Reply To: Yet another 10B post
We have decrypted 10A, but are still not making much headway on 10B. We have decided to write down the things we know / have observed in the hope that Harry might allow these jumbled thoughts (which may or may not be useful!) to be shared and that these might trigger some new discoveries…
1. we understand where case files 10.2 and 10.5 come from but are unsure what the others mean
2. we worked out that the smallest block size where there is always an equal amount of slashes, backslashes and pipes, is 21…and 42 is a multiple of this which ties in with Cribbage’s kind hint above!
3. we think that each brick in the wall (shown in casefiles 10.6 & 10.7) could represent 3 needles (because that’s what 10.7 shows!) and each row of bricks could then consist of:
—> 7 needles with staggering pattern: 3-3-1 / 2-3-2 / 1-3-3 / 3-3-1 (all add up to 7 needles per row)
—> 14 needles then we’d have pattern 6-6-2 / 4-6-4 / 2-6-6 / 6-6-2…(adding up to 14)
….
—> or perhaps most promisingly…42 needles and then we’d have 18-18-6 / 12-18-12 / 6-18-18 / 18-18-6 as the pattern
4. but staggering the original ciphertext and then still reading it left-to-right and top-to-bottom doesn’t change the order of anything and we then still end up with lots of blocks of 3 that would be invalid configurations of the 3-needle telegraph (e.g. ‘\\\’ which doesn’t point to any single letter)
5. so we think we need to “re-order” characters in the original ciphertext in some manner before doing anything else…or read them in a different way…which we have not yet worked out!
6. if we read the ciphertext *without* reordering (in blocks of 3), and translate all blocks that we can based on the 3-needle telegraph shown in 10.8, then we notice that when we group these into rows of 7 blocks of 3 (21 ciphertext chars per row), the 2nd and 6th columns are ALWAYS valid configs that point to one of the letters A/D/F/G/X/V (which are those shown on casefile 10.8). If we have 42 ciphertext chars per row then it’s the 2nd / 6th / 8th / 12th columns where we get 100% translation
Are we making any sense at all!?!!
This is really excellent, which is why I held it back until Jan 2nd. You are DEFINITELY on the right track. What does Case File 10.8 suggest about the type of cipher this might be, and how does that fit with your thinking above? Well done, keep going, Harry