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 Forum index » Archive » Archive: Perplex City » PXC: Puzzles
Sheet of paper found by Scarlett from the Granier painting
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Cabbage
Unfettered


Joined: 22 May 2006
Posts: 320
Location: North-East England, UK
BriEnigma wrote:
Does this configuration actually make real-world sense? It doesn't seem so to me, unless the troughs are figurative and not literal steps down and might represent bodies of water or somesuch. I just can't make it work on a map.


Very wide streets - that's exactly the reason that I started to look at it again and thought about numbers instead.


PS If you take away the second lot of six numbers from the first lot of six numbers e.g. 979958 - 757879 (for no other reason than the fact that you can) then you get 222079 http://forums.unfiction.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=222079
which shows that you can get meaning out of just about anything, n'est-ce pas mes enfants???
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PostPosted: Mon Sep 11, 2006 1:34 pm
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TheQuestion
Boot


Joined: 28 Aug 2006
Posts: 30
Location: in the wired

 		I'm not in a position to follow up on this myself, but it may be worth looking into:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manchester_encoding

EDIT: on second thought, it's not really applicable to our scenario, but I'll keep it here in case someoen else thinks of it as well.
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PostPosted: Mon Sep 11, 2006 1:52 pm
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makomk
Boot

Joined: 11 Jul 2006
Posts: 56
h0neym0nster wrote:
I thought it was a curb map but have been unable to find a valid starting point, since we only know that the Granier house is in the Old Town, 30 minutes walk from Foreman Station. So I went off on a search and found this. It appears that we may have an NRZ digital signal, the page even states that loss of timimg due to lots of zero's is a problem. What do you think?

[EDIT] On closer inspection it is more likely to be the NRZI line code. Any telecoms gurus want to chip in on this Question


Funnily enough, I saw a mention of NRZI elsewhere recently (in relation to the data on old tape drives, of all things). Wikipedia is, as usual, informative: NRZ and NRZI. The trouble is, I still can't see a sensible clock. Thoughts?

Edit: "Old tape drive using NZRI encoding" might actually be a reasonable angle, but:
1) I think they generally have 7 or 9 tracks (in this world, anyway Wink) whereas this has 12 lines
2) AFAIK, they either need a clock track (which this doesn't have) or at least one transition per symbol (we're close, but not quite there)
3) I'd expect more transitions at once
4) Makes little sense in the context (especially after the latest update), surely?

PostPosted: Mon Sep 11, 2006 2:03 pm
Last edited by makomk on Mon Sep 11, 2006 2:49 pm; edited 1 time in total
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rose
...and then Magic happens


Joined: 26 Nov 2003
Posts: 4117

 		clue
Violet wrote:
Quote:
Yes," she said, "it's rather lovely, is it not? So many tiny touches which indicate fine penmanship. This glyph here, for example, one might think it was simply part of the border, but in fact it is a navigational symbol representing a rotation, starting at due North, and circling 360 degrees clockwise. This young man must be rather taken with you to go to such trouble


So I assume this is a hint to solving the map. This is from Violet's update from today - it seems the note contained more than the message we were given earlier (like Scarlettt subsequently noticing that two of the mosaic pieces didn't move and telling us about it after we had played with that puzzle for a while. )

I found this confusing at first, because I didn't understand why Violet would take the note to be translated - we already had the translation on Friday. It had to be to give us this extra bit of information.

added: I don't suppose this would have anything to do with the lighthouse would it? I mean the navigational marker making a rotation through 360 degrees sounds like a lighthouse light. But, I am only thinking of that because the painting had the lighthouse in it.

one more idea: could this be some kind of maze?
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PostPosted: Mon Sep 11, 2006 2:04 pm
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Flynn
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Joined: 11 Nov 2003
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Location: UK

 		Following up on some of the previous ideas, I thought I'd mess around with overlaying the patterns on the paper onto the aerial map. It's easy enough to find odd correlations (see below for a couple of examples) but this approach looks like a dead end to me. Might save someone else a couple of hours fruitless work...



PostPosted: Mon Sep 11, 2006 4:47 pm
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Fimbo
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Joined: 11 Sep 2006
Posts: 5

 		Posted this in wrong forum originally, just an idea.

could this anything to do with PWM?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulse-width_modulation

We have had a puzzle card which carried some speech, maybe we got it again?

PostPosted: Mon Sep 11, 2006 4:58 pm
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themandotcom
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Joined: 28 Apr 2006
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Location: Syosset, New York, USA, Earth, Milky Way Galaxy, Universe

 		It does match up to the streets very nicely, but not by the Amedek house. After talking on #syzygy, I took a look to the map to see if we could go up/ down on the streets, it didnt work.... But this 360 degree thing is interenting, could the lines going up equal a 90 degree turn?
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PostPosted: Mon Sep 11, 2006 5:19 pm
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Cabbage
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Joined: 22 May 2006
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themandotcom wrote:
It does match up to the streets very nicely, but not by the Amedek house. After talking on #syzygy, I took a look to the map to see if we could go up/ down on the streets, it didnt work.... But this 360 degree thing is interenting, could the lines going up equal a 90 degree turn?


This 360 degree turn thing is bugging me. If this is a directional map, what would be the point of including a 360 degree turn which would (ststo) leave you pointing in the same direction?
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PostPosted: Mon Sep 11, 2006 6:53 pm
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WolverineFan
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AtionSong wrote:
Sorry, just another quick note:

I do not think that this puzzle represents one thing
That is to say that I feel like each line may be independant of the others.

