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Coded messages found in Ontario library books

**Posted:** Wed Mar 26, 2014 5:12 pm

Tao · Veteran Joined: 16 May 2011 Posts: 122 Location: The MOON!

Been a while since I've been in UF, however as soon as I saw these letters, I thought to come here. We need more people in this thread. This NEEDS to get figured out. Something's really curious about these things. My boyfriend and I are going to be trying to figure it out but codes and glyphs were never my strong suit.

Apparently there's 50 characters, so it's not your standard cryptogram. The characters probably do not correspond to the roman alphabet. They may suggest words or phrases, but not letters.

Any ideas?

**Posted:** Wed Mar 26, 2014 10:14 pm

misery of pain · Guest

I haven't been here for years, saw this on buzzfeed and thought I would see if anyone had started this. Has anyone looked though their fonts just to check it's not a simple decode? I'm only on my phone at present and can't check.
I'm going to print them off later and have a proper look.
I miss uf!

**Posted:** Thu Mar 27, 2014 3:33 am

wintermute740 · Boot Joined: 12 Sep 2006 Posts: 21 Location: Lancaster, OH

Color me intrigued... I just went through the source to 000xyz.blog.ca... Nothing out of the ordinary stands out... Very interesting, regardless, and something I plan on following...

**Posted:** Thu Mar 27, 2014 4:08 am

NiceLurk · Boot Joined: 19 Jul 2013 Posts: 65

[Trailhead?] Crypted Notes found in University Library

**Posted:** Thu Mar 27, 2014 4:28 am

Jung · Veteran Joined: 24 May 2009 Posts: 96 Location: Barcelona

Re: [Trailhead?] Crypted Notes found in University Library

**Posted:** Thu Mar 27, 2014 11:13 am

Thunderwolf

**Posted:** Thu Mar 27, 2014 11:45 am

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miseryofpainthe2nd · Kilroy Joined: 27 Mar 2014 Posts: 2

I agree with thunderwolf re character count. I've been looking (not too in depth) and trying to find a string of three characters that is repeated for the word 'the'. It's the most obvious word (to me anyway) that would be easiest to pick out and help decode the rest.
Also, I've noticed that the first block before the coloured character (a space maybe?) seems to be short, then the next part is very long, much longer than any words I know of.

**Posted:** Thu Mar 27, 2014 1:58 pm

Seadevil4

Thunderwolf nice to see you back at the rockface.

Symbol for a letter space would be nice, nothing really jumping out at me. I don't think all symbols are letters probably a fair bit of misdirection at work here I think.

Where they were found on the shelves and position in the books maybe of importance and possibly the names of the books too.

Interesting indeed.

ETA: Might worth overlaying the images, many of them have the same number of symbols. Also removing all the symbols that are obviously the same as the coloured symbols and objects eg: box for a cube etc.

ETA2: Excellent work Jung.

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Jung · Veteran Joined: 24 May 2009 Posts: 96 Location: Barcelona

Four new paper notes have been discovered (19 notes so far) but no new glyphs or symbols, so finally it seems that there're 52 glyphs plus 3 coloured symbols: leaf, feather and gem for this mystery code.

Helpful link to the "alphabet" rendered in MS Paint: http://imgur.com/gallery/P7u9z

ETA: IMO the scenario 1 glyph - 1 letter does not work. Looking at any paper note can be seen up to a succession of 16 different glyphs, which is unlikely in any Western language.

Maybe the code is written with glyphs representing letters, plus others for syllables (like Hiragana), words, numbers...

**Posted:** Thu Mar 27, 2014 2:56 pm

Melchizedek · Boot Joined: 16 Jun 2013 Posts: 20 Location: Boston

This is super interesting. I'm not how much time I have to dedicate to this right now, but I'll definitely check in whenever I can!

**Posted:** Thu Mar 27, 2014 9:57 pm

Thunderwolf

**Posted:** Fri Mar 28, 2014 7:12 am

_________________
"OK, now what you gotta do is go down the road past the old Johnson place. You're gonna find two roads, one parallel and one perpendicular. Now keep going until you come to a highway that bisects it at a 45-degree angle. Solve for x."

NiceLurk · Boot Joined: 19 Jul 2013 Posts: 65

Hello

there are exactly 52 different symbols. Maybe there are 2 different symbols for every letter. If so, the problem is that frequency analysis doesn't work, because we'd have to add the number of 2 symbols to get the number of letters in the plaintext.
I assigned the letters a-z and A-Z to the symbols to get it somehow 'computable':

http://prntscr.com/34malk

and used this table to transcribe the notes:

https://infotomb.com/m5z26/

There are only 3 different messages, the similar ones only differ in some symbols at the end.

**Posted:** Fri Mar 28, 2014 12:05 pm

Atropanocturna · Decorated Joined: 09 Nov 2008 Posts: 240

They have tallied the frequency of each character over at reddit.

http://www.reddit.com/r/UWOCipher/comments/21h3gt/text_analysis_of_the_tokenized_text/

I am unsure wether this has been updated for all of the 19 notes found at this point. (I am sure they explain somewhere, but I don't do the reddit thing because their format is annoying and I just wish everyone would come use uF. End rant.)

Anyway, it's a good start. They also linked to this graph of frequency of letter use in english.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b0/English_letter_frequency_%28frequency%29.svg

With the possibility of using separate characters for upper and lower case it would certainly skew how we use the frequency data. (ie "z" is not automatically going to be the least used because we would need to account for the infrequency of upper case letters at the beginning of sentences.)

EDIT:

For some reason I have been stuck on the inclusion of the items, their colored lines and dots, and the picture on the paper. I can't imagine that they are meaningless. Someone put forth the idea that the person leaving the notes probably did not not intend for the finder to need all of them to solve the code. So you could, with the key, translate each note by itself. Maybe the key is within the items, pictures, and dots/lines? How? I have no clue.

**Posted:** Fri Mar 28, 2014 2:33 pm

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Mystery solved, link to story enclosed

**Posted:** Wed Apr 09, 2014 11:29 am