The "Unsolved" Puzzle
There's been some interest in finding the original solution for this puzzle, so I took a stab at it.
I don't have very good ways of looking at .mov files frame-by-frame, and I am lazy, but I would really appreciate it if someone could get the most accurate times and durations of the beginning/end of each song fragment.
But basically here is what I think is the way to solve the puzzle:
Clue 1: (from the classified ad:) "The first is the marble. The second is the chisel. Set the angel free."
As coasterdigi said in the unfiction forums, this refers to Michaelangelo's Pieta, where he said "I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set her free."
To me this means vigenere cipher (http://rumkin.com/tools/cipher/vigenere.php), where key 1 is the text and key 2 is the passphrase
Clue 2: (from IRC chat with Penn:) "The titles are irrelevant. Time is always a factor. And worry not about being too exact with time."
It occurred to me that, although the mashup is cool, it is the time values in the videos that would spell out the letters to use for key 1 and 2. However, if we don't need to be too exact with time, does that mean we need to worry about the duration of the song, or just the time when the song ended?
According to times as reported on LG15Today and on the unfiction forums, Key 1's songs end at the following times (where we ignore 2 numbers are the ':'): 20-28-12-13-24-18-16-10-30. Assign each number a letter such that (1=A, 2=B, etc.) and after 26 you'd wrap around (27=A, 28=B, etc.). This would translate to: TBLMXRPJD. You'd do the same process for key 2.
Doing this method does not provide the straightforward solution, with some possible reasons:
1) The reported times/durations are off a little.
2) There might be a flaw in the duration of song #7 in key 2, and possibly the duration of song #8, because I honestly think that #7 should be 23 instead of 32. And #8 should be 41 instead of 31. I don't know?
3) This entire method is completely wrong but a big freakin' coincidence.
I'm trying to crack it by "cheating" and working backwards, i.e. I'm using the vigenere cipher to encrypt the text "OPZEROSUM" with my decode of key2 and playing around with letters in order to get the letters for key1 spelled out. If someone wants to actually give this a try, you can get all of the brownie points!
Also it is slightly late so this probably doesn't make any sense so let me know if you have any questions about it, I'll try to answer them tomorrow.
http://wethehomeoffice.ning.com/forum/topics/the-solution?page=1&commentId=2468308%3AComment%3A202&x=1#2468308Comment202
"02:23 HO16051414: Time is always a factor. And worry not about being too exact with time."
ReplyDeleteMeaning - the frames don't matter, people are getting too anal about the details. Just round to the nearest second.
With the reported times it just doesn't work. Rounding to the nearest second, Key 1 =
ReplyDelete20-28-12-13-24-18-16-10-30 or TBLMXRPJD. Key 2 = 5-12-38-8-6-3-32-31-17 or ELLHFCFEQ. The result of the vigenere cipher decode is PQAFSPKFN, which is ALMOST nearly OPZEROSUM (1 letter ahead), except for the 7th and 8th letters.
Also, if I hadn't been working backwards, I would never have immediately realized this solution because who leaves an answer that's completely 1-letter off?
This is why I made a post about someone checking the times again because I think either I am doing something wrong or the times were reported wrong.
Or, you know, the vids we'd been looking at till we were cross-eyed were wrong. Just saying.
ReplyDeletemy guess is that it is very very very simple....
ReplyDelete...and we are just missing the obvious..