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

Hmm...

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

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

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.

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]