Fermilab’s Strange Letter – Interlude
Hi Slashdot! You guys can be proud to be the first stress test of my new host – and they appear to have passed with flying colours (yes, flying Canadian spelled with a u colours).
That being said, progress on the Fermilab letter hasn’t been as good. I’ve tried an absolutely ridiculous number of things, and I get little. So I thought I’d try to present the letter in a more usable form along with the progress so far and any unresolved questions.
For your reference, my cleaned up data can be found in this CSV file. I figured if Slashdot linked to it, I better provide something multiplatform. Please inform me if you find any errors.
Also, please don’t phone/email/stalk Frank Shoemaker! The poor guy is retired after a distinguished career, has been contacted far too many times about this, and say he has no involvement. Pierre Piroue has also been contacted, and has claimed no knowledge of this whatsoever.
If anyone has talked to CF please email me (sorry for being vague, privacy issues).
Ternary Paragraph
Here’s the first ternary paragraph. If we decode it as in my previous post, we get “FRANK SHOEMAKER WOULD CALL THIS NOISE”. Note that the grey shaded areas are double spaces – if only the I, II, and III symbols mattered, what are these random extra spaces doing in there? A transcription error seems unlikely. To me, it seems like this was written on graph paper in a specific way, then transcribed to a blank sheet of paper. Effort was taken to ensure the symbols reflected the original alignment – while the whole paragraph may be out of overall “grid” alignment, each individual “tic” is well-oriented in relation to it’s neighbours.
Is it on a grid:
- for simple boring organization’s sake? If so, why the double spaces?
- to create some sort of bitmap which maps to the symbols? Alone it seems to provide little help, perhaps it is combined with another section?
- so that “windows” are cut in the grid according to some specification and it is then laid over another section/combination of sections?
Hexadecimal Section
The hexadecimal section consists of two lines of 12 symbol/letter pairs, seen below.
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Note that this transcription uses the same images if a hex/symbol pair repeats, for the sake of lazy html/Photoshop and in an attempt to weed out “noise”. Note this will backfire horribly if the point of the letter is in fact noise – from my preliminary analysis I didn’t see anything too significantly different between duplicated hex/symbol pairs, feel free to correct me.
Note that 1 and A are not included in these 24 pairs. 24 is evenly divisible by 3, I’m not sure if this is relevant, but interesting since the other decodings are based off triplets.
After this is a “signoff” with one symbol we’ve never seen before. I hesistate to call it “undefined” since we are not confident that the hexadecimal digits in fact “define” the symbols.
What are the meanings of the symbol/hex pairs?
- They belong to three/etc “groups” like in an IQ test, and are used to map hex digits to other digits which will create a new message
- They are a distinct message by themselves. The hex digits were added later to translate an employee number (see Binary Paragraph) out of the “signoff”.
- The sixteen hex digits map to musical notes and the symbols mean nothing – Update: this has been attempted, and unless Timbaland produces it and the video involves a lot of nudity, it’s far from a number one hit.
- The symbols are a convoluted mathematical equation, and the hex digits and signoff allow us to decode it somehow
There’s a million more, but there’s a few to start. If you’ve disproved any/have any new ones, post in comments.
Binary Paragraph
I realize this is impossible to read, but the overall view is what we’re after. Grab the raw data at the top if that’s what you want. Note again that the grey spots are “double spaced” and everything is in a grid, leading to the same questions as before.
If we decode this as described in the previous post, we get “EMPLOYEE NUMBER BASSE SIXTEEN”. The spelling of BASE is off, and could be a reference to the French word for low, although I suspect simple repetition of a triad by accident
If we look at how the message is decoded, this has to be a single “I”, however it appears to be significantly out of place compared to all the other marks. A minor transcription error, or a clue? I think it’s a transcription error – because it’s part of the second S in BASSE. I think he accidentally transcribed S (201) twice, then realized his error at the end when the spacing started to go off.
This leads me to believe that there probably aren’t images stored in the “dashes” in some manner (otherwise he would have fixed the second S, or all the information is contained before this), and the grid was simply to organize or for another purpose.
