Challenge 10B
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Thanks for CF 10.3 Harry – the ‘gears in my mind’ are certainly turning (or should that be Ternan?) [Ouch, bad pun. Harry] now. Just need to work out what substitutes were!
Merry Christmas, and good luck to all fellow cipherers!
Harry, have I figured something out? – TRUE or FALSE…
Same
Can this (or a modified version of it) be posted as a hint later on?:
Current affairs!!Not sure this is a hint as such! Perhaps just reading too much into it? Tolkien complained when people started reading LotR as a parable of the Second World War. Can’t claim to be in the same league, but perhaps in the same situation. Harry
Re #114599 @Crackerjack_404
> I think Harry might be more evil than Madness given the final challenge this year
Ha ha ha ha ha ha. Maybe you’re just not playing with a full deck. Ha ha ha ha …….
@Geo_addict
You could assume one of your conjectures to be true and then experiment on a section of ciphertext and see if the output leads to something implausible, bit like a proof by contradiction. I’ve found that ruling things out as a way of making progress worked better than trying to find the key and solving it all at once. Each discarded hypothesis shrinks the space even if no key has been found yet, and once you narrow down enough options, you can then write a programming script to test out the final few possibilities and more or less brute force it. Writing some things down on some squared paper might be helpful!
Feel free to blur antything out in this post but i have a feeling this has smn to do with cards 8 letters total all relevant to cards (Ace, Spades ,Clubs, Diamonds, king, queen, jack, hearts) with numbers 2-9 so maybe the x is 10 like in toman numerals i think but even then i dont think its just a solitare cipher as u get a bunch of gibberish. Also would not be suprised is Puzzling_Pelicans have got it already if they have fair play to them they have been doing rlly well this year
I’ve gone so far as to shuffle my own deck of cards to spot any patterns and still nothing 🙁 Must’ve been at it for 12 hours now and to me its insane how quick the time flies by as well as the number of things being carried out on my computer!
For anyone struggling to make any headway, I would say that before doing anything with cards, you must always shuffle and cut your deck!
The numbers have an interval, but not quite. Sometimes, there is a letter. I think you have all seen the thing being used in this cipher, even played it…
Hoping this isn’t too much to say, but we have already been told about the first step…
I’m referencing https://www.cipherchallenge.org/your-standard-boss-field-kit/, where it says regarding a deck of cards: “This item is important. Remember it. Deck. Cards.”
Could it be a card-base cipher due to the characters in the ciphertext?
We (father and son (age 13) team) wrote down some thoughts well before the first clue was revealed and they have not yet appeared on the forum…we’re taking that as a hint that those might well be good ideas! Having said that, after that point we’ve been stumped for the last few days. We think what we originally found is too much of a coincidence to not be significant in some way, though we are struggling to find what way!
We see the “REPORT” crib idea (from CF 10.2) and if you just read the ciphertext from left to right it’s clear that “7C” (7 of clubs) ties to the letter “R”…but (1) after that it’s really not obvious how to guess at other letters and using a hill climb approach has not yielded anything useful thus far and (2) doesn’t that seem a little too “simple” in that we get directly from the ciphertext to the plaintext in one step. We think Harry is too devious to give us that as 10B! Therefore, we think we need to find a way to translate the cards into letters but those letters may not be the final plaintext and may need another decryption method applied…BUT that then goes against us assuming we can directly see “REPORT” in the ciphertext…so we are thoroughly confused. Anyone else in the same boat?!
Thinking playing cards…
I think, laying my cards on the table is the best hint I can give!
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