Clue #1

[Jenny]

Clue #1 released.....


rubyhunt.us/clues/


Looks like the Pigpen cipher.... but how to fill the grids?

[stercox]

Sooo agree.  There's a twist here for sure.  If the word breaks are legit, then there are three words (line 2, line 5, line 7) that would start with three different sets of double letters.  That seems very unlikely.  This seems that it requires some serious flipping or manipulation.

[jewelie]

Even if you flip it, there is still one word that starts with double letters. Weird.

[brucewayne]

There are only 21 unique characters used. Is it likely that doubles represent a different letter?  Or that they are proper names, or possible intentionally misspelled?

Also, if it is direct replacement, there is only 1 symbol that appears on its own, and it does so twice.  It is the inverted and backwards "L" with a dot. (line 1, line 6)

There are also a limited number of 3 letter words that start and end with the same letter. (first word, line 9)


EDIT* there are 21, not 20 unique characters

[Jenny]

It does look like there is a slight 'crease' going through the middle, which could flip just half of it....

[brucewayne]

Line 1, Word 3, must be an "A" or "I" in direct replacement.

But this means there are EXTREMELY limited options for Line 9, Word 1. Basically it only leaves the options of "I" and "DID". So far that's all I can find to narrow anything down.

[Jenny]

The Square which might be a D would not change with a different orientation.... so it is puzzling that two lines up from that 3 letter word, there is a word with 3 squares in it..... and when you use the website QuipQuip www.quipqiup.com/ and put in those squares as D's, I wouldn't say a good word appears to help us out any....(unless it's something not showing up or I overlooked it)

Here is what was given... (ignore the ad space)





HOWEVER..... if a D is not a D but an S....or something...

Then we can get some good words:

Systems
Sisters
Execute
Elevate

And backwards, if the square is e, m or and s....

Extreme
maximum
spouses


I haven't worked on it further to know if any of that helps......

[jewelie]

I looked at the crease and tried reversing half of the characters, but the thing that I keep going back to is the 8th and 11th lines. There are two 3-character words on the right side of the crease. I cannot manipulate them at all, so assuming there is a straight replacement of character to letter, we have 1 2 3 and 2 3 1. Does anyone know of 2 words that would fit this code?

[brucewayne]

Well I built a letter plug-in sheet in Excel and tried everything I could think of for the single letter / double letter words. And I couldn't find a combination that formed actual words elsewhere in the document. Line 7, Word 1 is unique. Very few words in English have the pattern " X _ X _ _ _ X ". This helped eliminate a lot of possibilities. Definitely seems something more complicated than direct replacement.

@jenny
Administrator, basically I came to the same conclusion you did about limiting options because of that pattern.  I came up with the same options after trying every letter in that weird pattern.  But none of them extrapolated out to the rest of the page that I could find, unless it's backwards? (I didn't check that or more crazy complicated schemes)

[brucewayne]

There also aren't any words that are "A _ x x" or "I _ x x" .... 4 letter words with the last 2 the same letter starting with "A" or "I" that I can find. (Line 6, words 3 and 4).  This alone eliminates direct replacement as a simple solution.

[stercox]

It's kinda tough.  Traditional pigpen yielded garbage.  So then I thought a pigpen cryptogram it is, but came to the same conclusions as many of you that with double letter starts, very little bigrams or trigrams to work with, it would be exceptionally difficult to solve it that way.  A flipped or mirrored orientation has the same problems.   You can read this cipher vertically as it lends well to that orientation also, but still garbage.  So, I concluded it must be doubly encrypted.  The double letter starts could indicate a keyed caesar or Vigenere, so I ran a bunch of those referencing the prologue, this clue and the hunt generally.  Nada!   My other thought is that it looks like pigpen but has nothing to do with pigpen...like a dot, non-dot pattern, something binary perhaps?  But haven't got around to working on that yet.....

[brucewayne]

I had a similar thought and worked the binary angle for a while. I'm not saying it's not possible, but it really felt like going down the wrong way and not yielding much.

I like the concept of double encryption though... I think creases and aesthetics in the picture are non-starters and are simply what they appear to be: making it look like a distressed sheet of paper.

HOWEVER, on the double encryption... What about a pigpen style cipher with anagrams? Ridiculous to decode, but would remove the confines of the double letter starts?

[brucewayne]

Another option is that the code has its own "grammar". (a doubled up symbol stands for a single letter, or certain symbols stand for a pair of letters). I honestly think this would be harder to figure out than anagrams though, and I'm likely not going to pursue this

[jewelie]

I still keep going back to those single letters. We cannot do an anagram to make any of those an A or an I. Not to mention, the first 4 letter word has no vowels. I like ciphers that follow some kind of order and rules. If this code is one where the creator decided to use a different double cipher for every line, that will make me sad. It is just luck at that point, not skill.

[susb8383]

Could be a slight-of-hand cipher (my own term. Magicians make everyone focus on the empty hand while the other hand contains the coin). If some of the words weren’t so long, I’d think morse code where the characters with circles are dots and the plain ones are dashes.