As well, if we decode it based on simple Morse code (I=dot, II=dash) it reads EUREKA until trailing off to gibberish (credit Henry H in comments). It’s possible that it isn’t gibberish, but since Morse letters are different lengths decoding this becomes a huge pain. My guess is it’s a red herring with no real meaning, but still something to note.
Conclusions
All I can say is I hope this helps someone, and if you figure out anything, let me know! The only thing I think I managed to figure out of note is why it’s “BASSE” sixteen instead of “BASE”. I’m insanely busy this week so I can’t put as much time toward it as I like, perhaps this weekend will be more illuminating…
[...] Note to readers: I have some more detail (although unfortunately not a lot more progress) up at Fermilab’s Strange Letter – Interlude. [...]
Here is the hexadecimal; section mapped across slightly more than two octaves, from G1 (0×0) to C4 (0x0f). There’s actually fifteen notes in two octaves (not including polychromatic incidentals). Since the hex section traverses sixteen numbers, there’s one not more than two octaves.
http://rapidshare.com/files/116424052/Fermilab_Hex_Section.mp3.html
I think that it is unlikely that this is music, because there us no information about the time signature, duration of notes, velocity, etc.
Also, it doesn’t sound very good.
[...] Slashdot picked up on the story, there’s been some breakthroughs. Of note is ‘Geoff”s work found here (only linking to the most recent post). I heard about this earlier today, and found it rather [...]
[...] Thanks to Geoff’s work on decrypting the first and third part, I’ve been spending my entire day (and night) trying to figure out the middle part. I highly recommend reading his work to get a feel for what has been done so far. [...]
The problem for the middle is 0×00-0xFF gives 255 combinations for 26 letters.
234 is the first number to be divisible by 26, 9 times. So assume each letter is repeated 9 times.
The largest number in the sequence is 0xF6, while the smallest is 0×0C. What is 0xF6 – 0×0C in decimal 234!
Its my thought that the letters repeat 9 times between 0×0C and 0xF6 and you can spell out a four digit employee number with the numbers:
ONE, TWO, SIX
With at least one repeated once. Using these numbers the ‘O’ and the ‘E’ are repeated. That may give some help with frequency counting.
I placed this, a link to your site and some other thoughts on my blog. This is exciting I haven’t done this in a long time!
Sorry to double post!
I think I figured out the sentence!
FRANK SHOEMAKER WOULD CALL THIS NOISE (first part)
BUT _ _ _ _ (guessed second part + base 16 number)
SI (‘is’ backwards i.e. the middle part should be in reverse and CF is ‘i’)
EMPLOYEE NUMBER BASSE 16.
SO! the employee number is either
0×126 = 294 (unlikely)
0×162 = 354 (unlikely)
0×216 = 534
0×261 = 609
0×612 = 1554 (most likely)
0×621 = 1569 (most likely)
From Fermilab about the Wilson Hall 16th Floor:
The Cathedral (A.D. 1225-1568) was never completed westward of the choir and transepts, and the site of the proposed nave is partly occupied by the Romanesque church known as the “Basse oeuvre” (“low work”)
I believe it is employee 1569.
Well, I know there’s a relation between Group Theory and coding… f-sub-c is the couterdiagonal flip on the dihedral symmetry group. Applied to a page (roughly a member of D-sub-4), this represents a flip along the NW-SE diagonal. The digital significance of a 4-bit binary number is a member of P-sub-4 (the permutations of a 4 object list) of which D-sub-4 is a subgroup. So…. applying f-sub-c to the binary representations of hexadecimal digits you get:
0 0
1 1
2 8
3 9
4 4
5 5
6 C
7 D
A A
B E
F F
Or… print it, flip the paper on the NW-SE axis and view… This would explain the need for graph paper and the extra long spaces… this would give us a set of seven/eight bit numbers which roughly line up with ASCII characters, with the thing at the bottom perhaps indicating how to decode those symbols… I don’t have time to dig through this tonight, but I’ll check back tomorrow.
OK, I noticed something very strange.
