Summary: Forrest Fenn Words in Code

[onthechase]

ironwill -- it is very rare for classical ciphers to encode spaces or punctuation, and the examples of other treasure hunts that Jenny describes in her book don't (I think) include any examples of exceptions to this. As you noticed, in at least one case (in fact I think it may have been a few cases), Jenny pointed out that a treasure hunt cipher was solved using a method that ignores or skips or doesn't count punctuation. And in all of the "fun distraction" ciphers in the book that I have decoded so far that don't have explicit and obvious word breaks in the ciphertext, spaces and punctuation were not encoded. So I think it's reasonable to assume that if you're counting something, you don't need to count spaces or punctuation.

Jamming the plaintext together without spaces or punctuation or upper/lowercase distinction is a long-held convention in the classical cryptography world -- and there are actually good reasons for it too: encoding these things actually makes the cipher much easier to crack, since it "leaks information" about the plaintext message and/or the cipher used. (Not to mention that a lot of ciphers are designed to only work with a specific total number of characters, e.g. 25 or 26, that doesn't allow for spaces or punctuation to be used.)

[zaphod73491]

Hi Jenny: I have a question about the puzzle piece codes that hopefully you'll feel is innocuous enough that you can answer (but I understand if you want to decline to answer). Each puzzle piece has five integer pairs, which each pair separated by a dash. The question: would their successful decryption be complicated or even thwarted if you had instead reversed the order of each pair? For instance: 2-112 instead of 112-2. Thanks!

[onthechase]

I'm sure Jenny will answer your question specifically, but in situations like this where you have a bunch of numbers you don't know what to do with, it is always good to look at the range (smallest to largest / number of different values) and distribution of values (the count of how many times each unique value occurs). Even just eyeballing the pairs of numbers, you can see the second number is always only a single digit, so that's a clue that it means something different from the first number, which has a max value of 481 or something (I don't have my notes handy). Plotting the distribution of values of both of the numerical fields is helpful in figuring out what one of the two numbers refers to, at least it helped me to verify what the numbers meant, and from that I figured out what the other number had to refer to.

If Jenny had presented the numbers backwards, Y-XXX rather than XXX-Y, then you could still tell that one of the numbers was a single digit and the other had up to three digits. So you'd still be able to tell them apart. It wouldn't therefore strictly impede anyone from figuring out what the numbers refer to, although reversing them would obscure the meaning of the two parts of the number a little bit.

Figuring out what the numbers mean gets you the first step through the multi-step solution process. I know at least three people figured this first step out at least, because I talked to a couple of others who also found the solution for this part. When you figure out what the numbers mean, you will know it's the right interpretation for the numbers, because there is only one way to decode the numbers that actually works for all of them. Note that one of the number pairs is wrong (Jenny posted about that on the forums here somewhere), and her correction of that number pair will be further confirmation when you have correctly figured out how to use the numbers in this first step, because that number pair won't work unless you apply Jenny's correction (of changing the second number from a 9 to an 8).

[zaphod73491]

Onthechase: thank you for a reply! I was about to give up that anyone is paying any attention (to include Jenny, which surprised me a bit). The reason I specifically asked about the ordering is that *I* would have done it the other way around if my front-runner thoughts are correct on what's going on.

I won't beat around the bush: it looks like a modified book code to me. My assumption is that the single digit number is a chapter number (note: no zeroes), and the up-to-three digit prefix (again no zeroes) is a word number in that chapter. Trouble is, the first two main sections of Jenny's book each have 10 chapters (in both cases numbered 1-10), introducing ambiguity. That said, it seems more likely to me that it's the second section that's in play (unsolved hunts, including Fenn's).

I certainly have paid particular attention to the correction (8 vs. 9 on one dash pair), but it wasn't apparent to me that having the wrong chapter would be obvious to the solver unless the word count happened to exceed the number of words in the chapter.

