8B
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Regarding 8B, are the ‘spurious characters’ the added ‘X’s and/or the punctuation? When you say, ‘Decryption will also produce spurious characters, and YOU MUST NOT DELETE THEM!!!!’, does that mean not to remove them (“X” and/or punctuation) when submitting the answer?
That is exactly what it means, thanks for asking. Punctuation is irrelevant but any alphabetic characters, including any padding, should be left in your answer. Harry
What edition of X XXXXXXXXX XXXXX should we be analysing?
The one we provided? Harry
@Mbellmo
Check case files for the latest update
I have solved part B but I would like to point out I think there’s an error in the case files 8.3. It says the pair DG -> EG and pair LE -> DG, but in “DEASREST GRENVILLE” (which you guys suggest in the case files), the last pair to the first is LE -> DE, however you did LE -> DG. I don’t know if this is intentional, but if not, it can be a bit misleading.
Good catch. I will ask Jodie to correct the file. Harry
Just out of curiosity – which edition of ACC is it the ciphers are using? I’ve tried every edition (got the keyword from remembering the quote from GCSE!) but couldn’t see that particular passage on P21…
What the Dickens is going on here?
I have been sitting here with the plaintext for 3 days now
trying to figure out just as to where I am suppposed to
put in some stupid x’s to get a 100 score!How insulting to Dickens, the only one with a wooden head
is the BOSS who planned the submit decrypt matching. Sorry.Just getting the clean unabigous plaintext is all that
should be required of any agent.The highest I’ve scored with a clean PT is 75%
I tried the PT with x’s put between all double letters
just like you would when composing a playfair but submitting
that gave a worse score.Unless there is a nudge of a clue as to what x’s are needed where
I’m giving up on this one. 🙁I think Harry is right it will lower the count of correct submissions.
If you just do a straight decrypt of the cipher text with the correct Playfair grid then all the padding will be included for you. Not sure why this is so hard? Harry
OK I never gave up, I finally got it.
Because I had coded my old app to remove all x’s from the
decoded plaintext it was useless for this session!As I no longer have the dev package for that app I couldn’t alter it,
so I had to write new code from scratch (using gp of course)
to perform a playfair cipher that did not remove x’s, that got me the answer.If you want to check your answer before posting it then you
can check for MD5 of 8B plaintext all uppercase no spaces
it should be:At this point an unidentified figure in a pointy hat, with pointy ears and shoes, rushed in and stole the rest of the message away. They muttered something about not giving any clues during a live challenge. Hope that makes sense. The Announcer
🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂
It’s the naughty one again isn’t it?
As tis the season of good will I’ll not report him as a thief!
😉 😉 😉 😉 😉 😉 😉 ;;) 😉 😉 😉 😉 😉 😉 😉 😉 😉 😉 ) 😉 😉Which edition have they provided? I haven’t seen them provide any edition outside of the case files.
Am I missing something, or is the key for the Playfair Grid not on page 21?
@Combination-Harvester
Looking at the case file image, it’s a pretty close match to the 1877 Boston Lee & Shepard edition. You can probably find it on Internet Archive, but I may easily be wrong. I also feel like the page numbers don’t quite match from what you’d expect having solved 8A, but I doubt that matters at this point anyway.
On the other hand it might actually be useful to think of famous Dickens’ quotes from his other works in prep for hunting for keywords!
Which edition of A Christmas Carol has been used? I can’t seem to find another edition with this on page 21 – it always seems to be later.
@BBM92
This is the closest edition I could find, the page 21 might be something for Harry to answer:
https://archive.org/details/christmascarol00dickiala/page/24/mode/2up
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