Now, looking at the top ternary part, and assuming the double space assumption is correct*, the rows count:
47
46 <–
47
46 <–
46 <–
47
47
25
NOW. Look at the last row. EXACTLY 7 ‘spaces’ along is a period (using imageMagick ‘display’ this is definitely a pen mark). So that would make the last row count 33 ‘bits’.
Now assume that as the whole item is drawn not very technically accurate* (i.e. it is slanted, and a job to make out what is a double space etc.) we could assume somewhere in the left hand side, there could be a double space on rows 2, 4 and 5 also?
Revisit with this assumption and the extra 7 spaces terminated with the period:
47
47
47
47
47
47
47
32
–
361 == 19*19.
Transposing (including the final ‘period’):
1110110111011011101
1101110111010101011
0101110111110111011
1011011101011101101
1010110111011101001
1010101011101110101
0111011011101011011
0111011111101110111
0110101101011011101
1010111010010011111
1010101110111011101
1101011101110111010
0100101110101011101
1101110111011011101
1011101101100101110
1110110111010111011
1011101010110101101
1100101110111011011
1010111010110000000.
But buggered if I can see anything here…
Nick
About the “hexadecimal section”.
Count the repetitions os each symbol:
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 A B C D E F => 1 0 2 2 1 1 3 1 1 2 0 1 1 2 3 3
0,1,2,3… base 4? Converting to base 16:
10 22 11 31 12 01 12 33 => 4A 5D 61 6F
ASCII gives: J]ao
Joao is John in another language. Notice the upper case J and the “noise”.
Coincidence?
Hm.. if you have “I think I managed to figure out of note is why it’s “BASSE” sixteen instead of “BASE”.”
You forgot to write it on the page… you are just guessing that its a mistake as far as i can see.
Well, this entire thing is a guess so far
I think that people are overanalyzing the BASSE and not it’s implications – if it’s an error, the “grid” can only have meaning before this. I think the spaces are telling us this too, they’re “outside” of the dataset are were used to align the symbols properly.
Going into French history and the like seems rather involved compared to the complexity of the first and last section – I think the best approach is assuming the encoder had a vaguely consistent (ie in this case mathematical/computational) approach.
Flip the paper over to match the dots to a sky map, http://www.esa.int/images/IRC_AllSky_Cnstellation_E_H.jpg this one uses infrared imaging of the stars. Polaris is to the right of the last line on the first paragraph. I think that Basse Ouevre cathedral being at 16° 0′ N, 61° 43′ E . I think these coordinates need to be used as the reference point for the star map to make it more exact.
Following the theory of a star map, if it is a mirror view of the northern sky, maybe we need to try decoding the 3 stanza’s mirrored so as to make them right side up when matched to the sky?
[...] And now for something completely different: The Fermilab note Filed under: cryptography — Tags: distractions, fermilab note — pafcu @ 7:00 pm A while back I read on ./ about a letter to Fermilab written in some cipher. Apparently some progress has been made decrypting it, but several questions still remain. [...]
Okay, I’m going to play the Devil’s Advocate and throw out a bunch of what-ifs here, although I remain firmly agnostic as to the actual content or purpose of the encoded message, if any purpose even exists.
0. What if “Frank Shoemaker would call this noise” means that either the ternary decoding technique, the first paragraph, or all three paragraphs are totally useless?
1. What if “Basse” was not mis-spelled and it really does refer to the French term?
2. What if there really is something important about the basement or 16th floor of Wilson Hall?
3. What if the Morse decoding of “Eureka” in the third paragraph really does indicate there are multiple simultaneous encodings for this or other paragraphs?
4. What if the Phi symbol really does refer to the Golden Ratio?
5. What if some of the symbols really were borrowed from the Standard Galactic Alphabet?
6. What if the grid spacing of the first and third paragraphs really is significant?
7. What if the symbols themselves are significant when arranged in a certain shape or picture?
8. What if the specks are not from the fax machine, but really are a star map or other information?
9. What if Frank Shoemaker or Pierre Piroue really do have something to do with this, but are covering it up for some reason?
