unforum

[Mindez]

[arnezami]

[BrianEnigma]

[Teebor]

Right oki thanks, I know what I am having for tea then.

Boy its hard to remember whats been mentioned in all these pages.

[James Siegesmund]

[RedZed333]

I've been through the 'Cryptic' posts and I may have a new lead.....

I'm supposing the first part of 'If entropy etc.........' is an anagram, leaving the rest after the comma 'outward looks etc........' as the Classic Cryptic clue.

I came up with.....

[Scribe]

Heheh, I took this the other way around... i.e. "If entropy wins" indicates that something else is an anagram (entropy = randomness). "Should leave you cold" is the "clue" bit, leaving "outward looks" to be the anagram. I can see two things that fit this:

[Sh1ft]

[Kradlum]

I spent another couple of hours staring blankly at the card last night trying different thoughts.

A few meta-thoughts on this card - while most of the other silvers have been difficult, I can't think of one that has been particularly complex. I.e. Swarms - once you see the pattern, it is really easy. Same is true of Billion to 1 or Reimann (the answer is not easy, but the puzzle is). I can't think of 1 silver card that is as complex as people suppose Shuffled is. This leads me to think we are over-thinking the problem.

Looking at a few silver threads, the answer, or at least the main drive towards the answer, tends to be on the first page of the thread, after that it tends to be red herrings and nitpicking.

[fretty]

So it's probable that the right method has already been tried in the many pages of posts.

[FranG]

I wouldn't be surprised if someone had tried all the parts of the solution, but just not put it all together. We need the right passphrase/deck order, the right ciphertext in the right order, and we need to know how to recognize the solution. If the plaintext comes out scrambled, we could look right at it and not see it.

Unfortunately, there's a gi-normous number of more or less reasonable combinations. I don't see how we can use a distributed attack, though, since there doesn't appear to be a good way to divide it up and keep track. Also, they told us Shuffled didn't need collaboration.

All that makes me think there's a pointer to the solution that we're not seeing. Maybe it's harder to see that they thought it would be. All my inspirations have led exactly nowhere.

Maybe we should try to pin down the elements separately. I think we should stick to the basic description of Solitaire until we're sure it's been fully explored; i.e. use the standard deck order with a passphrase, or some other deck order without a passphrase, and only the operations described by Schneier.

I'm pretty sure it's come up before, but I think we need to back off and take another fresh look at it. Maybe someone could update the Wiki with a revised summary.

[RedZed333]

Looking at all of 'if entropy wins........etc' as an anagram.....

[rosemary]

did a quick search and didn't find this already posted.
the phrase "If entropy wins...."
is an anagram for

[pheebs]

good going guys, i'll have a think about those ideas and see if something miraculously pops into my head!!

[TascoDLX]