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Svengoolie · Decorated Joined: 19 Apr 2005 Posts: 289 Location: Chicago

carlwebb on the Cypher board just made a really good observation. He downloaded The Jungle in its entirety, and found that words containing "poison" show up 18 times and "parasite" is in there 3 times. This could be what we needed all along. If anyone hasn't used their guess already, they should try it out.

**Posted:** Mon May 01, 2006 6:37 pm

Dr. Confoundo · Boot Joined: 06 Apr 2006 Posts: 49

Considering no one seems able to locate Kevin's previous text, I have a feeling that the answer to this will have nothing to do with the full text of 'The Jungle'. His example seems like it was supposed to give us a clue on the solve for this; either we are doing a bad job with Google Fu, or the answer is in the quote itself, not in an outside source.

**Posted:** Mon May 01, 2006 7:36 pm

vikingofmars · Greenhorn Joined: 20 Apr 2006 Posts: 5 Location: New York

i converted the letters in the words "poison" and "parasite" to ASCII and added them to get 664 and 857 respectively. i then added the digits to get 16 and 20. which corresponds to "p" and "t".there are 6 "p"'s in the first passage so i counted the "p"'s and "t"'s in the second and used that for my guess. if my #'s are wrong please tell me.

**Posted:** Mon May 01, 2006 7:54 pm

cjknight06 · Boot Joined: 29 Apr 2006 Posts: 55 Location: my house

Hey, I just looked up Charles Lehner on myspace, and it did return one profile. The profile looked very OOG, but it did have and AIM sn. I'll follow up with the results of the conversation (he's away now) it it turns out to be relevant

**Posted:** Mon May 01, 2006 8:27 pm

thelsdj · Boot Joined: 13 Apr 2006 Posts: 52 Location: Phoenix, AZ

Batch 1 Results:

thelsdj · Boot Joined: 13 Apr 2006 Posts: 52 Location: Phoenix, AZ

Today's text:

**Posted:** Tue May 02, 2006 2:30 am

ALISDAIRPARK

based on the results the only correct answer was by Lady Indigo, with 1 for How much poison? No one got the parasites right.

Anyone know who the Lady is? would be good to understand her thinking, or if it was a guess.

So, we have two 1/3s for poison. I'm assuming the scores are in order. We have no results at all for parasites. It gives us something to analyse.

**Posted:** Tue May 02, 2006 5:50 am

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ladyindigo · Boot Joined: 26 Apr 2006 Posts: 37

That would be me. *Complete* and utter guess, I was actually trying it out to see if the /3 meant there were three answers and put 1 2 3 for the first and 4 5 6 for the second. Since they only counted one, I guess not, but wow. Unintentional clue for us. Smile

**Posted:** Tue May 02, 2006 6:33 am

ALISDAIRPARK

Hi Milady!

Did you put spaces or commas? as it looks like it only took the first digit. That may help answer why/ how we get the /3 score?

**Posted:** Tue May 02, 2006 6:52 am

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ladyindigo · Boot Joined: 26 Apr 2006 Posts: 37

Hi there

I put in spaces, not sure if commas would do anything differently but I hate how we can only try this out once a day to even test that idea. Ngh, seems like everyone was off about the book thing, though this next passage seems to be from The Jungle as well, the next few sentences after the ones we had yesterday in fact.

**Posted:** Tue May 02, 2006 7:47 am

Svengoolie · Decorated Joined: 19 Apr 2005 Posts: 289 Location: Chicago

This is quite confusing. At least we know two of the answers, now.

**Posted:** Tue May 02, 2006 7:56 am

ALISDAIRPARK

yeah but not sure that it helps us. I've tried distribution, but it doesn't appear to be that based on the first 2 texts.

It seems unlikely that it will be anything too complex though, as it's the very first puzzle, and the training was fairly easy...

Has anyone any thoughts on why "poison" and why "parasite"? Again I would guess there is somr correlation to what we are looking for.

**Posted:** Tue May 02, 2006 9:42 am

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LatentMoths · Unfettered Joined: 01 May 2005 Posts: 523 Location: Texas

We need to figure out a way to coordinate our efforts so that we aren't duplicating guesses. I was thinking that we could use the list from the first batch that thesldj posted above to assign numbers to each person. If we guess those same numbers each day we should be able to piece the complete answer together to help us crack this. Since there are 24 people in the list, maybe we could assign 1 & 24 to gandalf112, 2 & 23 to ladyindigo, 3 & 22 to tipsila, and so on until you get to me with 24 & 1. Let me know what everyone thinks.

**Posted:** Tue May 02, 2006 10:42 am

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ALISDAIRPARK

totally agree with the coordination, although I don't understand your logic with the ascending descending numbers, why not just 1 & 1 etc through to 24 & 24?

Also if the parasites number is greater than 24, which I suspect it is, then I suggest we increase the number each day until we get a hit. So 1 - 24 today, 25- 49 tomorrow etc.

BTW - positions are:
1 gandalf112 - 1 & 24
2 ladyindigo - 2 & 23
3 tipsila - 3 & 22
4 logicphyber - 4 & 21
5 lpilker - 5 & 20
6 Ransom - 6 & 19
7 thelsdj - 7 & 18
8 tjray - 8 & 17
9 sgresso - 9 & 16
10 carlwebb - 10 & 15
11 brad7924 - 11 & 14
12 Synchronicity - 12 & 13
13 Silverkun - 13 & 12
14 Svengoolie - 14 & 11
15 mnemo - 15 & 10
16 Chattonne - 16 & 9
17 tallerbird - 17 & 8
18 Tesseract - 18 & 7
19 vikingofmars - 19 & 6
20 confoundo - 20 & 5
21 cjknight06 - 21 & 4
22 emighhome - 22 & 3
23 dizzave - 23 & 2
24 ilikepucks - 24 & 1

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