CipherQuest

therethinker · Post by **therethinker** » Sat Jun 20, 2009 6:28 pm

Is it safe to assume that the plaintext of these challenges are English? Can we go as far as to say that they are "real", and not just random words?

Or is it just english-like text, like lorem ipsum, that follows distributions?

coderT · Post by **coderT** » Sat Jun 20, 2009 7:18 pm

So I guess you are working on CipherQuest B? I stuck at here too.
My guess is that CipherQuest B should be "real" English, since CipherQuest A is.

Post by **adum** » Sun Jun 21, 2009 3:27 am

they're all plain english, and nothing too weird. only some proper nouns will be odd, and i think one or two might have a scattering of english renditions of foreign words, but less than 1% of the text.

and to be clear, each plaintext is a whole, contiguous narrative. nothing disjointed.

therethinker · Post by **therethinker** » Sun Jun 21, 2009 3:49 am

Thanks for the clarification.

Interesting set of challenges... how many do you have so far?

I think the initial text was a bit misleading...

Post by **adum** » Sun Jun 21, 2009 10:34 pm

there are four so far; more to come. only two people have solved all four. how was the text misleading? it wasn't intended to be.

rmplpmpl · Post by **rmplpmpl** » Sat Jul 11, 2009 11:26 pm

The first four ciphers (incl. warmup) had been pretty straight forward, the fifth seems to have a much steeper learning curve... at the moment most of my strategies seem to fail with this

Fri Jun 17, 2011 4:50 pm

I'm having a problem with CipherQuest A. I have found the solution, it is an English text which you can find on Wikipedia (and on other websites, too) and which is related to (weak spoiler in tiny letters) Hubbard. But when I enter the first ten characters of the paragraph in question, it does not accept this as the solution. Am I missing anything here?

rmplpmpl · Post by **rmplpmpl** » Fri Jun 17, 2011 9:43 pm

AMindForeverVoyaging wrote:I'm having a problem with CipherQuest A. I have found the solution, it is an English text which you can find on Wikipedia (and on other websites, too) and which is related to (weak spoiler in tiny letters) Hubbard. But when I enter the first ten characters of the paragraph in question, it does not accept this as the solution. Am I missing anything here?

A blank is a character, too, maybe this helps?

Sat Jun 18, 2011 3:44 pm

rmplpmpl wrote: A blank is a character, too, maybe this helps?

In the plaintext which I think is the correct solution, the:

1. character is an uppercase letter
2. character is a lowercase letter
3. character is a lowercase letter
4. character is a blank
5. character is a lowercase letter
6. character is a lowercase letter
7. character is a lowercase letter
8. character is a hyphen
9. character is a lowercase letter
10. character is a lowercase letter

Is that correct? If not, no wonder I can try any combination with or without blanks...

rmplpmpl · Post by **rmplpmpl** » Sat Jun 18, 2011 3:52 pm

AMindForeverVoyaging wrote:
rmplpmpl wrote: A blank is a character, too, maybe this helps?
In the plaintext which I think is the correct solution, the:

1. character is an uppercase letter
2. character is a lowercase letter
3. character is a lowercase letter
4. character is a blank
5. character is a lowercase letter
6. character is a lowercase letter
7. character is a lowercase letter
8. character is a hyphen
9. character is a lowercase letter
10. character is a lowercase letter

Is that correct? If not, no wonder I can try any combination with or without blanks...

OK, you have taken the letters from the wikipedia article or somewhere else, try to get the letters right by substituting the given ciphertext - for example there is no difference between upper or lower case letters in the resulting plain text (there wouldn't have been enough letters in the cipher).
I have no idea if this is checked (I submitted the solution in uppercase, methinks), but it seems that the plaintext derived from the cipher is a little different to the original source.

Sun Jun 19, 2011 11:05 am

Well, I have solved it now. I am not convinced though that the second word of the plaintext, as it is written here, exists in the English language. Online dictionaries do not list it. In my opinion there should be either a space or a hyphen in front of the participle, otherwise it is misspelled.

moose · Post by **moose** » Sat Jul 09, 2011 3:42 pm

Has the text spaces? Is it case-sensitive?

I guess I have to look at it tomorrow again. My usual approach (frequency analysis and word patterns) seems to be useless here

speedfire · Post by **speedfire** » Mon Jul 30, 2012 3:53 pm

In the CipherQuest A Warmup. I have understand what kind of caractère is blink. But that's means like a space or just to ignore to character ?

And another question I don't fin anything with the standard monoaphabetic substitution. Maybe it's polyalphabetic substitutions ?

Thanks you for your answers

argyblarg · Post by **argyblarg** » Thu Sep 04, 2014 3:07 pm

Ok, this is driving me crazy. In CipherQuest A, I know what the text is, but there seems to be no way to type it in correctly.

I've tried:

10 characters without any blanks
10 characters with blanks
10 characters with blanks but not counting the blanks as characters
All with hyphen and no hyphen
and even the same with 25 characters (like the last one).

Nothing seems to work...I really would like to push on. Any help?

destiny · Post by **destiny** » Fri Sep 12, 2014 10:06 am

argyblarg wrote:Ok, this is driving me crazy. In CipherQuest A, I know what the text is, but there seems to be no way to type it in correctly.

I've tried:

10 characters without any blanks
10 characters with blanks
10 characters with blanks but not counting the blanks as characters
All with hyphen and no hyphen
and even the same with 25 characters (like the last one).

Nothing seems to work...I really would like to push on. Any help?

If you decrypted it correctly then the answer is just as it appears for the first 10 chars. From one of your points that you tried it sounds like it may not have been decrypted correctly.