Puzzle #4 - Color Code

The file name is gone. The puzzle now saves as "untitled".

Hmm...

reply to post by Kryties

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this is important i believe so.

reply to post by Tuning Spork

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It is still working for me. It still says 8uhnbsgt62bs.

I have been working on the possibility that these two lines from the clue are of significance to this puzzle:

IT WILL BE OBSERVED THAT A CYCLE OF ADDITIVE COLORS IS IMPORTANT AS WELL AS THAT OF SIMPLE DOTS.
IT WILL BE OBSERVED THAT SIXTEEN IS IMPORTANT IN NUMBER AND COLOR, BUT THAT CAESAR SEQUENTIALLY SHIFTS HIS COLORS.

Keeping in mind the 'additive colours' bit i tried subtracting the greater of two adjacent green values to get a difference between each green value.

I come up with:

0 8 5 2 10 8 8 7 0
2 16 20 9 3 9
9 1 8 1 1 3
7 16 11 12 17 8 6
7 3 4 7 18 10 5 0 7
10 2 11 1 6

With each number assigned a unique letter i get :

ABCDEBBFA DGHIJI IKBKKJ FGLMOBP FJQFRECAF EDLKP

Not sure if this is a good direction to go down, but i cant think of anything else and i think my brain is starting to bleed lol

yeah same here, still says the same name.

reply to post by GarethAyres

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ok this is also good, I love new letters an formulations, I am working on this right now. It just the symbols seem so interesting to not be anything...

tried saving image as txt, but just got the encoding for the image


Šž“m0Ïô¼ŽëH9
$I‹³HŽªX’xP‘ùÏÿÿ¬‘ÓHáȑᘐ,}!

goes on like that forever, so probably nothing there. just normal code

reply to post by Varrin7

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I did that too and it was huge. Tons in notepad and 63 pages once pasted to Word. I am seriously hoping that is not what we are supposed to decode.

[edit on 8/9/2008 by AshleyD]

Not sure if the image will show up but this is what I got with all the subtle color differences. The only colors that stay the same are the center 15. My daughter and I keep coming up with the same letter patterns as everyone else and can't make sense yet.

[edit on 9-8-2008 by oregongal]

I think we should now try an focus on maybe how ATS designed this cipher, if we can get a basic knowledge of this color coding whatnot, maybe it will give us an extra hand in figuring it out...

I thought maybe the key was to break it up into vertical strips. But, the inverted image almost looks to be a reflection. If you take away the solid middle blocks and then take every line from the middle and place together, you will start to see that this builds the clue.

reply to post by Freenrgy2

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Could you please elaborate a little more? Im a little confused as to what you mean.

reply to post by ragster

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i was looking into that. in the clue, "caesar.....shifts..."

i looked up caesar code and got the caesar cipher. it's a fairly basic cipher where you shift the alphabet

i.e.----shift of one would look like this

real letter: ABCDEF......
cipher: BCDEFG......

You basically "move" the alphabet. This led me to the part where the number "sixteen" is important. i think it might mean a shift of 16. now all we have to do is find the coded letters, assuming i'm right bout the caesar cipher.

reply to post by Varrin7

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I made a program that shifts each letter in this string for all possible shifts. It's still gibberish. Please explain more about this number 16.

reply to post by Kryties

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I'm trying to do this in paint but its extremely time consuming. I inverted the colors and came up with the image in my earlier post. I thought perhaps the key was to break up the image along the vertical strips that it formed. However, I think now, that the each line (excluding the middle section) is almost a mirror image of itself. So, I'm trying to combine one line from the top with its mirror from the bottom. It's hard to try and get the select window just right. I know there are graphics experts here, but it seems that the lines are interlaced and need to be arranhged with its mirror and then the who thing can be reassembled.

reply to post by Freenrgy2

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I've been doing that. See here and let me know if you think it's worth continuing:

www.abovetopsecret.com...

reply to post by Varrin7

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Yes this is also known as rot-n. rot is for rotation and n is teh number of positions to move. ROT13 is a popular one on the net for obvious reasons.

Here is a rot web site: www.unfiction.com...

I have tried most the codes i have made on it and only had more jibberish

reply to post by Deaf Alien

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here is the alphabet apllied to a caesar shift of 16:

actual: A|B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
coded: M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z A B C D E F G H I J K L


see, A, the first letter of the alphabet, is shifted in order 16 letters. the code than can be translated by matching them. for example:

actual: above top secret
coded: mnzgq eza dqocqe

hope this helps.

Has anyone tried a steganographic approach to this problem yet? If not, I will attempt to do so. I have written several steganographic libraries (specialized - so it will take some time to alter them for this puzzle).

For the uninitiated: Steganography is the art of hiding information in the least significant bit in an image. Thus, hexadecimal will tell you nothing as each hexadecimal number represents 16 bits and thus could be extremely misleading (I'm only mentioning this since if steganography was in fact used, hex is the wrong approach - it is like looking for viruses in a microscope with the magnification set a couple orders or magnitude too high to see the salient features you are looking for). You need to look at the binary representation of the image and see if there are slight variations in the least significant digit. This way - the colors look the same and are unable to be distinguished from a pure color that is one bit different from the neighboring color with a bit flipped another direction. Plus - being a color image - a stegonographic message might often use all three fields (red, green and blue -or- in print cyan, magenta, yellow and black) in order to hide three or four bits of information per pixel. In this way, one can put more data per pixel in each individual pixel. And this is a color image.

This is a common way for terrorists (and government's) to transmit data right in front of your eyes. If this has already been attempted (although I could not find mention of it with a quick search) then I apologize for the repeat information.

Let me know if you would like me to attempt to do a steganographic analysis on this image.

Finally - it should be noted that many of you have cut off what is potentially part of the message - it appears to the eye to be black, but in fact is not, thus the image information extends beyond many of the images that I have seen in this thread. That might lend a clue to this problem.

WoodyAcres

EDIT to add: Or is this problem effectively solved?

[edit on 9-8-08 by WoodyAcres]

reply to post by WoodyAcres

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I believe many of us are at the point of wanting to tear our eyeballs out over this image!

Please try your approach, I personally haven't tried that way and I have not seen any posts here indicting anyone else has either.