Keep Digging

chrjue · Post by **chrjue** » Mon Nov 10, 2008 2:15 pm

Took me few days to solve this, and still don't really know why the solution is the solution.

Was it encoded in the picture or is "Keep digging, watson" just a 'common' phrase (had to google it)?

chrjue · Post by **chrjue** » Mon Nov 10, 2008 2:49 pm

[Update:] Googled a bit further and even found an online-toool for that 'dancing men cipher':

http://rumkin.com/tools/cipher/substitution.php

Now i know, that the code is derived from the Sherlock Holmes Story "The Adventure of the Dancing Men" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Advent ... ancing_Men).

It is a rather simple substitution cipher, but the flags (that indicate a whitespace to follow) confused me...

Since i never read Sherlock Holmes and never heard the KDW phrase (as non-native-speaker), i found this one very hard...

gfoot · Post by **gfoot** » Mon Nov 10, 2008 3:21 pm

I guess it depends whether you guess what the flags mean. I transcribed the images with letters, and instinctively used an apostrophe after the letters for the men with flags. The frequency of flags is about right for word breaks, so the only question was really whether the space was before or after that letter. One way worked better than the other. The message length is a bit short for frequency analysis but guessing that the six-letter word towards the end was "answer" worked well and led to the solution ("watson" shares a lot of letters with "answer").

I guess if you read the book you might find it's the same cipher, so you wouldn't need to crack it. I don't know though, I've never read any Sherlock Holmes books.

Maybe you're not aware, but Waston was Holmes's companion. I don't know what "Keep Digging" means - I don't think it's a common phrase.

chrjue · Post by **chrjue** » Mon Nov 10, 2008 4:04 pm

obviously it's a more or less well known acronym:

http://acronyms.thefreedictionary.com/K ... ng,+Watson

The correct use of the phrase seems to be as reply to "No Shit, Sherlock." - "Keep Digging, Watson."

At least in Texas (http://onlineslangdictionary.com/defini ... ng,+watson.).

theStack · Post by **theStack** » Fri Nov 21, 2008 6:20 pm

I just solved that and well, the flags kinda confused me, too.

The thing is, if some have ever only seen this symbols or even read the short story by Shakespeare, the solution is really easy.
I have unfortunately not, but luckily have found this symbols by accident in the wikipedia article to "Frequency analysis", so I tried to find the story, checked if it would make sense to replace the pictures by the same letters used in the text and voila.... it told me WATSON

nebukadnezar · Post by **nebukadnezar** » Wed Mar 18, 2009 6:51 am

Hi chrjue,

chrjue wrote:Since i never read Sherlock Holmes and never heard the KDW phrase (as non-native-speaker), i found this one very hard...

I'm non-native too, but I was lucky, that two years ago I got an audiobook of the Sherlock Holmes story from "Deutsche Bahn" which had the dancing men on the cover. This immediately came to my mind as I saw the encoded text. With the knowledge from the story about the flags meaning, I continued isolating the 6-letter-word "answer" and the remaining letters were rather easy then.

Happy Hacking,
Nebukadnezar

compudemon · Post by **compudemon** » Mon Aug 15, 2011 11:41 pm

one of my favorite Sherlock Holmes stories. I knew the code right away. the substitution was very hard though my eyes are trained for letters and numbers not dancing men

speedfire · Post by **speedfire** » Sun Jul 29, 2012 6:09 pm

Finally I found It but by deduction: At the first time I found thiss:

AS TO DANCE TO FIND THE ANSWER IS WATSON

But I was not sure because I find the same dancer for 'E' and 'O'.

So I continue my analyse and finally I found this:

AS WE DANCE WE FIND THE ANSWER IS WATSON

I say that my mother tongue is not English. What complicates matters considerably.

Somebody had the same problem as me ?

AgRaven · Post by **AgRaven** » Wed Sep 04, 2013 4:45 am

I got way too distracted by semaphore, trying to find a semaphore code that they corresponded to. One nice fruit of that search was this little gem:

th4wri · Post by **th4wri** » Thu Mar 30, 2017 1:06 pm

http://rumkin.com/tools/cipher/substitution.php

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