A. What if Shoemaker really doesn’t have anything to do with this, but is referenced to specifically bring up his field of study in neutrino detection or something else about him?
B. What if the symbols decode to some type of really important mathematical formula or physics equation?
C. What if the symbols decode to some type of terrestrial, stellar, temporal, or dimensional coordinates?
D. What if it was not a coincidence that the articles titled “Breaking the Fermilab Code” and “ET will Phone Home using Neutrinos, not Photons” were posted w/in a few hours of one another?
E. What if Eric is right and the message needs to be mirror or rotated to be properly decoded?
F. What if this is all just some stupid joke, prank, or test? What if it’s NOT?
The most out-there theory I can come up with is that the combination of a star map and some type of coordinates vector will point to a spot in the sky where we could aim a neutrino detector and receive some type of data packets. Yes, as the /. linked article states, neutrinos are much slower than light, but the obvious solution for an advanced intelligence seeking others is to send out neutrino signals containing instructions on how to construct a faster-than-light communications device, which could then be built and used to carry on useful conversations with the originator of the neutrino signal. Not to mention letting the Borg, Dominion, Galactic Empire, Cylons, Reptoids, and Daleks know exactly where we’re at. *grin*
Again, just the Devil’s Advocate.
And Geoff, who the heck is CF???
- Anonymous Howard
The first stanza flat out tells you that it is noise, it could be a hint that its being deciphered in an obvious way, that isnt intended. I dont think we should put it past the original author to be able to encode multiple messages…
Starmap? Where the heck did that idea come from?
PJ:
It is clear that thare are numerous tiny specks throughout the entire image.
The first question we still need answered is if the specks came from a fax machine or were in the actual original as well.
If they were in the original and could perhaps be purposeful, then it’s anyone’s guess if it’s a starmap or whatever else.
-AH
Hello all,
Can somebody who has connections to Fermilab please confirm if there are specks on the original hand-written sheet of paper?
-AH
Some old programming languages were derided as yielding code “indistinguishable from line noise” and this epithet has been carried forward and applied to some contemporary languages.
But APL and its ilk were kings of the line noise languages. APL used a custom character set. Is there any possibility that the hex/symbol section decodes to a small chunk of something like code?
More fun with potential mere apophenia: take the hex digits in the middle, and divide them into four blocks of six.
Decode as RGB color triplets ala HTML’s color spec. You’ll
get orange,yellow, blue, violet.
Decode acc. to resistor color code, just to be perverse.
This gives 3467.
Just for fun, construe as March 4, 1967.
Google for march 4 1967 at site:fnal.gov
get multiple pages referencing march 1967 as the month that Robert Rathbun Wilson became
the first director of Fermi lab.
Note that March 4 is Wilson’s birthday.
Note that Wilson Hall is the one giving rise to all of the speculation about the use of the word “Basse”.
Be amused.
Go to bed.
Refrain from speculations about other possible interpretations of colors or the number 3467.
> As well, if we decode it based on simple Morse code (I=dot, II=dash) …
and if we assume the third section is not English Morse code, but instead it is Japanese Morse code (Wabun – see wikipedia), then the third section ends with a “full stop” (period) character. I’ll leave it to the reader to do the trivial work of decoding the rest (ha ha).
The symbol sequence in part 2 seems to me to be the work of someone “channeling” an alien “message”. (If you do a search you’ll find quite a number of people doing this sort of thing.) This person has wrapped this “message” in a simple cipher in order to entice people to work on decoding the “important” part. This will be impossible since it is a work of his imagination.
I think the sFC ist just a signature — Shoemaker, Frank C.
The Employer-ID Base 16 is his ID and this will be the key to translate the middle part (somehow). So the question is: what is his ID. The Telephon list @http://www-tele.fnal.gov/cgi-bin/telephone.script gives nothing useful (at least I couldn’t figure anything out with Phone or Postal Numbers. Either they are in Hex notation or one has to transcrypt them?!
What I don’t understand ist why there is this redundancy of the Glyphs and the Hex Code below.
