unforum

[Mindez]

[Dranioth]

This may sound a tad stupid ( There are no stupid questions, only stupid People. ) but has anyone tried heating up the actual Card? The track I'm going on here is that perhaps there's some kind of... Invisible Ink.... Yeah. I think the train of thought blew up in the station on this one.

[Mindez]

Yes. No hidden inks, just the first and last 10 letters disappearing, as has been said.

[Flynn]

[Mindez]

[Flynn]

A note about the symbols that might be around the card number - I'm taking it into work tomorrow, and I'll check it under a lupe. I'll let you know, but my money is on it being card symbols...

A side note... (getting desperate? Me? Never!) - the disappearing letters anagram to "Fed fox fur might hurl up" - made me smile, anyway

[ryandrew]

I never got why we thought that the prime numbered cards would help us. Since the message is clearly added after the puzzles were designed, by whoever stole the cube, coughVioletcough, the chance of the cube thief's secret message being relevant to solving Shuffled seemed a tad unlikely.

[Mindez]

[BrianEnigma]

I have also modified my app to run through the various permutations of "stock" decks including:

Joker Positions
AB...
BA...
A...B
B...A
...AB
...BA

Counting Direction
A...K (ace low, king high)
2...A (two low, ace high)
K...A (ace low, king high in reverse)
A...2 (two low, ace high in reverse)

Suit Order
The 24 (4!) orders of clubs, spades, diamonds, hearts

Basically, I'm going on the assumption that when you purchase a pack of new cards, you get the two jokers somewhere (beginning, end, or sandwiching the deck), you get all the cards of the same suit together, and all of the cards within the suit are somehow sequential.

I ran it with "if entropy wins..." as the keyphrase, an empty keyphrase, various words (shuffled, entropy, djinn) and with the disappearing letters as the keyphrase.

Fortunately, these deck orderings (6*4*24) are easy enough to compute in less than a minute for each passphrase. There were absolutely no results worth reporting, unfortunately.

[BrianEnigma]

[Mindez]

[BrianEnigma]

[Flynn]

[zaeil]

[arnezami]

I'm thinking about joining in the effort to solve this puzzle . But for now I have one very concrete idea I wanted to share.

I've been reading/studying all posts/articles to understand this card more deeply and to see what has been tried so far. Man this puzzle is unforgiving! You can be extremely close to the solution without ever knowing it! Deep bow for those that relentlessly keep trying.

Anyway. From what I understand what has been considered so far (when it comes to key-ing the deck) is (1) using a passphrase to generate a key-ed deck (2) using Prime-numbered cards as a key-ed deck (3) somehow "translating" the 108 letters into a key-ed deck or (4) simply trying any "fresh" deck without key-ing at all. One other possibility however may be an option mentioned by Bruce Schneier: using a bridge ordering.

I considered this because I was looking at the 20 heat sensitive letters. Bruce Schneier says a standard bridge ordering (in for example a newspaper) is about a 95-bits key in size (or roughly: 10^28 combinations.) And interestingly the 20 heat sensitive letters letters can (in principle) represent 26^20 (also roughly 10^28 ) combinations (a little more than 94-bits). That seems awfully close. The question is whether this a coincidence. I'm not sure but I think its interesting at least. (It would however require very compact encoding to achieve this "density").

Apart from that what has been bugging me since I saw the card is the fact there are two groups of 10 letters on each side of the 108 letters. Could this be a hint? But if so to what? When I was looking at bridge diagrams and how they were presented in newspapers I also came along the possiblity of Two-Hand Diagrams (for describing a "partnership" in bridge). Is it possible the two 10 letters groups on both sides of the 108 letters are somehow descriptions of two hands of cards on opposite sides of the "table"? Where the "table" is in fact the 108 letter group to be decoded?

Hmmmm...

I sort like this idea because it gives some meaning to the 10 letters-on-both-sides oddity. Also: only two hands would reduce the "density" of encoding problem (compared to four hands diagrams) making it easier to decode while still keeping a reasonable key strength. Of course we would still have to figure out the encoding (just like with the 108 letters). But it gives another possibility. At least something new to try out.

I will be trying things out myself but thought this idea was worth mentioning here.

Regards,

arnezami