Re: Cryptomania
 

Don't worry about that, your masks seems to be right. i.e: as far as you made it: yellow+blue+red=black. No colour at all= white

When I realized brown wouldn't do I thought RGB would be a nice alternative, but I wanted to swap black and white because.... just because :cheesy: but it made me make a lot of mistakes, I'm not used to it, so I changed to RYB... and I thougth I had swapped black and white again! But I've checked it. Now I'm sure. I did it right. So your masks are correct... and also are mine (provided I didn't make any mistakes when ordering the dots... of that I'm not so sure :embarasse)

Re: Cryptomania
 

Looks as if it is triply encoded :)? I might be a step closer now



[edit] first attempt :)

Re: Cryptomania
 

You have the right letters.... but I'd say it's not quite the right order :tongue:

ahhh! Didn't see your edit. Now it's right!
Attachment 71873

(Now you only have to find out whether I made mistakes or not....:rolleyes:)
[second edit] The messed up Y is probably my fault, I thought what to do, had the idea, looked for a sentence, shifted if, transformed it to braille and made the image in about an hour...

Re: Cryptomania
 

Very nice code, would love to see a spy working through his messages with that one :lol:

Re: Cryptomania
 

I'd rather see them counting the "holes" in the o's, e's and g's.... :tongue:
I guess all their sophisticated decryption machines wouldn't help them much with our crazy ideas about encryption :tongue:

Re: Cryptomania
 

I have an idea for another one, but that will take a bit of work so in the mean time I'll give you this one:



You only get one shot at it, but don't worry: it should be easy if you play fair ;)!

Re: Cryptomania
 

Although the hint suggests a playfair cipher, after inspection of the text I think that's not it - the text includes all 26 letters (as opposed to a 25-letter playfair alphabet).
However, you could have used a kind of dynamic playfair, where the alphabet gets rebuilt after each step, but I don't know of any standardized algorithm of such an augmented playfair version.
Needs some more investigation...

Re: Cryptomania
 

An unintended interpretation of the hint (didn't think of the fact that there was a cipher of that name :)), it's a more 'direct' hint I think (and there's another hint as well).

Re: Cryptomania
 

Wow, that was tough. Luckily your pad wasn't random binary...

[EDIT]
Before I forget... this is the 'key':

Re: Cryptomania
 

The key of course being a quote from here and the text a quote from wiki ;).

Your turn :jossun:

Re: Cryptomania
 

I haven't understood totally what to do or how to do it, but working letter by letter changing the key each time seems a lot of work, I stopped doing Bolaf's domino after just a few words and a lot of mistakes. How do you manage???
(On second thoughts: If there's a way of programming excel - for instance- to shift each letter you enter I don't really need the explanation.... I wouldn't understand it, either :frown:)

Re: Cryptomania
 

That wiki page shows what's involved, but I do it the lazy spy's way ;)

Re: Cryptomania
 

Let's look at mysterious objects...


Attachment 71922

Re: Cryptomania
 

I don't know whether to investigate atbash ciphers made of pictures.... or send an email to olivia :tongue:

(I'm in the middle of a Board of Directors Meeting, I'll think about it when I've done translating all its members)

[edit] aaaarrrghhh! I've just realized the hand has 6 fingers!!!!

Re: Cryptomania
 

:nod: Bonus for spotting the atbash hint.

Re: Cryptomania
 

Atbash suggests mirroring (seahorse) but it looks like there is some rotation (hand, daisy) involved as well :thinking:..

Re: Cryptomania
 

The visual appearence of these symbols isn't affected by Atbash.

[EDIT]
You might as well replace them with ordinary letters. In earnest, you should do that ;)

Re: Cryptomania
 

I'm still in the middle of a BoD meeting... but yes, that's what I thought of doing yesterday, in order to apply mi fav technique:
Attachment 71985

Unfortunately the Directors decided to eat some sandwiches inside a windfarm.... so I couldn't even try. But, now that I know it was a good idea, I'll try it later... and I'll come back either with a lot of questions/doubts or simply crying :rolleyes:

Re: Cryptomania
 

... fav technique ...
If you want to be brutal, I'm cool with that. Though you don't need to (this symbol font wasn't made up by me; it exists).

Re: Cryptomania
 

Never thought of looking for a font :lol:! But it has to do with some TV series, apparently.

And there is more to them than you notice at first sight :lol:

Re: Cryptomania
 

:nod: Bonus for revealing the symbols. And disclosing the Olivia connection, by the way.

Now you've been digging deep enough - who wants to raise the treasure?

Re: Cryptomania
 

RMXLNKIVSVMHRYOVMVHH = incomprehensibleness ;)

Re: Cryptomania
 

:arms: show us your (hopefully comprehensible) mystery, Hel :jossun:

Re: Cryptomania
 

I hope I didn't overdo it :biggrin:!

OCKIIAOOI
ILKDLILIO
IKIALLIOO
OCOIIAOOI
LKCDKOODL
KLLIAOLLI
OOOCLIALL
IOOOCOIIA
OKILKIKOC

Re: Cryptomania
 

-The curtain raises-
[Background music: As Time goes by can be heard along the whole play]
Bolaf: Is that "Bruja"?
Bruja (in a black mood): That hand has only four fingers!
-The curtain comes down-

mmmm.... Samuel Beckett, maybe?