MoH:
You could be onto something, although according to Geoff a bunch of people have talked to Shoemaker and he denies knowledge, which if true would mean if it was supposed to be his initials as a signature then somebody was trying to “frame” him as being the author.
Geoff:
Have you talked to Shoemaker yourself? If so, what exactly did you both say? If not, who do you know who has talked to him? I’m very curious what all you know that you may not be telling us! ;^)
Fermilab people:
We still need to know if the original copy had the specks in the back ground, and I’d also like to know if there is invisible ink writing on the large blank areas. Now we also need to know what Frank Shoemaker’s ID number is.
-AH
Thanks Anonymous Howard – I think its just fax dust….
Regarding shoemaker, it might be a former student of his.
If I have time, next week I can try and wander down to the Public Affairs office and see if they’ll let me have a look.
PJ:
You may be correct about a former student of Shoemaker. Of course, that lead would probably prove quite difficult to follow considering Shoemaker probably has tons of former students. The fact that the first paragraph refers to Shoemaker in the 3rd person seems to be at odds with a “signature” of SFC pointing to Shoemaker being the author. That makes me think the SFC is meant to _look_ like a signature, but has some other purpose. As for the specks, I personally think it’s fax dust, but thinking and knowing are very different things. ;^)
Burt:
That would be so awesome if you could view the original! As for the specks, you could immediately recognize if they were present in the original or not. Also, it would definitely be worth having a direct digital photo or scan of the original, not having passed through a fax machine. If you can sneak in a digital camera or talk them into letting you scan it directly, that would be great! As for the somewhat far-fetched yet still plausible idea of invisible ink data, the only two methods of detection I know of are a small blacklight and using a clothes iron on the piece of paper. Invisible inks made from lemon juice require heat (fire runes!) to become visible, and many other invisible inks require UV to become visible. The invisible ink is going to be alot harder to determine than the specks, but if you can actually get at the original then it’s at least worth giving it the ole college try! Just imagine if there’s an invisible ink key that unlocks the whole thing! We would never know if not for good old Burt…
Geoff:
We still want to know if you have talked to Shoemaker, and if not who has. Information wants to be free!
-AH
Does anybody have a way of finding out what was Frank Shoemaker’s Fermilab ID number?
-AH
I’m trying to decode the middle part of the message.. Why aren’t more people trying to do that?
You all dumb or what? You don’t have the whole message decoded, which means any assumptions based purely on the first and third part won’t get you anywhere.
I’m not good at decoding, never tried it before, but I realize that any thoughts on first and third are probably useless without the text from the middle part. I hope others comprehend that as well.
Howard -
I haven’t talked to Shoemaker pesonally, but I believe Symmetry magazine has as well as a few people who have worked with him in the past. There’s a post from Peter Meyers at the original Symmetry Breaking blog post where he talks about how he worked with Frank Shoemaker and Pierre Piroue in the past and they’re all very amused by this but disavow any knowledge.
Just a thought: has anyone looked at quantifying the vertical size/location of the lines in the first paragraph? They’re clearly not uniform, and it’s been noted that the horizontal spacing appears to be carefully done. One way of reading the message ‘would call this noise’ is that there’s more information hidden in that part of the message.
Quercus – I’m not sure what you mean, I’ve got a CSV up that has all the “lines” with proper spacing you can download near the top of the article.
Geoff, I think your reproduction of the middle section is a bit misleading, because the dot in the symbol assigned to the digit 6 seems to simply be a fax artifact as it doesn’t appear in the other occurrences in the original image.
Does anybody have any idea what the symbols could represent? I mean, the greek letter phi is obvious, but the others are rather mysterious. I had a look at most of the unicode pages (omitting the vast CJK pages) and I found out that many of the symbols are letters in some languages. However, there seems to be no single language that has all of them.
Actually, for some of the symbols I couldn’t find a language at all, especially the symbols for digits 4 (three circles with bar), 9 (two bars), and D (eight with circle). Maybe I didn’t look hard enough or maybe they aren’t letters at all. Maybe it’s a rebus.
