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!"
Well, obvious stuff: (Score:5, Interesting)
Starting with the "middle" stanza, that appears to be some sort of "key" perhaps. Each of the different symbols correspond to a different hexadecimal digit.
In the first stanza, each grouping of lines has 1, 2 or 3 lines.
In the last stanza, each group of lines is only 1 or 2 lines.
Maybe the last stanza is binary?
And maybe the first stanza is base 3?
Anyone else care to wager a guess?
The dots (Score:4, Interesting)
Google recruiting? (Score:5, Interesting)
Source? (Score:5, Interesting)
Not to be harsh, but if I send some random code letter to some lab, I guess (hope) it won't make the news, even on slashdot.
Re:Google recruiting? (Score:4, Interesting)
EA posted billboards all over Vancouver, BC awhile, that had char *msg[] = { "10", "43", "14" } (not real values) and essentially it was the ascii decimal equivilant of "Now Hiring".
I thought that was pretty trick.
Re:Mathamatically speaking.... (Score:3, Interesting)
Part of it bears a striking resemblance to UPC code for "8200019288".
Re:Well, obvious stuff: (Score:4, Interesting)
If I weren't at work, I would try translating the hash marks into their hex equivalent, storing that, then translating the hex to the symbols that were given and storing that separately. The symbols may mean something to someone other than me (some of them look hebrew, but some of them definitely aren't; perhaps astrology symbols or something else?), or it may be that the key in the middle is a red herring and that the hex itself codes for something (ascii being the most likely generally, although a quick glance seems to indicate that some of them would code for non-display characters).
Most likely a hoax all things considered. A (accidentally?) clever hoax, considering the hex in the middle and the many interpretations of the vertical lines, but most likely a hoax nonetheless.
Re:The raw numbers (Score:4, Interesting)
"J)IEQ)"""$curren;\QHquot;$)T
Re:Well, obvious stuff: (Score:3, Interesting)
The Binary can then be converted to Hex and then perhaps deciphered...
Working on it atm..
Re:Well, obvious stuff: (Score:3, Interesting)
32323333 1112132
33323132 212331
21113311 32312233
33321212 3213113
31133331 3331111
21133332 3232211
23231333 1121231
33231312
My transcription of the second block:
11121211 21212121 21121212 12111212 1121
11211211 21211121 21121112 12112111 21111
11112121 21121121 21112121 21211121 11211
21112121 12112111 21112111 21112111 21112
11121121 11211121 21121112 12221112 1211
12121121 11211121 11211211 12121211 12111
21121121 11211211 12112111 21211211 1212
11212121 1
Any see errors in this (parts were hard to read).
I'm pretty sure that's a stargate address... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Well, obvious stuff: (Score:3, Interesting)
I just have a weird feeling about it.
Then I just got another Idea that's too good!
It's the intro to statistical analysis. Imagine (P.S. I have no effing Idea what the center part is) that this is a guy counting something. Maybe something like how many buffalo show up to the lake at a given day day one, he sees 3, 2, 3, 2, 3, 3, 3, 3, 1 1, 1, 2, 1, 3, 2,
Mom, Dad, baby.
Dad dies, and now he only sees 2 at the lake.
Analysis! (Score:3, Interesting)
Someone is counting the number of something. Day one, it was 3. Day 2, 2. on day 4, 2 show up. Probably animals at a watering hole. Then one of them dies... or maybe the hunter kills it.
Then he starts analysis again, to see how long it takes for a 3rd to show again.
Re:Mathamatically speaking.... (Score:3, Interesting)
Line 1) 11101101110110111011101110111010101011010111011 (47 digits)
Line 2) 01110111011101101110101110110110101101110111010
Line 3) 11010101011101110101011101101110101101101110111
Line 4) 0111011101110110101101011011101101011101010111
Line 5) 0111010101110111011101110101110111011101010101
Line 6) 1101010111011101110111011011101101110110110101
Line 7) 1101110110111010111011101110101011010110111010
Line 8) 1110111011011101011101011 (25/26 digits)
Consecutive spaces allow the coding to always hit 47 characters, but dramatically increases the complexity of the problem. I'm wondering if the whole code is continuous, meaning that the last tick on line 5 and the first two ticks on line 6 are actually one code three ticks wide (also 6-7). The spaces in the first and last columns of the first two lines seem to imply this...
Tad more to add (Score:2, Interesting)
47
46
46
46
46
46
46
25 not counting final space.
Tried to give | || representation of the bits, but
This leads me to believe there is a double space in there, and with the crooked lining up of the |'s it is hard to tell exactly where... but i believe it is in the bottom most 5-6 lines.