Although the beginnings of lines 2, 3, and 4 begin where the previous line left off, lines 5, 9, 10, and 11 do not.

So it could not be one continuous pattern, aka one continuous walk through Perplex City.


I know the map idea is looking unlikely but I wanted to point out that it's possible the lines that don't begin where the previous line left off indicate an additional step DOWN or UP. Not that I know exactly how a curb map works to know if this is possible... But I thought I'd mention it.

EDIT: And this is what it would look like if you attach the end of each line to the start of the next. I added it as a zip since it's 11,000 pixels wide and that looked really bad Wink
long_walk.zip
 Description   
 Filesize   1.5KB
    174 Time(s)

Unfortunately, this file is no longer in our archives.
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PostPosted: Tue Sep 12, 2006 9:25 am
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makomk
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 		Hmmm... numbers. Each row is 50 pixels high and 850 wide (plus some fraction of a pixel at each edge, due to blurry lines), and all the lines are aligned horizontally and are separated vertically by 26 pixels (minus some fraction of a pixel at each edge). Nothing interesting there.

Slightly interestingly, 850*12=10200, so we have 10200 bits to work with (if we interpret it as such). It'd be exactly right for a 102*100 pixel image (except that has already been tried and it didn't work). And I'm still getting nowhere with this, and probably looking at it in completely the wrong way...

PostPosted: Tue Sep 12, 2006 5:47 pm
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BrianEnigma
Entrenched


Joined: 05 Oct 2003
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WolverineFan wrote:
I know the map idea is looking unlikely but I wanted to point out that it's possible the lines that don't begin where the previous line left off indicate an additional step DOWN or UP. Not that I know exactly how a curb map works to know if this is possible... But I thought I'd mention it.


I'm still going on the assumption that they correlate to a map, but not end-to-end--more of a star/asterisk pattern with a line sticking out every 30 degrees around the compass, given the compass glyph Violet told us about. Of course, I'm probably wrong, and I haven't gotten very far (or had time to get very far, for that matter.)
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PostPosted: Tue Sep 12, 2006 7:09 pm
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c1023
Boot

Joined: 21 Oct 2005
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Location: Hampshire, UK

 		I had a thought on similar lines:

Take each of the 12 line, and bend them around (360 degrees) to form a circle of sorts. The peeks could represent somthing present in that direction, and the troughs an absence.

Now if each or the twelve circles was placed at each of the hour marks on a clock...

It is unlikely that all 12 would form any coherent pattern. But I've not tried it.

PostPosted: Wed Sep 13, 2006 4:32 am
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Teebor
Boot


Joined: 28 Jun 2006
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 		I jsut read Scarletts update and one particular part stood out to me.

Quote:
I did get a good thought from Anji Petrizzo, who said it might be a skyline seen from a lighthouse in the picture. I think there has to be something to that, though I do have some qualms. The city was under very heavy construction at that time - Granier couldn't have known what roofs would be there even a few months after he died. So it must refer to something more permanent than the roofs of buildings. Also, there seem to be many traces - maybe it's views of permanent natural features taken from several different vantage points?


In its self its kind of a kick in the face kind of obvious really.

But it made me think of trig points (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trig_point) and that on the top of them they usually had some sort of markings pointing at a permanent fixture like a house or something else.

What if these markings on the paper represent permanant structures like parks (low areas, and very nicely shown above) and high areas being trees or possibly important buildings (academy, etc) even though building work is still going on it might be assumed that they are more "permanent"

If you divide the lines up in to three you get four sets. If you could work out where you would be standing to see this outline and then plotted a line across them point to point it may cross at a mid section, this is where you would want to go.

of course its all speculation as I have not had the time to follow this up yet, but it seemed to be along the lines you guys have been following and rather stood out like a slap in the face to me.

PostPosted: Wed Sep 13, 2006 11:19 am
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Flabyo
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Joined: 25 Aug 2006
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 		So Scarlett's latest blog entry suggests that each line on the page is a view of some feature from different vantage points. But that those permanent features are not buildings, but something thats older and more permanent. Roads? Rivers? Mountains? Scarlett's old hand drawn map of her hiking route is a possibilty, assuming she was good enough to draw it nicely to scale?

PostPosted: Wed Sep 13, 2006 11:20 am
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WolverineFan
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Flabyo wrote:
So Scarlett's latest blog entry suggests that each line on the page is a view of some feature from different vantage points. But that those permanent features are not buildings, but something thats older and more permanent. Roads? Rivers? Mountains? Scarlett's old hand drawn map of her hiking route is a possibilty, assuming she was good enough to draw it nicely to scale?


If it's the same feature drawn from 12 different vantage points (say circling around it) you'd expect to see some similarities in the patterns. Assuming he stood at various clock points, 12 and 6 should be close to mirror images of each other, as would 3 and 9. A few of the lines are kinda close, but not terribly.

Then again, maybe he wasn't nice enough to circle it completly and just drew it from various random spots. That would suck.

It's also possible he stood in one spot and drew a the skyline all around. Then there wouldn't be any similarities in the lines.

Either way, if it's a skyline, I can't see how we're going to find this place without topological maps of PPC and the surrounding regions.
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PostPosted: Wed Sep 13, 2006 12:10 pm
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