Puzzle #4 - Color Code

reply to post by Varrin7


Yes I believe that has always been there. You probably mentally shut it out while focusing on the image too much

Originally posted by americandingbat
If anyone happens to run across a standalone freeware decryption program that works on MacOS, u2u me please?

The Decrypto guy didn't ban us from using the online version I would think you could use it, just as long as we don't all try to use it at the same time.

reply to post by Kryties


yeah, or maybe this puzzle has just completely robbed me of key brain functions, such as memory, and um, i don't know, maybe HAPPINESS!!

PLEASE! I BEG OF YOU! HAVE MERCY!!!! I CAN'T SUFFER LIKE THIS!!!! HAVE YOU KNOW UNDERSTANDING OF OUR MISERY? We toil in this field of cryptographic agony, lured in by your worldy prizes. FOOLS we were, to think we could come out of this for the BETTER! Nothing lays ahead but TORMENT!!!!!

(wow, i should be an author)

I still can't believe we haven't solved this yet. I wonder how they came up with this stuff.

reply to post by Deaf Alien


Deaf Alien, you might be onto something.

The very first day I worked on this, I also came up with the word 'Abduct' like you but I also go 'Alien' as well. However, since nothing else made sense, I dropped it and never posted anything on the thread.

It might not have worked at the time because we were still thinking the puzzle was 'linear.' However, if it does require a fold or flip, then see if you can also find the word 'alien' (or aliens- I can't remember) in the first part.

Aliens and abduction would be right up ATS' alley so that would make sense. Glad to see you came up with the word abduct too.

perhaps if it has to do with abductions it has to do with a famous one. travis walton, betty and barney hill, or that stan guy with the video.

Did anyone else get the word 'imagine' as well?

Abduct, alien, imagine? And also possibly cloaks?

Can't make sense of anything and I am 2 seconds away from throwing in the towel. lol

Even tried doing some code forward and some code backwards. Nothing completely coherent.

:bnghd:

Originally posted by AshleyD
Can't make sense of anything and I am 2 seconds away from throwing in the towel. lol
:bnghd:

I threw in the towel long ago. Any work I do on the puzzle now is more from an unhealthy obsession to make the purple bars go away rather than any real desire to solve it.

reply to post by Wintermute


The thing that disturbs me is weren't there some errors in the previous puzzles? This is the first one I have participated in but I could have sworn the last one had some errors like southuest = southwest, etc. If that is the case, a cryptogram solver won't be of any help because they wouldn't pick up 'southuest.'

And this point, I'm relegating myself to a back seat cheerleader to all of you.

Good luck to all the remaining contenders.

Originally posted by AshleyD
Did anyone else get the word 'imagine' as well?

Also, to save anyone else 20 minutes of cut-n-pasting, I've tried the ID of just about every ATS thread that mentions 'liverpool' (which matches the pattern of the fifth 'word' in the puzzle). None of them said they were the correct thread ID. Of course, I probably missed one, and that was the correct one...

If it is that pattern, there's also 'disagreed', as in "here is one ATS user who disagrees that this puzzle is easy" "AshleyD disagreed that the word 'disagrees' would fit".

Oh, I also tried, for some reason, all the threads that mention 'snowballs' and 'driftwood'.

Edit to correct: Thanks Ashley, it is indeed 'disagreed' rather than 'disagrees'...


[edit on 10-8-2008 by Ian McLean]

reply to post by Ian McLean


hehe. Yes, I got driftwood and snowballs, too. Then I thought, 'Oh! Flatwoods!' Like the Flatwoods monster which is a new tinwiki article. Since that is an unusual word, the cryptogram solver wouldn't have it in its database. There are also some threads about it. But then I realized the word didn't fit into that slot because the double O's were one letter off. Oh well. I don't recall getting Liverpool but I think I remember disagrees. Not sure. It's all circling around in my head now and getting blurred together.



Edit: Does this have to form an actual grammatically correct sentence or phrase? Or were the other puzzles sometimes just themed words that went together?