I hate book codes myself: they're tedious, require little in the way of cryptanalytic skill, and have "rules" that vary widely in terms of word counting (e.g. do you count numbers such as years as "words"? Are hyphenated words 1 word or 2? How are acronyms or abbreviations handled? Include or exclude titles and/or subtitles?) However, Jenny included in her book a chapter on the Beale cipher (a total hoax by the way), and so it seems likely at least one of her puzzle challenges is a book cipher, and none of the 18 I solved was a book cipher.

[onthechase]

Jenny is actually very helpful and responsive if you send her a private message, but obviously she doesn't want to give too much away, because that would ruin the fun! Jenny mentioned to me that she always had a plan of providing a series of hints and clues for the FF puzzle if a community of FF puzzle-solvers sprung up on these boards, as long as they were working hard on trying to solve this puzzle, but that has not happened so far unfortunately, with the exception of a few people like you and me asking occasional questions about the puzzle.

You are right that you do need additional information to make sense of the numbers (the numbers themselves don't tell you anything) -- but keep working on it, you're not quite there yet. Once you realize what the correct interpretation of the numbers is, again, you will have a sure confirmation that it is correct, because there really is only one correct way to interpret the numbers, and no other interpretation will work.

One thing I would suggest is that if you do figure out anything about the puzzle, feel free to post hints here to help other people, but don't flat out give away the steps that you figured out, because again, it would ruin the fun and the challenge for others. Then again, on the other end of the spectrum it doesn't help to be as cryptic as Forrest Fenn tends to be ;-)

[Jenny]

Dec 5, 2018 2:24:35 GMT -5 zaphod73491 said:

Onthechase: thank you for a reply! I was about to give up that anyone is paying any attention (to include Jenny, which surprised me a bit). The reason I specifically asked about the ordering is that *I* would have done it the other way around if my front-runner thoughts are correct on what's going on.

I won't beat around the bush: it looks like a modified book code to me. My assumption is that the single digit number is a chapter number (note: no zeroes), and the up-to-three digit prefix (again no zeroes) is a word number in that chapter. Trouble is, the first two main sections of Jenny's book each have 10 chapters (in both cases numbered 1-10), introducing ambiguity. That said, it seems more likely to me that it's the second section that's in play (unsolved hunts, including Fenn's).

I certainly have paid particular attention to the correction (8 vs. 9 on one dash pair), but it wasn't apparent to me that having the wrong chapter would be obvious to the solver unless the word count happened to exceed the number of words in the chapter.

I hate book codes myself: they're tedious, require little in the way of cryptanalytic skill, and have "rules" that vary widely in terms of word counting (e.g. do you count numbers such as years as "words"? Are hyphenated words 1 word or 2? How are acronyms or abbreviations handled? Include or exclude titles and/or subtitles?) However, Jenny included in her book a chapter on the Beale cipher (a total hoax by the way), and so it seems likely at least one of her puzzle challenges is a book cipher, and none of the 18 I solved was a book cipher.

Sorry Zaphod for the delay in reply.... busy last week or more....

A book cipher alone won't solve the words... there are other steps.

[ironwill]

Dec 5, 2018 3:10:54 GMT -5 onthechase said:

Jenny is actually very helpful and responsive if you send her a private message, but obviously she doesn't want to give too much away, because that would ruin the fun! Jenny mentioned to me that she always had a plan of providing a series of hints and clues for the FF puzzle if a community of FF puzzle-solvers sprung up on these boards, as long as they were working hard on trying to solve this puzzle, but that has not happened so far unfortunately, with the exception of a few people like you and me asking occasional questions about the puzzle.

You are right that you do need additional information to make sense of the numbers (the numbers themselves don't tell you anything) -- but keep working on it, you're not quite there yet. Once you realize what the correct interpretation of the numbers is, again, you will have a sure confirmation that it is correct, because there really is only one correct way to interpret the numbers, and no other interpretation will work.

