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Some thoughts

Posted By: Luigi <lorsina@mac.com>
Date: 14 June 2001, 07:51

Once again, a question: how were the puzzles conceived?

Which one was the first? The pictures inside the glyphs, the coding of the word ARRIVAL by ROT-16, or the numbers in the glyphs?
Observe that every glyph-puzzle can be changed in order to have a different letter as answer:

G1: could encode the whole alphabet
G2: could encode B C D E F G H
G3: could encode up to 16 letters (ESE SE SSE S SSW SW and so on)
G4: one of the four ACGT
G5: any letter (it *was* a letter, after all!)
G6: any line in the New York subway...
G7: any letter corresponding to an element

Thus, the authors had several degrees of freedom in order to choose the base for the ROT operation to apply to ARRIVAL (look, they even set up some fake http addresses for them...), and probably they choose the one who gave G3 = C, or a letter that could be encoded by G3 (for example, K = 11 could be encoded by ENE in the same way).

If this is the case, it may mean that they had already placed the numbers around the center pictures... i.e., that the puzzle of the 56 numbers must be not related to the others. In other words, it could be independent on the number 7 (the letters of ARRIVAL), so that looking *only* for a user/pass of 7 letters may be useless.

OK: I'm only giving other problems, and not solutions... As for the Beale cipher, the problem is always that of finding the text; I've a suggestion, and two problems.

1) Since everything up to now is Marathon-unrelated, could the text be one of the postings of Chelsea? Unfortunately, none of them I saw has at least 114 words...
2) If a Beale cipher has been used, how come the numbers are not 'equally spaced' in the interval [0,113]?
3) If it's a Beale cipher, why use 15 to times in a row? Could it be that we have to read the numbers in another order?

That's it...

Luigi

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