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StrickenBiged's occasional Premium givaways


StrickenBiged

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Damn, I'm making these too easy!

 

Well done @Dragon-Archon! Yes, the answer is "HOHOHOG"!

 

i suppose as a Guide Team member you don't need the Premium and will be donating it to a lucky member? 

 

Just out of interest, how many other people were having a crack at this one? How did you get on if you were trying?

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10 minutes ago, StrickenBiged said:

Damn, I'm making these too easy!

 

Well done @Dragon-Archon! Yes, the answer is "HOHOHOG"!

 

i suppose as a Guide Team member you don't need the Premium and will be donating it to a lucky member? 

 

Just out of interest, how many other people were having a crack at this one? How did you get on if you were trying?

Awesome :dance: .

 

TOO EASY :blink:!!! I spent over an hour trying to solve it. Yeah I was thinking of adding it to the New Year's Contest as a prize, would that be ok?

 

@Cyanpower and everyone else who want to know the solution, here it is:

Spoiler

i2E9w9C.png

 

Edited by Dragon-Archon
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It's a frequency analysis puzzle. Emoji, chosen deliberately to be similar and confusing, stand in place of letters and spaces. 

 

A combination of counting the frequency of each emoji and comparing to letter frequencies in English, educated guessing and trial and error will give you the message.

 

@Dragon-Archon Would you care to go through all your steps and give people the message? Y'know, if you wanted to show off? xD

Woah! Maybe put the image under a spoiler tag dude! Some people might still want to work it out! ;)

4 minutes ago, Dragon-Archon said:

Yeah I was thinking of adding it to the New Year's Contest as a prize, would that be ok?

 

Fine by me. Presumably it'd then go to the highest ranking person who isn't already a lifetime member?

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36 minutes ago, StrickenBiged said:

chosen deliberately to be similar and confusing

Why you :spank:, no wonder they looked alike :shakefist: .

 

36 minutes ago, StrickenBiged said:

It's a frequency analysis puzzle. Emoji, chosen deliberately to be similar and confusing, stand in place of letters and spaces. 

 

A combination of counting the frequency of each emoji and comparing to letter frequencies in English, educated guessing and trial and error will give you the message.

 

@Dragon-Archon Would you care to go through all your steps and give people the message? Y'know, if you wanted to show off? xD

Woah! Maybe put the image under a spoiler tag dude! Some people might still want to work it out! ;)

Why not. First I started by counting how many different smileys there were. Seeing how there were 21 kinds, I'd figured each one is supposed to represent a letter. After closer inspection the santa hat popped up after certain intervals. The intervals were different each time, so I guessed it was a space, which also formed words. Now I hoped you weren't a total sadist and included punctuation marks (which you didn't, thankfully). 

 

The next thing I did was searching for 3-letter words and found 4 of those. One of the safest words to translate is "the", so I looked at how many of those 3-letter words used the same smileys in the exact same order (which were 2). This was my starting point. After filling those three letters in the entire puzzle, I noticed a 2-letter word started with "T". The only possible letter I knew was "to", so added the "O" everywhere. With those 4 letters I started guessing possible letters for other smileys and found the letter "L" and a few options for 5 others:

  1. A / I
  2. B / H / M / W / Y
  3. B / F / M / P
  4. F / N 
  5. D / W

I tried several possibilities in letters where I already knew most of the letters and thought to have found the "R", but later realized that the puzzle could say "Nor" or "Now", so I dropped that theory after wasting about 10 minutes on it. Possibility 1 and 4 were the easiest ones to deduce by using the translated 4 letters by using the part of the puzzle that says "on the internet", which at the time said "o_ the _ _te_ _ et". That gave me the "I", "N", and "R". The first word then said "_err_" and that could either be the name "Jerry" or the word "Merry". After trying both, the second word matched "Christmas" perfectly, which gave me the letters M, Y, C, H, I, S, and A. After that it was just filling the gaps for the missing letters and google the solution to find out who Roadhog was.

 

Btw Stricken: Merry Christmas in advance to you too :highfive: .

Edited by Dragon-Archon
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  • 1 month later...

So I promised people an announcement. 

 

The announcement is that a new puzzle will go up very soon (as in, probably before the weekend, but if not very soon afterwards). I have the puzzle all planned out, it's just the execution is taking a little longer than I'd hoped.

 

Just a bump for the thread for now then - sub if you want to be notified when the puzzle goes live, which should be my next post. 

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1 hour ago, StrickenBiged said:

Puzzle finished. Just need to check that it's solvable and then it'll go up, probably tomorrow (Friday). 

 

I'm looking forward to seeing how you get on with this one, it's a doozy!

 

Put it up anyway, even if it's not solvable. That'll be quite the challenge for some of us!

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God-damn! A winner so soon!

 

@Komrade_Konrad - I bet I spent longer writing the damn puzzle than you did in solving it! xD 

 

I'm guessing you'd like the prize to go to yourself? 

 

Why not show off and explain the puzzle (behind spoiler tags in case anyone is still working on it) and just confirm for me that you'd like the prize and I'll get it done for you. 

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9 minutes ago, StrickenBiged said:

God-damn! A winner so soon!

 

Sorry, I just saw your status and my knew that I had a chance to win if I was quick. :lol: 

 

Plus I'm doing other work right now, so anything to get out of that.

 

Thanks, @Danny_Johansen!  I know, so much beating around the bush lol.

Edited by Komrade_Konrad
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35 minutes ago, StrickenBiged said:

God-damn! A winner so soon!

