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[JoeUser]

[UPDATE] 3/3 - Pictures

[rowan]

Ok..that is just freaking trippy.

It seems that there are several pictures (on energy), but that they always load in the same position.

1st position:
hoy.png - bell peppers
its.png - a moving liberty bell
the.png - bell graph

2nd position:
sam.png - chinese(?) symbol
ghe.png - stick figure
nwe.png - Isle of Mann flag

3rd position:
at.png - Ford Prefect (David Dixon)
rt.png - Henry Ford
eh.png - ford of a creek

There is such a thing as a Bellman ford algorithm. Something to do with graphs (look at a google image search). It might have something to do with the shortest path. I'll keep looking for other info.

Thanks to strifey, Cortana, and sapagoo in #uf for their help.

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<sapagoo> yes. The Ford-Bellman/Bellman-Ford algorithm is a shortest path algorithm, "see also dijstkra's algorithm"

the picture names don't seem to ROT, but the 3 english words say "it's sam at" (leaving hoy/tne ghe/nwe eh/rt). Could this be a new person to email? samSPLATchaoseed.com perhaps? (I can't try it until I get home). I'll keep looking for info about the algorithm.

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idea.php

It looks like the lines in the middle create a star (pentagram?) but every time I click one, I get "already chosen". Dunno what's up with that. I'll see if they left us any messages in the flash when I get home.

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will.php

That seems to be where we want to find the shortest path. But I dunno where to start or where I want to go. strifey is looking to see if he has a program to help me out. Remind me to maim simon for this little problem when this is all done

[JoeUser]

Wow, great work!

I'll have to go back and look up more on Bellman-Ford, but it's the way to get the shortest paths from every point to a single destination (usually vertex 0). The numbers on in the circles are the vertex numbers. The numbers on the line are weights. Dijkstra's algorithm can't handle negative weights, so that's why we need Bellman-Ford.

If you click on the image, you get symbol1.png. There is also a symbol2.png, which is just another strange line. You can get a much better look at symbol3.png by looking at it by itself. A pentagram with weights like a graph?

[aNgus]

I'm pretty sure that the symbol files are related. I think that symbol1 is the key to symbol0, and symbol2 is the key to symbol3. If I am correct, the path they would take us would be as follows:

[aNgus]

No wait, on symbol0, I only told the bubbled numbers. There are two nubers in between the bubbled nubers, one on the inside and outside of the line. I'll just put a slash between the inside and outside numbers, outside first.

[rowan]

Alas, no samSPLATchaoseed.com. And I was so looking forward to talking to a new guy.

Maybe I should email vis and find out where all the updates are occuring over at chaoseed. It's driving me nuts that I can't find them.

[vidstudent]

...I am looking at the same thing you guys are.

I have no idea what to do from here.

Any luck from #uf yet, Rowan?

[rowan]

Alas no. Damn all the new ARGs popping up taking away everyone's attention (she says as she's sitting in #ares).

I'm not a traitor. Really. This will always be my first love (I'm still even shilling in the other forums so that must prove how loyal I am).

I think Simon is just playing with us. I mean, he knows what our capabilities are and how much we generally suck along the puzzle line (look how long it took us to get pentagram). We'll figure this out one of these days - he just may have to help us.

[JoeUser]

rowan mentioning the original site made me go back and look ... check out vis's directory!

http://daemon.chaoseed.com/vis/hint4.png

As usual, they're screenshots from various places, a couple from the forums.

Looking for the "Kur" reference now...

Edit: oh, it's from the Sumerian FAQ I posted a link to.

Here's the text for the entry on Kur:

[rowan]

Here is what the green text says:

[JoeUser]

They added the green text after I posted! Sneaky ...

Well now there's a symbol4.png, which is some red text over symbol3.png.

[rowan]

Okay, I think I have the binary done.

[JoeUser]

OK, here's a short (maybe) explanation of symbol0.png.

It's a graph: a series of nodes (circles) connected by edges (lines). The edges have weights associated with them. To get from node A to node B has a "cost" of some amount.

You can think of this like distance between two points, for simplicity. The directional arrows indicate which way you can go.

If you look at the numbers in the nodes, each number is the shortest distance to the node with a zero in it. This is how the Bellman-Ford algorithm is applied. For a fairly simple graph like symbol0, you can pretty much figure out the shortest paths by hand.

When there are two weights on an edge (and you're trying to find the shortest path), you just take the smaller one.

An interesting value to note is the "4 node" southeast of zero. Taking the southeast route from zero would give a distance of 5. But if we go north, southeast, southwest, we can end up with a total distance of 4 (because of the -3 along the path).

We can do the same thing for the pentagram graph, taking the center node to be the origin (zero) node. I'm not sure what that means given symbol4.png though.

OK, I'm not sure how clear that was (probably not very), but I finally got a chance to really look at it and wanted to at least try to explain.

[JoeUser]

Hey, remember the stuff wunder always put?

[JoeUser]

On the will->tartarus page, some text has been added to the graph: