Clue

[justsomerando]

I'm going to thank both Jenny and Fools Gold for their work. I think the quote was worth the effort, and even if it wasn't, I still enjoyed the work that I did (script an unfruitful brute force attack) in the end.

[cw]

foolsgold -

Once I figured out you used (13 22 26 35 38 8 42 47 56 2 32 45 19 53 61 69 33 72 12 46 23 4 16 30 41 50 31 6 21 39 55 9 57 71 44 14 60 78 25 18 1 52 65 75 24 70 79 80 29 37 28 49 10 54 59 15 40 62 68 43 11 51 74 76 17 64 20 67 34 48 36 58 3 66 63 7 73 77 27 5), I was able to replicate the phrase.

How did you arrive at (13 22 26 35 38 8 42 47 56 2 32 45 19 53 61 69 33 72 12 46 23 4 16 30 41 50 31 6 21 39 55 9 57 71 44 14 60 78 25 18 1 52 65 75 24 70 79 80 29 37 28 49 10 54 59 15 40 62 68 43 11 51 74 76 17 64 20 67 34 48 36 58 3 66 63 7 73 77 27 5) for the order? Just curious.

[foolsgold]

Sequences are reciprocal and I did try to explain them briefly above.

As a matter of fact I actually used (41 10 73 22 80 28 76 6 32 53 61 19 1 36 56 23 65 40 13 67 29 2 21 45 39 3 79 51 49 24 27 11 17 69 4 71 50 5 30 57 25 7 60 35 12 20 8 70 52 26 62 42 14 54 31 9 33 72 55 37 15 58 75 66 43 74 68 59 16 46 34 18 77 63 44 64 78 38 47 48).


If you paste the decrypted Vigenere string parallel to the numeric sequence, it will result in pairs:

_L_N__O_T__U
41 10 73 22 80

First letter L goes into position 41 of the final decoded text. So, N becomes the 10th letter of the phrase, 0 - 73rd, T - 22nd, U - 80th...


Conversely, in the numeric sequence, number 1 is in the 13th postion, # 2 - 22nd, # 3 - 26th, # 4 - 35th, # 5 - 38th...


Relationship between these 2 sequences are easy to visualize in Excel if you make 3 columns:


1 41 13
2 10 22
3 73 26
4 22 35
5 80 38
... .. ..
80 48 5

Now, sorting by each column will flip the sequences. Does it make sense or is it still confusing?

If interested, I am attaching an .RTF document file I used as a scratch pad in deciphering.
I was doing it from my home computer that didn't have Office / Excel on it, so I did it old school.

Attachments:

Coded.rtf (1.76 KB)

[cw]

Gotcha. No more confusion.

Thanks!

[heidini]

Apr 7, 2019 11:57:37 GMT -5 foolsgold said:

Sequences are reciprocal and I did try to explain them briefly above.

As a matter of fact I actually used (41 10 73 22 80 28 76 6 32 53 61 19 1 36 56 23 65 40 13 67 29 2 21 45 39 3 79 51 49 24 27 11 17 69 4 71 50 5 30 57 25 7 60 35 12 20 8 70 52 26 62 42 14 54 31 9 33 72 55 37 15 58 75 66 43 74 68 59 16 46 34 18 77 63 44 64 78 38 47 48).


If you paste the decrypted Vigenere string parallel to the numeric sequence, it will result in pairs:

_L_N__O_T__U
41 10 73 22 80

First letter L goes into position 41 of the final decoded text. So, N becomes the 10th letter of the phrase, 0 - 73rd, T - 22nd, U - 80th...


Conversely, in the numeric sequence, number 1 is in the 13th postion, # 2 - 22nd, # 3 - 26th, # 4 - 35th, # 5 - 38th...


Relationship between these 2 sequences are easy to visualize in Excel if you make 3 columns:


1 41 13
2 10 22
3 73 26
4 22 35
5 80 38
... .. ..
80 48 5

Now, sorting by each column will flip the sequences. Does it make sense or is it still confusing?

If interested, I am attaching an .RTF document file I used as a scratch pad in deciphering.
I was doing it from my home computer that didn't have Office / Excel on it, so I did it old school.

So you solved it? Wow!

[mcb]

Apr 7, 2019 12:34:34 GMT -5 heidini said:

Apr 7, 2019 11:57:37 GMT -5 foolsgold said:

Sequences are reciprocal and I did try to explain them briefly above.

As a matter of fact I actually used (41 10 73 22 80 28 76 6 32 53 61 19 1 36 56 23 65 40 13 67 29 2 21 45 39 3 79 51 49 24 27 11 17 69 4 71 50 5 30 57 25 7 60 35 12 20 8 70 52 26 62 42 14 54 31 9 33 72 55 37 15 58 75 66 43 74 68 59 16 46 34 18 77 63 44 64 78 38 47 48).


If you paste the decrypted Vigenere string parallel to the numeric sequence, it will result in pairs:

_L_N__O_T__U
41 10 73 22 80

First letter L goes into position 41 of the final decoded text. So, N becomes the 10th letter of the phrase, 0 - 73rd, T - 22nd, U - 80th...


Conversely, in the numeric sequence, number 1 is in the 13th postion, # 2 - 22nd, # 3 - 26th, # 4 - 35th, # 5 - 38th...


Relationship between these 2 sequences are easy to visualize in Excel if you make 3 columns:


1 41 13
2 10 22
3 73 26
4 22 35
5 80 38
... .. ..
80 48 5

Now, sorting by each column will flip the sequences. Does it make sense or is it still confusing?