Juhox – Fair enough, my intent was to attempt to ignore some noise, not reinforce it. I’ll fix it when I get home today.
I think figuring out the symbol’s meaning is critical, I’ll put together a little page on this so we can collaborate and figure out just what the hell each one of them is.
silly bob, take a look here: http://www.gmilburn.ca/2008/05/17/fermilabs-strange-letter-progress/#comment-316
Everybody is trying to decode the middle section, so far with no conclusive results…
I’m not sure if this helps any, but could it have something to do with the integral of F times C?
Or maybe the symbol for C looks like an i that is used to represent sqrt of negative 1?
Those three symbols seem to be the key to solving it.
Some analysis of the symbols in the middle section:
1. Notice the careful layout of the symbols, especially if you compare the duplicates. Ignoring the 0-symbol for a moment, they are either half-width (2, 7, 8, 9, B, C, D, F) or full-width (3, 4, 5, 6, E). And they are either half-height (2, 6, B, C) or full-height (3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9, D, E, F). Notice how the symbols for digits 2 and 6 precisely use the upper half. In other words, all the symbols have been carefully drawn to neatly fit into a 2×2 grid.
2. Notice the dots. The one in the E-symbol is obviously intentional, because it appears in all 3 occurrences. The one in the first 6-symbol is obviously unintentional (probably fax artifact), because it doesn’t appear in the other occurrences. Considering their size and alignment, the dots in the 5 and 8-symbol are probably intentional. Now for the 0-symbol. I think the dot is NOT intentional. It’s somewhat smaller than the other dots, it looks edgy like a digital artifact, and it doesn’t fit well in the 2×2 grid. I could be wrong, but to me this symbol appears to be just a small vertical stroke instead of the latin small “i” letter. Note that this stroke has exactly the same length as those in symbols 9 and B.
3. What are possible sources for these symbols? So far, there have been some interesting suggestions, some plausible, some less plausible. I suppose the letter aims to some persons or perhaps a single person at fermilab. Considering that fermilab employs scientists from all over the world I conclude the following:
3.1 The greek alphabet can be assumed as a source, since scientists frequently use greek letters in their forumulas. So, symbol 7 can be assumed to be the greek letter phi.
3.2 Mathematical notation can be assumed to be a source. Thus it seems obvious to interpret symbol 2 and 6 as the “greater than” and “not” signs, respectively. However, it’s strange how these symbols are shifted upward. Maybe this encodes a special meaning. Maybe it’s just a local notation variant. Or maybe this interpretation is wrong.
3.3 Maybe fermilab has a large map or satellite photo in their cafeteria (or elsewhere). In this case it can be expected that fermilab personnel recognizes certain prominent structures of the facility. Symbol D could be interpreted as the whole accelerator (tevatron + main injector), and symbol 5 could be the tevatron. But if you assume both, that would mean the tevatron is depicted in different symbols, using different notations. I doubt that. And I very much doubt that any small scale detail of the facility is depicted in any of the symbols. What person at fermilab could be expected to recognize such detail?
3.4 In case the letter aims to a specific person, and that person is known by the author to be a (former) computer gamer and especially a fan of the commander keen series, then some symbols could be interpreted as letters from the SGA. Symbol E would perfectly match the SGA letter M in this case. There’re also some vague similarities with other SGA letters, but considering the careful layout of the symbols, I don’t think they are valid.
3.5 Also, in case the letter aims to a specific person, and that person is known by the author to speek an exotic language, then some symbols could be letters from that language. Considering the strange shapes it must really be an exotic language. For example, note that symbols 2, 6, C, E, and F are similar to unicode characters U+1433, U+14A3, U+15EE, U+14B2, and U+140A, respectively (all from the code page for unified canadian aboriginal syllabics, see http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U1400.pdf). However, I doubt that any person at fermilab knows more than one exotic language, so just putting together letters from multiple exotic languages doesn’t seem valid to me.
Josh:
You may be on to something with the integral of F times C. I don’t know how that would fit in to the code, but it’s definitely a plausible interpretation.
