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Post by ironwill on Jan 18, 2019 19:11:07 GMT -5
Reading the letters horizontally on each line, as listed below, is incorrect. McB: you don't know that unless you EXPLICITLY asked Jenny. From my exchange with her, all she confirmed was that the ordering of the puzzle pieces was correct. She was silent on whether horizontal or vertical letters within each puzzle piece was important. While I believe that SVRWYULOKKOZMIE... is more likely correct, nothing that Jenny has told me rules out the other possibility. If no one has put that exact question to her, then perhaps someone should. Well I've ruled it out due to common sense. Her numbers are vertical in the puzzle pieces because she had to put 5 sets of numbers in a "Puzzle Piece." If she'd put them horizontal it would've been 3 inches long and not at all resembled a puzzle piece. SVRWYULOKKOZMIEAYULFUTIITYWBLBHKAVCAZUAUMWXCLLQFRMJMYPJLSVLCUSOKLLICTXBXACUHRBVG is not "more likely correct"...it IS correct, as confirmed to me by Jenny last night. So can we all just get past the nuance of everything before that and try to move forward constructively towards the next step whether its vigenere or something new?
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Post by zaphod73491 on Jan 18, 2019 19:52:50 GMT -5
McB: you don't know that unless you EXPLICITLY asked Jenny. From my exchange with her, all she confirmed was that the ordering of the puzzle pieces was correct. She was silent on whether horizontal or vertical letters within each puzzle piece was important. While I believe that SVRWYULOKKOZMIE... is more likely correct, nothing that Jenny has told me rules out the other possibility. If no one has put that exact question to her, then perhaps someone should. Well I've ruled it out due to common sense. Her numbers are vertical in the puzzle pieces because she had to put 5 sets of numbers in a "Puzzle Piece." If she'd put them horizontal it would've been 3 inches long and not at all resembled a puzzle piece. SVRWYULOKKOZMIEAYULFUTIITYWBLBHKAVCAZUAUMWXCLLQFRMJMYPJLSVLCUSOKLLICTXBXACUHRBVG is not "more likely correct"...it IS correct, as confirmed to me by Jenny last night. So can we all just get past the nuance of everything before that and try to move forward constructively towards the next step whether its vigenere or something new? Yes, IronWill -- in the thread way above, I mentioned while playing Devil's Advocate, that a horizontal layout would not have worked visually, so we couldn't "necessarily" read anything into the XXX-Y codes being laid out vertically. If Jenny has confirmed to both you and McB that SVRWYULOKK... is correct, then terrific. One less permutation. I was not fortunate enough to receive such a clear cut reply because the string I supplied her was SVRWY_ULOKK_OZMIE ... etc. -- i.e. with underscores separating the puzzle pieces. I shouldn't have been so specific in my question to her, yet I didn't feel like bugging her with a follow-up PM for clarification.
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Post by fennster on Jan 18, 2019 20:24:26 GMT -5
Well this is good. So now we just have to work through as many key phrases as possible. What does everyone think about putting together a list of phrases that have been checked. We could even do it in a whole new thread to make it easier.
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mcb
Junior Member
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Post by mcb on Jan 18, 2019 21:10:50 GMT -5
I have one more theory: What are the chances that the 80 numbers on the last page are converted into letters to be used as a key to the vigenere?
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Post by fennster on Jan 18, 2019 21:27:15 GMT -5
Hmmm that's an interesting theory. I'm not certain you would be able to do that effectively. With 80 numbers that are all different, we will be looking at an interesting cipher. Plus, it seems from what we have heard and the pattern so far, that the key phrase has to do with the Chase and/or Fenn
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Post by foolsgold on Jan 18, 2019 22:54:20 GMT -5
So, because of Fenn we have all become apprentice Cartographers. Now, thanks to Jenny we are becoming journeyman Cryptographers. We're all acquiring new skills... I have personally learnt a few things. For instance, I came to know that it's a common crypto convention to break the string of code into 4-5 letter chunks just for the sake of ease of handling. So, the 5-letter puzzle pieces are no coincidence. There is a discussion on how to read the letters, vertical or horizontal, that actually has another implication. If you know the key word length, you are supposed to break the code into chunks first, align them vertically and then read them horizontally in other to analyze letter frequency and break the code. So, both approaches are viable if you know what you're doing. Does it help us much, though?
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Post by harrytruman on Jan 18, 2019 22:58:55 GMT -5
Wow, so how did you know that this was the correct sequence? There were multiple possibilities using the TOTC grid, and following a sequencing of the letters in "Thrill of the Chase" that produced a magic square in which the rows, columns, AND diagonals produced equal sums seemed the most logical. This sequencing produces a magic square in which the rows and columns produce equal sums but the diagonals are way off. Was there some hint that indicated we should be looking for a flawed magic square, instead of the more elegant (and obvious) option? If not, I think I can understand Genetic Blend's frustration... Hi Harry -- I think you are misinterpreting how to APPLY the magic square provided by the anagram. This is the magic square:
8-11-14-1 13-2-7-12 3-16-9-6 10-5-4-15
34 across every row, column and the two major diagonals. Out of the 48 permutations that spell out THRILL OF THE CHASE, this is the only one that is a magic square. Now *I* would have laid out the puzzle pieces in this order: 8th puzzle piece in upper left, then 11th piece next to it, and so forth. Jenny didn't. She laid them out sequentially like this:
1-2-3-4 5-6-7-8 9-10-11-12 13-14-15-16
and then extracted them from the square in the order that spells out THRILL OF THE CHASE: 4th puzzle piece first, then 6th, 9th and so forth. Like IronWill, I still think there is ambiguity about whether SVRWYULOKKOZMIE... is the correct final order, or whether we must take the vertical orientation of the codes/letters within each key into consideration. At least it's only two possibilities, which is manageable.
