Re: Puzzle Solving

piglet@xxxxxxxxx (Porkrind) wrote in news:foia6m$jbk$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx:

John Fereira <jaf30@xxxxxxxxxxx>, in article
<Xns9A20B9A7BB163jaf30cornelledu@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, dixit:
..... There is one in particular that, although it in a
location I might never visit, I have taken the challenge to attempt to
solve. The puzzle has many levels including multiple types of ciphers
and hidden clues. Some of the clues are red herrings. The puzzle is
based on the book called Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson. In any
case, one of the pieces of the puzzle appears to involve astrology and
since I know very little about it I was wondering if anyone here knows
much about it and could make some sense of a couple of images that were
revealed in the puzzle.

If anyone is interested in working on the puzzle with me I'd love to
have someone else to bounce some ideas off of.

I suck at that kind of puzzle, which is why I haven't e-mailed you
about this. But I am wondering how it's going.

So, how's the puzzle solving going?


I solved it last weekend.

I had to decrypt a short message, which when combined with another piece of
the puzzle produced the final coordinates for the geocache. Because I
couldn't actually find the physical cache (a very large ammo box) I wanted
to confirm the coordinates. I plugged them into Google Earth to get a
street address. Then because I've found that the satellite imagery is often
better on map.live.com I used that address and got "birds eye" view of the
area. Someone that had previously found the geocache (one of about 6 people
so far) had posted some photos of them holding the container and I compared
that photo to a view of the area (after rotating the orientation) from
maps.live.com. Both photos showed a fence with the same grafitti on it.

There were several different ciphers which had to be solved to obtain the
final coordinates.

.

Relevant Pages

  • Classical Cipher Ideas
    ... I don't really want to post the ciphertext out of respect for the puzzle maker. ... I know 2 ciphers were used, and I think one of them may be a null cipher since part of the puzzle talks about nullifying and then it will be made clear. ... The puzzle mentions the key being located in a paragraph that makes a few references to the mathematical constant phi. ... Are there any known hand ciphers that have a numerical cipher text and use a numerical key? ...
    (sci.crypt)
  • Re: Classical Cipher Ideas
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    (sci.crypt)
  • Re: Puzzle Solving
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    (soc.singles.moderated)