Juhox:
Many people have mentioned Unicode and SGA as possible sources for the strange symbols. I am most intrigued by your ideas concerning a satellite or other birds-eye-view of the Fermilab campus, as well as your idea of the symbols fitting within a 2×2 grid. I suspect the symbols may well fit together in some pictoral fashion, which is the only explanation I can think of to account for the sheer strangeness of some of them.
In general I am still quite eager to have a reliable first-hand report of somebody (like Burt) inspecting the actual _original_ sheet of paper. All theories involving the possibility of meaning from the specks and any type of grid arrangement may be significantly affected by gaining access to the original paper document.
And I wouldn’t yet dismiss any theories that there could be machine-readable code embedded in the message somehow.
-AH
Back on the music interpretation of the middle section:
Maybe the sFC is a notation for the time signature: s = signature, F = 15, C = 12
15:12 isn’t a logical time signature, but the entire message is coded in ternary. Perhaps, divide each by 3, and you get a time signature of 5:4.
Just a thought.
Hey! That makes perfect sense.
5/4 is typical jazz/fusion or prog signature, and I bet an old guy like FC would call that “noise”
It’s probably some free form Miles Davis or old Genesis (too bad it wasn’t 9/8, then it surely would’ve been Apocalypse from Supper’s Ready)
Peder:
You may be onto something with the definition of “noise” being a reference to “unfavorable music”. A jazz time signature of 5/4 could well be pointing to a musical key to the puzzle.
Hmmm…
-AH
Just looking at the disposition on the page:
doesn’t it look like if the author took a lot of space for writing the first two stanzas (they are well centered together on the page), and later on he added third stanza, having to pack it at the bottom of the page.
Like if his original idea was to send the first two ones only, but afterwards he estimated that some additional informations or hints might be needed.
This would mean first stanza introduces second one and maybe contains its key, both being closely related, while third one being only a kind of annex, useful but not necessary.
This would also mean that maybe the author didn’t write any draft before to send his letter (I think he would then have adjusted the page’s layout more evenly), what give a chance to errors such as the apparent ones.
EV
This is just random, but I can’t shake the thought that we’re dealing with C = speed of light. F could easily then be from the Einstein-Maxwell equations. As could s.
it est, are we dealing with some form of electromagnetic field mathematics when dealing with near-lightspeed or paradoxical speeds? I think it’s possible, but it’s a hunch.
It just feels right.
anybody have more math backgrounds then I do in physics?
Here is my hypothesis concerning the middle section, although I did not get far in practice…
(Also I first posted this on the old thread before finding this one, so I now see others have had similar ideas)
The middle part provides 3 things:
1. A big pattern of bits in hexadecimal
2. a bunch of corresponding symbols to overlay the bit pattern to create the message
3. An example phrase (crib) which perhaps illustrates that the patterns are to be interpreted 3 nibbles at a time
The last part EMPLOYEE … could be the answer for the example phrase, e.g., perhaps
FRANK SHOEMAKER’s employee number.
creating a sample bit pattern of the nibbles is no problem (this might be the most obvious):
101 101 101 100
100 110 101 110
101 100 111 011
101 010 100 101
010 110 101 010
111 010 110 011
101 001 100 111
001 110 001 100
Trying to interpret the symbols as geometric patterns to read a bit sequence
is much harder for some symbols. This is complicated by the fact that some
symbols are much wider than others, and some would require an odd
number of pixel rows to look right. This is bad for the bit matrix idea.
What I think is interesting is that similar symbols are rendered with almost
the exact same proportions. The blocky symbols are almost all square
and drawn quite consistently. When you look at 2 and 6 you notice how
they are clearly and consistently offset to be top justified. The author
appeared to exercise much more care to line these up as compared to
the ticks.
I think the idea of a bit matrix from which you pull the bit stream off based
on the symbol pattern seems to fit as a “next level of complexity” I also
agree with the guy that wrote somewhere that because the third part
is crunched at the bottom it looks like it was an afterthought to add an
additional hint to solve the second part. I also find it interesting that the
0s and 1s are remarkably well distributed in the matrix I provided.