 

@Komrade_Konrad - I bet I spent longer writing the damn puzzle than you did in solving it! xD 

 

I'm guessing you'd like the prize to go to yourself? 

 

Why not show off and explain the puzzle (behind spoiler tags in case anyone is still working on it) and just confirm for me that you'd like the prize and I'll get it done for you. 

 

Haha I'm sure you did!  Did you have a program for that or did you have to do it manually?

 

Puzzle solution below:

Spoiler

The key to this puzzle is the degree of rotation of the letters. Letters were rotated either -90, -45, 0, +45, or +90 degrees which correspond to "true" letters being +2, +1, 0, -1, or -2 off of what the shown letter was.  Once you know how to solve each letter, it becomes easier to see that the messages are written top to bottom and left to right.  For example the first word in the first column is "DID".  For those of you who don't want to go through the effort of transcribing it, the full message (with some added capitalization and punctuation) was:

 

"Did you know that these puzzles take quite a lot of work to construct?  To win this one you need to give me the password.  The password is quite simple.  All I want to know is the answer to one question.  Enough teasing.  The question you must answer is 'what city was Elena Fisher writing an article about in Uncharted Four?'"

 

And yes, I would very much like a year of premium.  Thanks for doing this awesome event!  I look forward to the next one :yay:

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1 hour ago, Komrade_Konrad said:

Did you have a program for that or did you have to do it manually?

 

I started off doing it a really slow way in Word, where I had to make a text box (i.e. not normal text) for each letter and rotate individually. It was taking ages!

 

Then I realised I could put the message in Excel instead, and rotate them in there by selecting multiple cells at once, although then I was limited to +/- 90 degrees. My original intention was to do all the rotations clockwise using 45 degree incremements.

 

May I ask, have you seen this kind of cypher before? The first time I saw it it took me weeks of looking at it before I had my "aha!" moment and knew what to do. 

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Just now, Dragon-Archon said:

How do you come up with these puzzles?

 

Usually they're based on puzzles that I've done myself. 

 

I thought this one would be a bit harder, as I had to stare at something similar for hours before I saw the way to solve it. I guess nothing survives long on the internet!

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39 minutes ago, StrickenBiged said:

 

I started off doing it a really slow way in Word, where I had to make a text box (i.e. not normal text) for each letter and rotate individually. It was taking ages!

 

Then I realised I could put the message in Excel instead, and rotate them in there by selecting multiple cells at once, although then I was limited to +/- 90 degrees. My original intention was to do all the rotations clockwise using 45 degree incremements.

 

May I ask, have you seen this kind of cypher before? The first time I saw it it took me weeks of looking at it before I had my "aha!" moment and knew what to do. 

 

I have never seen this cypher before, but the way to is presented gives away that it contains words most likely from up to down or maybe vice versa. I had a project on cypher methods and in the middles ages it was common to rotate letters in the alphabet by splitting a long distant message into 2. So it was the first thing that I thought about. The smallest rotation is 45 degree so I started by making that equal to 1 and 90 degree to 2. The first word had 2 option but I wasn't sure if rotating past the A-Z was an option so first I went with B->D. Other options I considered if it wasn't the cause were shifting it +1, +2, or x2, x3. If all that didn't work the position could also play a roll in the cypher, the first letter gets +1, second +2, etc. Since the first option gave a legit word, other options didn't have to try out.

 

One thing that gave me trouble were the letters O, I, X because I didn't know how to rotate them.

Edited by Danny_Johansen
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2 hours ago, Mcbeanstr said:

Count me in for future puzzles

 

Definitely. I can see that you subbed so hopefully you'll be on next time I post something. I try to do them monthly-ish.  

 

I think I'll go for more of a riddle next time - much less time to make than a puzzle/crypto!

2 hours ago, Danny_Johansen said:

One thing that gave me trouble were the letters O, I, X because I didn't know how to rotate them.

 

I tried a few different fonts to see if there was one where they weren't so symmetrical, but then decided it added another layer of difficulty to leave them ambiguous. 

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7 hours ago, StrickenBiged said:

 

I started off doing it a really slow way in Word, where I had to make a text box (i.e. not normal text) for each letter and rotate individually. It was taking ages!

 

Then I realised I could put the message in Excel instead, and rotate them in there by selecting multiple cells at once, although then I was limited to +/- 90 degrees. My original intention was to do all the rotations clockwise using 45 degree incremements.

 

May I ask, have you seen this kind of cypher before? The first time I saw it it took me weeks of looking at it before I had my "aha!" moment and knew what to do. 

 

I hadn't seen this type of cypher before; I just think I'm pretty good at pattern recognition and I've seen other cyphers in the past.  What would have been particularly brutal is if the rotation had nothing to do with the cypher.  Security through obfuscation :)

 

If you ever want to do a puzzle that (I hope) is particularly brutal, I've been been thinking about an encryption for a while that I don't expect would get solved.  That said, it should be solvable, the implementation that I'm thinking of doesn't use a key like a book cypher or anything like that.  I'm curious to know if it's brute forceable through frequency analysis.

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  • 4 weeks later...

I'm wondering how you're all going to get on with this one... Hopefully some of you will see what to do. Maybe I've finally come up with something that will keep you occupied for more than an hour? xD

 

I'm going to be away from my PC for a few hours now, but I'll check in on mobile to see how things are going. 

 

(There are no clues in this post by the way, don't waste your time trying to analyse it. ;))

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