If interested, I am attaching an .RTF document file I used as a scratch pad in deciphering.
I was doing it from my home computer that didn't have Office / Excel on it, so I did it old school.

So you solved it? Wow!

codigojenny.xls (15 KB)

Just sort the two rows in ascending order, based on the first row.

[fennster]

I wonder if this could be referring to the big X I saw on the side of my blaze?

[ironwill]

Apr 7, 2019 12:46:53 GMT -5 mcb said:

Apr 7, 2019 12:34:34 GMT -5 heidini said:

So you solved it? Wow!

Just sort the two rows in ascending order, based on the first row.

Nice job dude!  I am impressed with your skills    

I can confirm the decoded message to be  "If you are in the right spot, something you probably haven't thought about, should be obvious to you."

And it does match the book code.  I reverse engineered his xcel positions then ran them through the Vigenere online tool to confirm they are correct.

Once again nice job


OH!   Okay its Fools Gold who solved it... MCB just passed it on.   GRATS FOOLSGOLD!

[cw]

fennster,

I've been active with TTOTC since late 2012. Now, that doesn't mean I am any more correct in my logic than the next person, but I have come to the conclusion after 6 years of rumination that the blaze is not the last clue. For example, one could imagine that "but tarry scant with marvel gaze" could mean a sign that says "please touch". Philsophically, I'm sure you can see the connections to the book.

From a physical sense, this wouldn't be hard for f to do. He has experience casting bronze. Who's to say he didn't cast a bronze sign/medallion/placard that could be permanently attached to some boulder/rock wall/whatever.

Also, it would put the chest a short distance away from the blaze, while keeping the average searcher's attention focused on the blaze due to the wording of the poem.

[zaphod73491]

Congrats, Foolsgold! Since Jenny's keyphrase was included among my candidate test phrases, I was curious to understand how my code failed to find it. The answer is that the incidence of coincidence (IoC) of Forrest's phrase actually scores relatively low against English. I filtered out anything under 6%, while Forrest's phrase scores 5.93%. The reason for the low score is that there are only 5 E's in Forrest's 80 letters -- about half what typical English would have. Lesson learned: be conservative when making statistical assumptions about comparatively short phrases.

And now, to see what I can make of Forrest's phrase relative to my poem solution...

[fennster]

Well, I'd also say that there is something with my blaze that is a direct call out to the chest. Which when I discovered this, I was certain I was going in the right direction.

I was hoping that the clue would share something a bit more, but that is ok. I guess it just means I have to trust my solve and go back again.

[foolsgold]

Thanks, Zaph.

I know what you're politely not saying and I will have to agree. Lucky guess.

But I also did analyze and think and adapted to failed attempts.

I also understand what you're saying.

When I first decoded characters 27-52 (I believe, on my second try as first time I didn't include "New Mexico"), the result which you can see in my previous posts had a bunch of O's and just one E, I believe.

I was sceptical but continued to check the result against the neighboring numerical positions. I believe the trigram HOU led me to try expanding the key to the left and to see if it would reveal plausible text.

Main tools I used was the French site Vigenere decoder, word letter counter site and some Word descrambler site that allowed wildcard masking.

[harrytruman]

Apr 7, 2019 5:41:28 GMT -5 foolsgold said:

"If you are in the right spot something you probably havent thought about should be obvious to you"


Enjoy!

This is awesome -- congrats to foolsgold!

Maybe I could have figured out the keyphrase some day, but even with Jenny's hint it would have taken many more weeks, if not months. (It's on p. 57 and "hidden" would have suggested it, with the fifth word, "Rocky" also being "hidden." But even the 52-letter phrase is several words removed from what Forrest actually wrote in TTOTC.)

Still, this method was much faster, and it makes me wonder even more how the first person who figured it out (and GeneticBlend) did so....

Anyway, many thanks for giving the rest of us a present on your own birthday! And thanks to Jenny for having the idea to get this message from Forrest! (And thanks to Forrest for providing it!)

It might not seem helpful to those who have not made it to "the right spot," mentally and/or physically. But I find it very, very helpful....

[zaphod73491]

Hi Foolsgold: "Thanks, Zaph. I know what you're politely not saying and I will have to agree. Lucky guess."

Oh, I wasn't thinking that at all -- you took the same logical, analytical approach that I did: knowing that at least 25 letters were identical between Jenny's phrase and the original phrase. But rather than shotgun the problem by trying hundreds of candidate phrases in all positions (like I did), you stuck with what you thought was the most likely phrase, assumed that the ending had not been altered, and applied it specifically to positions 27-52 (26 letters). You then took it a step further by descrambling the resulting letters, hoping for some digraphs or trigraphs in the final message where you could reason out some of the missing letters. That in turn would give you more letters in Jenny's keyphrase, and you could continue to ping-pong back and forth that way.

What's interesting is that there are 26-letter candidate keyphrases that generate better matches to English letter frequencies than the one Jenny actually used. ;-)

[zaphod73491]

A pretty coincidental red herring that my code found was "KEYS UNLOCK". If you plug that in as the beginning of Jenny's keyphrase (letters 1-10) and then again at positions 53-62, you will get:

IRTEEHAAIA and OLLTYIAOSI

That's a better match to English than the actual solution:

LNOTUHTAYG and RHGIOITOIO