> Okay folks, I've been mostly in lurk mode, but it's time to talk.

Shame shame :)

[snip]

> The first problem I see at work with our conceptual approach is that we're
> NOT LISTENING TO CHELSEA. Chelsea Bridge has been giving us clues all
> along, and we should be paying attention. We're taking the clues into
> consideration, certainly, but not closely enough, methinks. CB's latest
> message to the Story page AGAIN makes mention of "three rooms,"
> "three locks." We should be all over that. Does that mean that
> the seven dials will somehow give us three answers? What three answers?

Maybe it means (and for some reason, whenever someone posts their feelings on this, like you just did, I can't tell if they're saying the same thing I'm about to say) that the 7 glyphs actually hold 3 seperate but linked answers. Meaning, figure out one puzzle and you have the basis for the next puzzle, and then from that you can figure out the last puzzle. So, e.g., the outer numbers around the glyphs don't have anything to do with the middle glyphs YET, until we solve the middle glyphs FIRST. Or vice versa. And once those are done, then we put them both together or something and come up with the third answer.

> It's pretty hard to look for an answer when you don't know what the
> question is. In this case, finding out what the question is is part of the
> challenge. CB and Claude have posted maybe twenty messages since this
> thing began. I wish that all of those, no matter how trivial, were all
> assembled in one place so that we could refer to them. In our search, CE
> and CB's words are of paramount importance, because they know the answers.
> So -- could someone has brains, time, and a decent Internet connection (I
> lack all three) consider volunteering to hunt for every single CB and CE
> post on the subject, and assemble them in one place? I for one would be
> extremely grateful. Hip's page has been invaluable, but we can't expect
> him to do EVERYTHING for us...

I thought Hip had most of them down; he just updated the page a few hours ago, you should check it out.

> Once it's all in one place, I bet that passing a fine comb through this
> text will help us. (Putting it all together will certainly help the old
> timers like myself, whose memory is fading by the minute...) :) And this
> brings me to my second point, POE.

> I've read several very insightful posts that link the Glyphs deep within
> Marathon, PiD, etc. I read, somewhere, a post where Claude stated that the
> goal resided within Marathon (goal=reward), but that the PROCESS of
> getting there was NOT related to Marathon. (Claude, if your'e reading
> this, could you confirm/deny/no comment on the alleged post please?)

He doesn't need to, I've already stated his stating it before elsewhere in this forum.

> If
> that's the case, fine. As much as I love digging deep within Marathon's
> terminals, if the solution to the glyphs ain't there, great, END OF STORY,
> both Chelsea and Claude know the solution, I don't, so I can focus on
> something else. In other words, let's put to work my old Classics
> professor's second favorite methodology for figuring out reduplicating
> perfect verbs in ancient Greek, PROCESS OF ELIMINATION. (Could you believe
> it, Keep It Simple Stupid was his first) In other words, we've been
> working hard at BUILDING theories, let's see which ones we can agree on
> ELIMINATING, that'll leave fewer paths for us to concentrate on. One last
> word -- can it be CONFIRMED, once and for all, that the Mayan numeral on
> G7 is indeed 74 and NOT 3141? I've read in a few places that Claude
> confirmed this to someone. Can we settle on this, once and for all?

YES, THE MIDDLE GLYPH in CIRCLE 7 IS INDEED "74" !!!!

> Keeping KISS and POE in mind brings me to my third point. I know of
> several Marathon players who look for secret doors/areas not by hitting
> every wall they see, but by anticipating where a mapmaker might place it.
> To note two, Fm has his style of mapmaking, so does Greg K. Sure, you can
> hit your action key at every wall you see, and you'll eventually come up
> with all the secret areas, but it might be quicker to try and place
> yourself in the mapmaker's shoes for a moment, and think "where is
> the secret room." That said, I would have NEVER discovered the secret
> term on Smells like Napalm if it weren't for the MSG. :) Nevertheless,
> despite my lack of expertise finding secrets, I know that there are many
> here who can and have, so allow me to propose the following:

> •The glyphs were placed a long time ago on Bungie.org's site, in the hopes
> that someone would notice them, get intrigued, and get "hooked."

> How do you get someone "hooked?"

> •In order to get "hooked," anyone reading the Glyphs would have
> to solve one or two of them and KNOW (this is crucial) that he/she was on
> the right track. I think that at this point, the only thing we know for
> sure is that the Mayan numeral on G7 is 74.

> How do you tell someone they're on the right track in this kind of puzzle?

> •Either with numbers or letters. With numbers, you'd provide the solver
> with a recognizable pattern. Folks, we have pulled these numbers apart,
> we've twisted them, reduced them, serialized them, turned them into
> letters, ASCII, hex, and that's just the beginning. Two nights ago, I
> actually made a table of numbers based on 7, i.e., 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7,
> 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 20, etc. (My reasoning was for G2, with 32
> over 7/10ths. Using this system, counting to thirty two gives you twenty
> six numbers, the exact amount to create an alphabet table). But that's
> silly. As someone pointed out, we need to focus on the inner picts. Once
> we solve a few of those, perhaps the uses of the outside numbers will
> become apparent. Until then, we've neither the software, the hardware, or
> the decryption experience necesary to perform the kind of number crunching
> that's needed to work with those numbers and so many unknowns. More
> importantly, CHELSEA TOLD US in a post "If only I were more
> mathematical..."

AGREED! I say stop unnecessarily trying to push the outer numbers around until we force them to make sense. We're not there yet. IMHO.

> No. I think that the way for us to get on the track is think letters,
> think words. There's always a way to convert numbers (I'm thinking of 32
> and 74) into words (CB? GD?), and words (Threonine) into numbers (309)
> then back into words (C0I). The immense advantage there is that we'll know
> when we're wrong right away. For instance, once of the things that I
> played with for a while was to try and simplify the glyphs into a
> sentence, starting with G1 = "I see" (I C). The whole sentence
> read something like "I see 32 (bars? degrees?) East South East
> Threonine (amino? 309?)..." etc.

Very smart, I like what you're coming up with.

> Let's plug away and see what we come up with. Let's make the numbers make
> letters, make the letters make words, and the words will tell us when
> we're wrong, and when we're right.

Great post!!