Fermilab Calls For Code Crackers

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:

[Anonymous Coward]

The middle stanza is unlikely to be a key as it has many signs repeated. F, D, 6, 3, 9 etc.

Re:Mathamatically speaking....

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

The interstices would not represent zeroes, unless the message just happened to have no more than 1 zero in a row. Hence | represents 0, || represents 1, and ||| represents 2, or some rotation of that.

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:

[mhall119]

I don't think it's necessarily a key. If it were just a substitution key, they wouldn't need to repeat characters. Maybe it's a message in both glyphs and hex, like a Rosetta stone?

Context?

[Z00L00K]

To be able to decrypt a message it is usually necessary to know the context to where it belongs. Without context it's hard.

And is it really a message, it can be other things too:

1. A data sampling done by hand with two samplings, the first has three alternatives the second has two. The code in the middle is just thrown in for good measure by a joker.
2. It's someone's way to compose music. The first part is for a simple instrument with three tones, the last part is another instrument with two alternatives (bongo drums?). The middle part is just markers used to remind the performers about what to sing.
3. Someone's idea of a prank to pull.

Re:Well, obvious stuff:

[Dachannien]

I'm thinking the last stanza is also base 3, with digits then represented in unary, but with || indicating a division between the base 3 digits.

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:

[Sechr Nibw]

The only problem with that is twice in the last chunk the sequence "1 1 1 1" appears, not counting possible removal of line breaks

Re:Well, obvious stuff:

[Unending]

ugh this thing is so poorly done it's really hard to read also if the "aliens" know hex then they could just write a message this is obviously a hoax or a recruitment thing

What I translate is ...

[Zader]

All these worlds are yours except Europa ... attempt no landings there ...

Re:Well, obvious stuff:

[Anonymous Coward]

The 3rd set appears to be morse code, since binary appears to translate as gibberish.. 1 hash for short, 2 for long, and you get the word "eureka" or . ..- .-. . -.- .- at the start of that section. Without proper spacing between the | and || it's proving time consuming to break down but maybe that will help someone else out too.

Re:Well, obvious stuff:

[NeutronCowboy]

I think that's an interesting approach. Statistically speaking, if | and || would be two different symbols, the chance that one of them would never appear consecutively would be zero. As such, I agree that the || is probably a demarcation. Furthermore, the last character at the end of each line of the last stanza is probably also a demarcation, drawn before actual code series was written out. The reason I say that is because the last characters are the only ones that are actually beneath each other - the slanting comes from a right-handed writer slanting the page as they write. This in turn means that the places were 4 | are next to each other would actually be 3 | plus one | that signals end of line.

Re:FRANK SHOEMAKER WOULD CALL THIS NOISE

[femtobyte]

Last stanza:
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!