Fermilab Calls For Code Crackers 392
atrocious cowpat passes along a call for help from symmetry magazine, the joint publication of Fermilab and SLAC, noting: "Could be just plain gibberish, it could be something like those wonderfully weird letters to the Mount Wilson observatory, or it could be a message from aliens who just happened to have gotten their hands (tentacles/exoskeleton) on a fax machine." "A little over a year ago, the Fermilab Office of Public Affairs received a curious letter in code (4.4-MB image here). It has been sitting in our files all that time and we haven't had much of a chance to look into breaking the code, nor are we particularly expert at this!"
Re:Well, obvious stuff: (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Mathamatically speaking.... (Score:3, Insightful)
By the way, this is apparently some kind of "unary" notation, though what zero it is remains to be seen. Similarly, the bottom set, having no more than two | in a row, might be another unary notation of something in a base 2.
As for the little dots, some, like the symbol for E, are repeated, so it's safe to assume they're part of the symbol. Others, like 6, are repeated without the dots, so it's probably a stray mark. Still others, like 5, 0, and 8 are not repeated, so we can't tell for sure whether the odd marks are stray or part of the symbol.
It's also possible they are an additional notation applied to the base symbol, giving it a slightly different meaning, or adding more info.
Re:Well, obvious stuff: (Score:3, Insightful)
Context? (Score:4, Insightful)
And is it really a message, it can be other things too:
Re:Well, obvious stuff: (Score:3, Insightful)
So || | | || is "2" with a separation marker on each end.
This would put an anomaly at the end of the second line which could be interpreted as the || being broken across the two lines (so the second line would end with 3 and the third line would start with 3).
Re:Well, obvious stuff: (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Well, obvious stuff: (Score:2, Insightful)
What I translate is ... (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Well, obvious stuff: (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Well, obvious stuff: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:FRANK SHOEMAKER WOULD CALL THIS NOISE (Score:5, Insightful)
consider the || separators between trinary digits |, | |, | | |; decode as for first stanza, gives:
tadcfmtt blaztr zyppt pioqttb ->
"employee number basse sixteen"
thus, the central numbers are probably the employee # of the prank letter writer. Someone at Fermilab could probably check this (maybe Frank Shoemaker?)
I think we've solved it!