Binary Hex Dec
1 11100101 E5 229
2 11111111 FF 255
3 10011011 9B 155
4 01111110 7E 126
5 11000001 C1 193
6 11111111 FF 255
7 10001010 8A 138
8 01111111 7F 127
9 11100001 E1 225
10 10111111 BF 191
11 01011110 5E 94
12 11111111 FF 255
13 11100001 E1 225
14 10111110 BE 190
15 01011111 5F 95
16 10110101 B5 181
17 01101011 6B 107
18 11110110 F6 246
19 11011011 DB 219
20 10111101 BD 189
21 01100011 63 99
22 11111100 FC 252
23 01010111 57 87
24 10111111 BF 191
25 11101011 EB 235
26 01110100 74 116
27 01001111 4F 79
28 00111011 3B 59
29 01111101 7D 125
30 00010110 16 22
31 01101111 6F 111
32 00111000 38 56
33 01110111 77 119
34 01011000 56 88
35 00100111 27 39
36 01111110 7E 126
This is where i lose my confidence on lining up the bits.. But in total there should be 48 rows... Oh, and I don't believe i mentioned this is the first stanza from the top of the page. Hope something from this helps,
Cheers
Re:Well, obvious stuff: (Score:2, Interesting)
If you take all of them as broken, and include the spaces that *might* be there on lines 2,4,7,8, then you end up with two sets of |||. Periods maybe? Some other delimiter?
Trying what you suggested with chunks of ||| being line breaks, you end up with:
3 1 2 1 1 1 1 2 1 1 1 3 1 2 3 2 2 1
1 2 3 1 2 3 3 3 1 1 2 2 1 3 1 1 1 3 3 2 3 1 2 2 3 3 3 3 3 3
2 2 3 3 1 2 3 1 3 1 1 1 2 3 3 3 2 3 1 1 3 3 2 2 3 2 3 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 1 1 2
Don't know where this is headed, but could be a breakthrough for someone else! (clearly a slow day at work)
Reminds me of the movie Zodiac (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Well, obvious stuff: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Well, obvious stuff: (Score:3, Interesting)
However, if Section 1 is trinary, its information content is equal to 180 bits (113 symbols times log2(3) bits per symbol). The second section, in hex, has 96 bits, and the third, if in binary, has 266 bits. Unless one symbol set has a huge amount of redundancy, they're not the same length.
----------
A casual glance at the "binary" third section suggests it's unlikely to be any sort of ASCII-like binary substitution cipher, and possibly not a binary-encoded language of any kind. A "1" can be followed by either another "1" or a "2" (equal probability), but you never see "22" except for one string of "222" on line 5.
This pattern is way too regular to represent a binary encoding of any large symbol-set like an alphabet.
-----------------
Section 2 is absolutely a hexadecimal code: the symbols are a simple substitution for the hex characters below them. The symbols look a little bit like the "pigpen" [wikipedia.org] cipher, but only vaguely.
I can't find any correspondence between the hexadecimal numbers in section 3 and the "trinary" in section 1.
Current best guess: this is a joke, with no actual information content.
Re:Real problem solvers comment here (Score:4, Interesting)
That was actually my first instinct too when I was "reading" the thing...
writing tendencies and charset (Score:3, Interesting)
secondly, i assume the author is writing with a felt tip pen and is transcribing this from another source. notice how some bars will have a larger dot at one end or the other. i postulate that the author has set down his pen and is checking another sheet to determine what to write, while his felt pen bleeds a little too much ink onto the paper. this, however, doesn't happen with a ball point pen. perhaps this will be of assistance in determining the order strokes were written in, giving us some insight into the author's intent.
thirdly, notice that the author writes the number 0 with a slash through it, but not the number 7 with a dash through it. i'm not an expert on handwriting identification, but certain groups will often be more keen on the selection of particular stylistic numbers, so this may help us to understand something of the author's background.
finally, note that many of the chars used in the second section are letters from other char sets. the letter i is obvious to the english readers, but less apparent is the instance of one that looks suspiciously like a greek capital phi. also, several bear a striking resemblance to chars that appear in a masonic cypher alphabet. http://www.odr.org/anonymous/fam-code.htm [odr.org] can the other chars be identified as belonging to specific alphabets?
FRANK SHOEMAKER WOULD CALL THIS NOISE (Score:5, Interesting)
If you break this up into tuples of 4... (Score:3, Interesting)
-- Terry
Re:Real problem solvers comment here (Score:4, Interesting)
Instead, they look like an RLL encoded pattern, similar to what you'd see on a hard drive. Maybe NRZI.
In fact, the first looks surprisingly like (1,3) MFM RLL.
Also reminds me of the old Apple Floppy drive "between any two ones there can only be a maximum of one zero" data writing rule.
Re:FRANK SHOEMAKER WOULD CALL THIS NOISE (Score:3, Interesting)
wsanqptssqpuzoewoqubugugu fqpggfqxgcgptxgfoa
Solved! (Score:1, Interesting)
Stanza 1 -> "frank shoemaker would call this noise"
Stanza 3 -> "employee number basse 16"
Middle: probably an employee number, Base 16
There is indeed a Frank Shoemaker working at Fermilab on the BooNe experiment; perhaps this is a reference to him?
Re:Real problem solvers comment here (Score:4, Interesting)
The second part we haven't deciphered yet. It's possible that we'd need a Fermilab insider for this.
The third part is RLL. Once you decode the RLL (number of | between consecutive ||), you get the same code as part one, which says "EMPLOYEE NUMBER BASSE SIXTEEN", or so I've been told. This suggests that at least one part of the puzzle requires help from Fermilab people.
My uninformed guess is that once we solve the middle section, we'll get someone's name. His or her employee number at Fermilab spells something out in base 16, a coincidence which Frank Shoemaker would call "noise". Another possibility is that the middle section is hex-encoded employee ID numbers, which would mean that we can't solve it.
Re:FRANK SHOEMAKER WOULD CALL THIS NOISE (Score:2, Interesting)