Edit again: I remember now, it is disagreed, not disagrees. The S cannot be the same as the D.

[edit on 8/10/2008 by AshleyD]

Ah Ian, I'm disappointed. You're resorting to Liverpool and snowballs now?

Aren't you the one who solved the similar, but smaller color code in the pre-game puzzles?

What happened when you applied the same technique to this puzzle. Is it the fact there are 42 lines to deal with? I tried to follow your logic, but at some point you arbitrarily added two to the values or something like that. Definitely not an intuitive to me.

When you listed the horizontal values on this table, why did you only select the odd lines?

Has anyone mapped out the entire 47X42 table yet? We could have gone through that tedium many times by now. I haven't done it because I keep thinking someone is going to solve this thing, and I'm not sure what I would do with the values.

reply to post by AshleyD

Thanks Ashley, I've corrected my post.

Also, can you believe there's no mention of 'Smirnoff's' on ATS? Surprising, that! However, there are many threads about various 'standoffs'.

so where at boys?
i see words like what we have been seeing in the past

are we sticking with the current information?

anything new?

Originally posted by msdesertrat
Ah Ian, I'm disappointed. You're resorting to Liverpool and snowballs now?

Just shooting spitballs at the problem... when the game moderators decided that puzzle #4 should be one of the four 'harder' ones, they weren't throwing softballs.

at some point you arbitrarily added two to the values or something like that. Definitely not an intuitive to me.

Yes, that was reaching a bit. An hour or two later I noticed that, two pixels down in the image, the text was encoded exactly, and I didn't need to jump through those hoops at all. There's a corrected post a page or so later in the thread, showing the more-accurate 14x5 table of colors, rather than the 14x3 I originally transcribed.

When you listed the horizontal values on this table, why did you only select the odd lines?

On the odd scanlines, every pixel in each 6x1 block is the same color. So, a table can be made that is 47 columns wide, not 268 columns. That's not true for the even scanlines -- there's stray dots of different colors in the 6x1 blocks. I do have a table of all the values, it's just unwieldy to post.

I also have a table of the Red/Blue data, from the odd scanlines -- it's not the same in all columns! I think I'll post that; it might be useful.

New clue, new clue, new clue.

Pretty please? My brain will be completely fried and my life in shambles if this continues for 12 days.

My house is in disarray, our pets are hungry. My husband is losing weight. I've fallen behind on following the current conspiracy threads.

We both fell aspleep early this morning while trying to convert numbers to base 16 for no particular reason.

This is wrong.

reply to post by ragster


I found SOME new interesting things and did SOME new tests but my brain blew a fuse. For instance, let's say the first code we had went like this:

ABCD EFGHI JKLMN OPQRST UVWXYZ

I would do combinations of things like try to decode ABCD EFGHI JKLMN normally then reverse the ZYXWVU TSRQPO to find words that way. Like half forwards, half backwards.

Then tried every other word front and back. Then eliminating every other letter like ACEG.

Nada.

Just a rant moment. Pay no attention. Just blowing off steam.

The thing is, if you add up the totals, fragments (horizontal and vertical), think of things like backwards, forwards, diagonal, letter skips, etc., with as much information is in that graphic, there would literally be hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of possible combinations to come up with. That is pretty crazy. Almost seems like it would take a special program to find a pattern. This reminds me of trying to find Bible codes by hand instead of using a program.

Sigh.

Ok, I'm officially taking a back seat unless something comes to me in a dream or by divine intervention.

Whats that sound its a continual thumping .

I thought I was going crazy.

Till i figured out what the sound is .

Its the sound of Hundreds of ATS members banging their heads against the wall

such a thumping of brains to rid them of the purple strips .

Okay back to a new angle

reply to post by Ian McLean


Yearfully, soon we shall solve this like the famous stanchoos of Deathwood.

This puzzle has caused me to see words that don't exist.

Oh. Just thought of something. Is the number 16 significant in any way? Or any other number significant in any way?

Edit: NM. Just noticed it wouldn't matter for what I was thinking of.

[edit on 8/10/2008 by AshleyD]