I'll have to use all my two clever neurons to make sense of that, let's picture myself while pondering the clues:

Re: Cryptomania
 

That's not exactly what Bolaf said - so not really your answer either ;)

Re: Cryptomania
 

Mmmmm...
So Bolaf asked: what does "bruja" mean?
And then I answered: Someone who uses black magic to steal thumbs.

And I must have stolen a lot of them... I'm all thumbs :frown:

Re: Cryptomania
 

Not really, he already knows, but being Bolaf he says......?

Re: Cryptomania
 

Bolaf: Hexe?
Bruja: Four digits!!

Let's not forget the other clue, to be read like this:

Attachment 72031 Attachment 72032 Attachment 72033

[edit] In fact, in order to be consistent, my answer should be:
Cuatro dedos!!

Re: Cryptomania
 

Bonus point for the 1st clue :bow: (I did check whether 'digitos/digitas/digites' etc. was word so it would 'really' fit, but I figured it would have to do :lol:)

Re: Cryptomania
 

As always, I was fetching too far: thought of asking "what about hex E?" (which is '1110'), and Bruja answered "has 4 digits". Anyway, I didn't believe that hint 1 merely says '4 digits' - you could as well have shown but the 4-fingered hand, without the Bolaf/Bruja conversation frame.

As for the crypted text:
- Length is 81 letters; hence groups of 3 come to mind, making the solution consist of 27 groups/symbols, technically a cryptogram.
- We see 7 distinct letters (ACDIKLO). Wondered whether they have a special meaning here - or could be any 7 diverse letters.
- Though being unsure about that '4 digits'-clue, I replaced the letters with binary symbols (using the lowest 4 digits of the ASCII/position values)...

... to get a nice digital grid. Apart from the fact that the leftmost column is all '1', I couldn't find promising patterns in either representation (visual, groups of 5/6, etc) so far.

... seen and heard ... [in the video]
Hmmm, we hear that song of course, but it can't be actually seen. The only elements we see and hear are the persons apparently. Is it about the characters (Sam, Elsa, Rick, Lazlo, Renault)? Or just Rick's Cafe?

Re: Cryptomania
 

:lol: I could have used myself - in Dutch, it's 'heks', sounds basically the same - but of course your avatar was more appropriate, except I never thought of the E=14 number that could be confusing ;)

You have the right idea in combining the 'hex' clue with '4 digits', but I implemented it in a different way to get another grid. 9x9=81 was just the nicest way of representing it here (and a good thing I chose to do that, because when working 'backwards' from it, it made me realize I had made a slight mistake, which would have made the second decryption all but impossible - but that aside :biggrin:!)

Yep, the hint refers to one of the characters.

Re: Cryptomania
 

You still haven't told anything about those exact letters (ACDIKLO) and their odd quantity 7. I don't think you've chosen them arbitrarily, but couldn't spot the underlying system yet.
At least I noticed that the 'A' is preceded by 'I' in all (6) occurrences - looks like a side-effect of your algorithm (likewise the 'LK' and 'LLI' sequences).
I'm curious if Bruja has her own ideas about this rather incomprehensible mystery...

Re: Cryptomania
 

Those actual 7 letters are fairly accidental, just what the code worked out to be. There are other letters that ccould have been part of the code there - though there are also a lot of letters that could not have occurred there. I looked back, and the IA combination is indeed not totally accidental. LK and LLI are accidental I think.

Re: Cryptomania
 

Bruja was busy trying to understand what you asked and what she answered....
And I still don't know what to do with the hex / digits clue. I'll have to read about hex. Attachment 72076

-Second Act-
[The piano guy has left, so no music can be heard]
Bolaf (deeply shocked by Bruja's words): Weißt du nicht, was "hex" ist?
Bruja (even more deeply embarrased): Puesss... no mucho.
[Exeunt]

Re: Cryptomania
 

Reading about hex would help ;)

Re: Cryptomania
 

Using IA as a separator to split the text yields 7 lines:

O CKI
(IA)
OO I ILK DLILIOIK
(IA)
LLIOOOC OI
(IA)
OO ILK CDKOODLKLL
(IA)
O LLIOOOC L
(IA)
LLIOOOC OI
(IA)
O K ILK IKOC

Observations:
- Two of them are identical (LLIOOOC OI) and a third contains the sub-pattern LLIOOOC.
- The other (5 non-identical) lines all start with O or OO.
- The pattern ILK emerges 3 times.

A hexadecimal representation is involved?

Re: Cryptomania
 

Using separation marks is probably a good idea, but not this early in the game: you have to deal with the letters first. There is no 'conscious' pattern in the letter grouping, though there is some repetition in the original text which may have caused some repetition in the code.

And yes, a hexadecimal representation is involved - sort of ;). Think about Bruja's clue!

Re: Cryptomania
 

So we're talking about 4 hex-digits?

Re: Cryptomania
 

I'm not sure what you mean by a hex-digit?

Re: Cryptomania
 

Glad to hear that... I wasn't too sure, either. :cheesy:
Truth is I must admit I'm totally in the dark here. I'm waiting for Bolaf to come with a clever idea about how to start, then I'll see whether I can contribute a bit. I'm just no good at maths.