington, but now the only info I can find is for Cali. I work in Bloomington and was thinking of stopping by to say "hi". His address on Counterpane is for CA, but the number is MN. Anyone? He also writes op/ed pieces for the Minneapolis paper. If he's in town here, I have no qualms over approaching him.

"A hostage stand-off ended in death this morning when a raving lunatic was gunned down after holding world renowned cryptographer Bruce Schneier for 3 hours - apparently trying to find out 'who created the djinn computer virus.' Schneier has said that he does 'not know anything about this djinn worm nor do I know anything about his magic cube.' Details of the incident are still sketchy, but the scene was littered with 3x5 'Perplexity' trading cards. Early morning phone calls to Mind Candy, the company that created the online and trading card game, were not immediately returned."

[James Siegesmund]

Last week, I was happily exploring what I believe is an unexplored idea for this card, and I hadn't yet posted it because I really liked it and hoped it would lead to my first "first solve." Then my cards were stolen (along with my briefcase).

So now I'm reduced to hoping the cards really aren't needed to hunt for the cube, and even if I got a solution here, I don't have a solve code. With that in mind, here's my idea:

From the "Operational notes" section of Bruce Schneider's page:

4. Solitaire is reversible. This means that if you leave the deck lying around after you've encrypted your message, the secret police can find it and work the algorithm backwards using the deck. This process can recover all of the output cards and decrypt a message. It is important that you shuffle the deck completely, six times, after you finish encrypting a message.

I have several reasons for thinking this may be the route to the solution:

First off, many players tried for many, many months to come up with a keyword and haven't, which means it's either ridiculously obscure and hard (admittedly very possible in PxC) or we don't need to come up with one at all. This method generates the keystream by working an already-ordered deck backwards, so the "key" that was used to order the deck in the first place needn't ever be known.

Second, the name of the card. It's "Shuffl_ED_" not "Shuffle." Why? Could it be because the deck is already shuffled (read: mixed up by generating a keystream), and we need to un-shuffle it?

Third, the whispered clue. I think shuffling a deck increases its entropy, and I think an "outward look" is an attempt to read the message. So the whispered clue effectively says "if you try shuffling this deck more than it is, you aren't going to solve this."

I think we have an already shuffled deck disguised as a new deck. Although this would be a near-impossibility if you just started with a message and a given code word, it seems like a person designing the cipher could say "I want the code word and initial deck order to be whatever they need to be so that, after generating the keystream, I am left with an "new from the box" deck.

The deck is new; we can see the gold strip sealing the box. So I tried to take the "new" deck, in the order it came from the box, and work it backwards as if it was a deck that had already been used to encode a message. I didn't get far, as this must be done by hand (as afar as I can tell, none of the online apps work Shuffled in this "backwards" direction), and there are still familiar issues such as which deck order to use (motor deck? Bridge order? If bridge order, where do the jokers go?) and which code letters to decode.

My current idea when my cards got snatched is that the entire message may need to be decoded: the ten letters on each end will decode to gibberish (which is why they are in vanishing ink), but you need to have them there in order to properly match the particular "keystream" you get from backwards-working Solitaire to the readable portion of the message. This idea is another interpretation of "if entropy. . .": heating the card increases the card's entropy, and being left cold is bad. It also makes this process time-consuming and hard: at least eleven rounds of backwards solitare must be completed before you get to a part of the keystream that will help to decode readable text.

Anyway, I didn't get anywhere with any of this, and I don't really feel like working on it any more now that my cards are gone. However, I don't recall seeing this idea elsewhere on the threads, and it does give a route to a keystream when all you have is a deck (no passkey).

[PerplexHero]

James: Are you thinking that the mystery letters are the deck order, the enciphered text, or both? If it is the deck order, that implies that the deck is 128 cards + 2 jokers. Since this isn't a nice multiple of 52, it's definitely a non-standard 2.25-ish decks.

You need both the end-condition deck order and the enciphered text to work out the solution as Bruce describes.

-PerplexHero

[Teebor]

Thats an interesting idea but surely there must only be one possible starting configuration that would mean once you have encoded the message would leave the deck in a perfect suit order, and that would then only apply to this message.

I think the dissapearing ink is there to make the message decipher into garbage as the first ten letters would decode to garbage and would offset the deck making the rest turn out garbage as well.

I was just thinking about the deck last night, and it occured to me that we know nothing about the deck other than it is in perfect suit order untouched except for the joker. This lead me to think that maybe its not a "normal" deck of cards and may be something a magician would use?

Its a long shot but my thinking was five of cups, cups are often used in magic tricks, a particular type of card deck

[UKver2.0]

[doublecross]

[fretty]

So if there is no way of knowing the deck order we've either got to play the guessing game or there MUST be a symbolic meaning somewhere with either the cards or the situation.

[UKver2.0]

Question: How can we get people to look at this again and get active with trying to solve it? I for one have spent too much time on it in the past and have been ignoring it lately. The infrequency of the posts makes me think others are feeling the same thing. Perhaps we could come up with some extra incentive for solving this? Although I'm not sure how you can top the honor of being the first to figure it out... Maybe incentive isn't right. Maybe something else like a weekly scheduled chat or some pledge that we will spend X amount of time on it per week. Maybe we should be encouraging people to post everything they are working on in regards to this puzzle and not just new stuff. People around here like their boards nice and neat, so maybe we can set something up somewhere else or in a new thread where people can just free-flow ideas whether they've been said or not. Anybody else think this might be something to try? And yeah, I know there's the cube to find, but who's actively working on that? The thread about the strange numbers and risk pieces and shapes is pretty lame too. I guess the thing I'm looking for is that kind of energy that a wave release gets going. Also, there are a number of people who don't pay much attention to the cards. This card is one of the few that can actually add to the story. Garnet said he'd give more information out if we give him the message. Can we use this to rope some new blood into solving this? Ideas? Maybe no one cares?

[Guin]

trust me i am still working on this - it haunts my dreams. As I have no news I just havent been posting. I have been trying old things again in new ways and new things.

I want "If entropy wins outward looks should leave you cold" written on my epitaph

[donstobbart]

I'm doing the same as Guin, going over old ideas, trying to see if I missed something. Am still here working on it though.

Don

[manleym]

[Mindez]

I'm still working on this as well.

I've taken to going up to random people in the street and saying "If entropy wins, outward looks should leave you cold." in the hopes that they should "Wha? You talking about ____?"

It's not worked, so far. (Dang it!)

EDIT: If there WAS a prize pool, I'd be MAJORLY trying to solve this, FAST O_O

[GinGenie]

Yup. Still here. Though when this is over, if I ever see a deck of cards in my life again, it will be too soon.

[manleym]

Same here GinGenie, once this card is solved my deck of cards will be Roasted