Since the symbols vary in complexity I figure you might just get a stream
out of each block which could vary in the number of bits. I thought this
might correspond to individual words. With my trials, though, I did not get
bit streams divisible by 3 or 4 which made me worry.
I figured to read the bit pattern, you could identify the bits hit in the matrix
and then read them off row major. I figured trying to read them as strokes
would be too hard. I also considered there may be a potential difference
between dots, strokes and circles. I also though maybe round shapes
might have a negative or XOR contribution.
I think if the author worked backwards and started with the message
to produce the bit stream, then the matrix and then just made up symbols
to encode the stream, this would not be that difficult since the author
could think up just about any shape at all. I also think the s=(1|A) ambiguity
with the crib makes it just a bit less trivial to decode the crib where you
would have to go through some potential combinations.
Maybe someone else wants to tackle this approach with a bit more
enthusiasm than I.
Hi everyone.
I think i found something interresting about the middle part.
I was playing with latex some minutes ago, when i realised that most of the caracters in the middle section exist in latex.
Here what i have found so far :
0 – “mid” with “dot”
1 – NA
2 – don’t know
3 – inverted “angle”
4 – maybe “therefore” (but really not sure)
5 – O ?
6 – “neg” or “urcorner”
7 – “Phi”
8 – “top” symbol, or inverted “bot” or “perp”
9 – don’t know
A – NA
B – the letter transform called “bar”
C – “curlywedge”, “perp”, “bot”
D – “infty” with surimposed “circledcirc” (anyway, the bottom definitivly looks like a “circledcirc”
E – “lrcorner” with “dot”
F – “triangleright”
A comment about the “inverted” symbols. some inverted symbols have a dot. I’m starting to ask myself if those should not be taken as a center of symetry, or an inversion indicator.
Well, this was my first, small contribution. I still don’t know what to do with that, but in case the guy who send the letter is a scientist, it make sense he used latex caracters (even more sense than using unicode). And if the middle part is an equation, latex is what he should have used.
EV:
I agree that it appears the last section was an afterthought. That would indeed point to the page being a first draft, and allowing for errors such as “basse”. Or maybe it’s just meant to look like that and the 3rd paragraph is the most important! *grin*
Kraz:
You’re right about the symbols seeming to be aligned and arranged with some care. I’m very curious about the 3-nibble crib and how it plays into decoding the symbols.
Mobius:
I agree that Latex is a strong possibility for matching most of the symbols in the center section. Are there any correlations between the hex values in the code and their respective Latex symbols?
-AH
shadows:
I’ve had a similar hunch that the hex symbols encode some sort of math or physics formula. There could be a correlation with Mobius’ ideas about Latex…
-AH
I no longer think that there is any significance to the structure (aka. grid) that might have been theoretically applied to the first stanza. Have a look at the following image which shows just how out-of-whack the columns are in the first stanza.
http://synhxd.sourceforge.net/images/stanza_one.jpg
Link: stanza_one.jpg
I took the first stanza into my trusty Gimp and colorized it, drawing boundaries for the following:
1. A light-blue boundary was first drawn around each tick mark
2. A llight-red boundary was then drawn around tick-mark groups, grouping them into trinary values
3. A green box was then drawn around groups of three trits
4. Lastly, the trinary triplet is decoded and the corresponding values are overlayed
Just to show that the author probably didn’t intend to strictly align the tick marks, I have done my best to align the columns. To do this, I first rotated the entire page 2 degrees CCW. Then, after I had bounded each tick mark, I drew a dotted-line from the center of each tick to the center of closest tick in the next row. You can see that it didn’t look very good afterwards (which leads me to believe that he/she didn’t even use graph paper; the rows are straight, but the columns are WAY off).
In the picture, you can see some question marks. Some seemingly apparent columns disappear, introduce double-spacing, and cause strange formations.
Let me know what you think and if it gives any idea. Also, let me know if you want the same thing done to the last stanza.
http://synhxd.sourceforge.net/images/stanza_one.jpg
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