unforum

[Donimo]

[Projectyl]

Okay, this HAS to be connected somehow. Check this out:

http://www.ciphergoth.org/crypto/mirdek/description.html

The deck of cards in the video? The one with MIR on it? That's a MIR-deck.

[Projectyl]

An exchange with Xander on Facebook:

[catherwood]

MIR-deck *groan*
But the shrimp confirms it. At last, some progress!

I found a Perl script online which can encrypt/decrypt the Mirdek cipher, but there are variables that have yet to be established. The hints I'm working with at the moment are:

1) "If everyone would just play the hand that's dealt" -- In the opening video for last week, we see two men playing poker. If instead of the cards spelling PAGES ELTIT (because that's really the order they appear in), the Mirdek cipher is pretty rigid in assigning letters to the cards, and those hands would spell PATRF RLGVG -- this assumes the cards are taken in a natural order as if each hand were held, although the man on the right of the screen lays his down on the table before the man on the left, I'm using the frame which views the table.

2) Mirdek is best run with an initial shuffle to half of the deck, or one set of the letters of the alphabet in a scrambled order (only 25 letters are given to the script, as the 26th is thus implied). No obvious unique set of letters leaps off the page, although only the middle initials of all 60 disciples taken together will give you at least one occurance of every letter A-Z (minus U). Those letters could either be taken in row order or column order, then uniqued to give an initial shuffle.

3) Mirdek also takes a keyphrase to further do something to the encryption, I'm not sure exactly what. The examples use a real word, not gibberish, but duplicate letters are allowed. I'm thinking that the video lingers on one view of the box of poker chips while Pastor Grace whittles -- the camera has his hands less in focus than the box, emphasizing *PCKER CHIPS, so perhaps that is a keyphrase. Poker chips were also prominent in the view of the table with the card hands laid out (next to the MIR deck).

*(edit to add) I watched it again, and now I'm convinced that the box doesn't spell POKER CHIPS correctly, and that the camera really lingers an extra long time with that box in focus for a reason, to note the misspelling of PCKER CHIPS.

4) Then what? Trial and error, I suppose, running with the disciples' initials, full names, with and without their home cities and/or state abbreviations.

It's going to be a long night.

[Projectyl]

And another post from Tabby:

[Qaqaq]

Apparently "Sherpa" literally means "man from the east", and Sherpas are associated with yaks. I'm good with KAY.

[catherwood]

My brain is fried from the mirdek runs, so much so that I was dreaming about strings of text, and yet I have no results.

So I got to thinking about the list of 20 tasks. Did you know that the shortest of them is exactly 20 letters? And the only one with punctuation has a hyphen immediately after its 20th letter? Random fun fact of the day, or a significant coincidence?

[Projectyl]

Xander on Facebook:

[catherwood]

With all of the hints to use Mirdek, i'm very disappointed so far. By the description of this and other Solitaire-type ciphers, the ciphertext should begin with a 25-unique-letter sequence, to initialize the system, before the encrypted message itself begins. I have not seen any such string. An extra benefit to finding such a sequence is that it would confirm that we were pulling the correct bits in the correct order, to then proceed with a real decryption, rather than guessing and doing trial-and-error with various sets of initials.

Additionally, if we are now getting confirmation that PAGES TITLE is the correct solution to the video poker hands, that violates the definition of the Mirdek card assignments as well. It is strict about dividing the cards along black/red colors, and one color gets the A-M half of the alphabet while the other color of cards get assigned to the N-Z half of the alphabet. That would yield either PATRFGVGLR or CNGESTITYE.

[Projectyl]

I'm pretty confident of the solution to today's DI:

[ToddE]

Another possibility for PAGE'S TITLE, if that still to be interepreted as something (conflicting messages from Xander on this one) is CHAIN LINKS, which is the title of the web page when you click on the word link in the Join the Chain page.

http://www.citizensofvirtue.com/ChainLinks.aspx

EDIT: It just doesn't make any sense, though to have both PAGES TITLE and Mirdek cipher co-existing. It's not too elegant to specifically call out a code for translating cards to letters and use something different? That would be very confusing.

[worthy_m]

So personally, I think the PAGE'S TITLE thing refers to the Chain Links page, as that is the only one with a different title in the HTML - i.e. Chain Links, rather than Citizens of Virtue. However, I don't know what to make of it, because I've been staring at the disciples initials, card values etc for so long. I still can't see any link between them.
Perhaps you're on to something with the unique combination bit at the start - is there anyway we can join up some of the disciples to create a unique combination? I'll have another look...

*EDIT* crossposted with ToddE

[theShaggy]

Folks, this is me going out on a limb after totally catching up for three days:

Tabby says something to the effect of "judging people by their face only," but I don't have the quote anywhere nearby (a few pages back) which suggests that maybe we're dealing with face cards here.

Xander also points out "PAGES TITLE ONLY." I wonder if this is a double clue. The Wikipedia [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_(playing_card)]entry[/url] writes:

[Projectyl]

Breakthrough!

Take the birthdates as chapter/verse numbers in Job (groooan), and read the initial letters of the verses. You get YAHOO?OLYROLLERSANON (the ? is because there is no Job 2:19, although there is a Job 2:9 that starts with H).

There's a Yahoo! group called holyrollersanon which mentions the CoV. There are a LOT of messages to read... http://health.groups.yahoo.com/group/holyrollersanon/?v=1&t=search&ch=web&pub=groups&sec=group&slk=1

[theShaggy]

And just to point out as a possible support for my theory on "Jack" being important: the Outreach Coordinator who set up the Yahoo group's name is Jack Bass. http://health.groups.yahoo.com/group/holyrollersanon/message/1

Could he be one of the seven?