Ugh, yes, I was laying it out 8-11-14-1 (because F-E-A-T). Many thanks...
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Post by zaphod73491 on Jan 19, 2019 0:43:39 GMT -5
So, because of Fenn we have all become apprentice Cartographers. Now, thanks to Jenny we are becoming journeyman Cryptographers. We're all acquiring new skills... I have personally learnt a few things. For instance, I came to know that it's a common crypto convention to break the string of code into 4-5 letter chunks just for the sake of ease of handling. So, the 5-letter puzzle pieces are no coincidence. There is a discussion on how to read the letters, vertical or horizontal, that actually has another implication. If you know the key word length, you are supposed to break the code into chunks first, align them vertically and then read them horizontally in other to analyze letter frequency and break the code. So, both approaches are viable if you know what you're doing. Does it help us much, though? Hi Foolsgold: one of my hats is as a cryptanalyst. In the last 20 years I've worked on ciphers far harder than anything Jenny would toss our way. But Jenny is not a cryppie: she's a puzzlemaker. This is a very different type of problem. When Jenny uses Vig, the solutions are not cryptologically solvable because she uses keyphrases that have lengths that are a significant fraction of the length of the message. If the key is, say, a sixth of the length of the cipher and is readable English, I can probably solve it with no further info. But a quarter or third is another beast: there just isn't enough repetion to exploit the statistics of English. So you need a crib to crack it. That crib will be found in Jenny's book, one way or another.
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jammy
New Member
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Post by jammy on Jan 19, 2019 14:35:29 GMT -5
I have been working on trying phrases for days now. I have a couple other people who have been as well. We haven't found any progress yet. It has to be an obvious phrase that we can see somewhere. We have tried everything in quotation marks. I have tried the phrases special words, words from Forrest, Forrest Fenn, and anything else I can think of related to the chase. Nothing has brought measurable results so far.
Another theory I have is that the number 16 is associated. It has played a key part in the first two parts of the cipher. There were 16 puzzle pieces, and there are 16 blocks in the cube. Does that mean the phrase We are looking for is 16 letters long, where that the key itself is 16 letters long?
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mcb
Junior Member
Posts: 68
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Post by mcb on Jan 19, 2019 15:12:05 GMT -5
So if I plug-in the following coded letters SVRWYULOKKOZMIEAYULFUTIITYWBLBHKAVCAZUAUMWXCLLQFRMJMYPJLSVLCUSOKLLICTXBXACUHRBVG In that order into vigenere cipher and guess the correct key how will I know If the key is correct? is the solution supposed to spell out a sentence or just letters that have English language frequency? I have an idea, and I think Zap too. The solution to this phase may result in something indicating that the correct replacement has been made. I can not help but notice that in "SVRWY...." the key "what" results in "word" and vice versa.
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Post by zaphod73491 on Jan 19, 2019 15:50:01 GMT -5
So if I plug-in the following coded letters SVRWYULOKKOZMIEAYULFUTIITYWBLBHKAVCAZUAUMWXCLLQFRMJMYPJLSVLCUSOKLLICTXBXACUHRBVG In that order into vigenere cipher and guess the correct key how will I know If the key is correct? is the solution supposed to spell out a sentence or just letters that have English language frequency? Hi Sangre: since we suspect the scrambled 80 numbers are applied last to reveal the message, the expected result of the Vigenere stage will be 80 letters that have the statistics of English: many E's, T's, A's and O's, and few if any of J, Q, X or Z. Mathematically, the way you test a potential string of letters is to tally the number of occurrences of each letter, multiply each letter's count by that letter's frequency of occurrence in English, add those 26 numbers together, and divide by 80 (the # of letters). The higher the result, the greater the chance that it's correct. A good result should be around 6.7%. Anything under 5% is almost definitely wrong except in rare, pathological cases (e.g. The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog).
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Post by zaphod73491 on Jan 19, 2019 15:55:56 GMT -5
Forgot to add (and McB brought this up just above) that because Jenny had complete control of the descrambling method in (presumably) the final step, she could cause a short message to appear in the correct decryption of the Vig stage. For instance I posted a few days ago that the keyword "WORDS" decrypts to "WHATG". Whether Jenny took advantage of this degree of freedom remains to be determined of course.
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Post by ironwill on Jan 19, 2019 18:03:33 GMT -5
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mcb
Junior Member
Posts: 68
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Post by mcb on Jan 20, 2019 14:26:06 GMT -5
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Post by ironwill on Jan 21, 2019 9:13:47 GMT -5
Okay... I was lying in bed last night and my mind came up with a way to find the key phrase. It's going to take some time, but I'm positive it will work. Thinking outside of the box, I imagined "Why play by Jenny's rules, and solve it the way she engineered it!?" It suddenly dawned on me that, at this point in the process, I can REVERSE ENGINEER it! Stay tuned... this might take all day.
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