One thing I would suggest is that if you do figure out anything about the puzzle, feel free to post hints here to help other people, but don't flat out give away the steps that you figured out, because again, it would ruin the fun and the challenge for others. Then again, on the other end of the spectrum it doesn't help to be as cryptic as Forrest Fenn tends to be ;-)

I'm working on it as we speak.  I immediately figured out what the numbers 1-80 represent back when I bought the book, but I've been slightly stumped from there.  I feel I'm on the right track with this new method I'm trying but it's exhausting and so much attention has to be paid to detail when setting it up to avoid a simple mistake.  

I am curious however about the person who realized the -8/-9 typo.  This has me worried they noticed a coding method that I did not.  

And for those that are still stumped at the numbers 1 through 80, I will offer small advice.  Before the listed code... Jenny said, "Can you solve the puzzle and discover what they (special words) are?"  
So how do you solve a puzzle?  By piecing it together of course.        Good luck and if my advice helps pole vault you past my progress, I expect the same help back in kind    

[zaphod73491]

IronWill: I think many people with Jenny's book have figured out the significance/purpose of the scrambled numbers from 1-80 at the back of the book. Hint: puzzle, plus 80=16x5. Stage 1. A much smaller number of people (to exclude me so far) has figured out the significance of the X's and Y's of XXX-Y. Jenny likes book codes, so I've naturally pursued that angle. There are a huge number of ways to encode the index information via chapters, pages, lines, sentences, words or even letters. Using 4 digits to encode just one letter is very inefficient, so I'm thinking the final message may have 160 letters, not 80, and each number pair encodes a digraph. At least ... that's something I'd do. ;-)

[zaphod73491]

Dec 5, 2018 14:44:16 GMT -5 Jenny said:

Dec 5, 2018 2:24:35 GMT -5 zaphod73491 said:

Onthechase: thank you for a reply! I was about to give up that anyone is paying any attention (to include Jenny, which surprised me a bit). The reason I specifically asked about the ordering is that *I* would have done it the other way around if my front-runner thoughts are correct on what's going on.

I won't beat around the bush: it looks like a modified book code to me. My assumption is that the single digit number is a chapter number (note: no zeroes), and the up-to-three digit prefix (again no zeroes) is a word number in that chapter. Trouble is, the first two main sections of Jenny's book each have 10 chapters (in both cases numbered 1-10), introducing ambiguity. That said, it seems more likely to me that it's the second section that's in play (unsolved hunts, including Fenn's).

I certainly have paid particular attention to the correction (8 vs. 9 on one dash pair), but it wasn't apparent to me that having the wrong chapter would be obvious to the solver unless the word count happened to exceed the number of words in the chapter.

I hate book codes myself: they're tedious, require little in the way of cryptanalytic skill, and have "rules" that vary widely in terms of word counting (e.g. do you count numbers such as years as "words"? Are hyphenated words 1 word or 2? How are acronyms or abbreviations handled? Include or exclude titles and/or subtitles?) However, Jenny included in her book a chapter on the Beale cipher (a total hoax by the way), and so it seems likely at least one of her puzzle challenges is a book cipher, and none of the 18 I solved was a book cipher.

Sorry Zaphod for the delay in reply.... busy last week or more....

A book cipher alone won't solve the words... there are other steps.

Thanks for the reply, Jenny! I figured you were unaware of my posts and it would have been better/faster if I had emailed you with my question directly. I'll press on!

[grlcansng]

Forgive me if I’ve posted this in the incorrect location I’ve neither purchased his or any other books so I can’t really comment on the topic however it is my belief that the treasure location had nothing to do with “NORTH of Santa Fe” and for this reason it took so long to find. In fact it is my true belief that this could be the mystery everyone is trying to decipher here it was in fact found in the canyon down from the beginning point of Armijo Springs camp ground in the ”AGUA FRIA MOUNTAIN RANGE” agua Fria in Spanish is cold water where do warm waters halt ? warm water completely stops in cold water. Before I continue, I have a question for everyone. Notice forest used “warm waters” referring to the starting point, Why didn’t he instead use “Hot Waters?” “Anyone know where I’m headed with this?”