Wait, I know almost nothing about cryptology other than what I googled last night, but you mean to tell me the encoded message you gave us has meaningless characters and isn’t even in the right order? Like the word “the” encoded in your message could be:
[key we have to figure out]
a = t
b = h
c = e
[message you give us] bpdfghhtrefapqwerecmn
Where the letters in bold map to the actual letters in the message with intermittent garbage in-between?
Wow, if so, that’s crazy. I give up and hope you eventually tell us the answer. I thought I might be able to guess it when my idea was to break your key up into 26 numbers, map those numbers to the alphabet, then somehow translate that to the actual characters in the message.
When someone posts a key with numbers corresponding to letters (the correct one), it should be a bit more clear. The letters that are only place holders should be easier to figure out (IMO) than solving the key.
My hint about the final solution should help as well. This is very doable, especially for this group.
Including figuring out which letters are not part of the code, there are only two steps left to finding the final solution. The last step is very easy.
I have to admit, I’m stumped on this at this point. I took the four potential sequences, and attempted to decode the message in several ways. I took the alphabet and placed it against all four keys and decoded in both directions, and then I would shift by one and repeat for all possible shifts. Then I took the alphabet, and reversed it and tried again. Then I took each of the four keys, guessing they might be recursive and did the same thing with them being decoded with the various shifts against themselves. None of these ideas seemed to produce any recognizable results.
One thing I did notice, however, was that despite the fact that it is encoded, each word in the message still has a vowel in it. This is contrary to expectations unless the vowels and consantants are encoded seperately somehow (eg, a->e->i->o->u->a), but I don’t see how that could be drawn from the key, or how it would be matched with the key.
I’ve tried it, but it doesn’t yield anything as far as I can tell. It makes sense because then the two letter word would be DC, corresponding to Washington DC, but none of the other words are even close to anything. It also puts the letter “C” in there an inordinate number of times and in odd locations. [/spoiler]
If you just want to get to the good part, the key is spelled out here
a 20 b 15 c 1 d 7 e 18 f 16 g 24 h 3 i 23 j 13 k 25 l 5 m 19 n 2 o 4 p 10 q 17 r 21 s 6 t 11 u 26 v 14 w 8 x 12 y 9 z 22 (the letter is equal to the following number)
This will leave only two steps, determining which values are part of the solution, and the last part.
Unless I’m completely misunderstanding, I’m still not seeing anything that leads me to think any values are more or less part of the sequence:MYHT XRJF WY FWCA FWLI VCEHBV CYX FLET FEB
or
13-25-8-20 24-18-10-6 23-25 6-23-3-1 6-23-12-9 22-3-5-8-2-22 3-5-24 6-12-5-20 6-5-2
Yes, I had gotten that one as well, but since it is really more of a further encoding, it seemed to make even less sense to me–not that the one I posted makes the least bit of sense either…
Okay, I’m going to take a guess since it’s been in my head for a while, but I don’t know enough about it to see if anyone else knows enough. Is it possible these aren’t words but are, in fact, something like GPS coordinates? **dnooman ** did say “a very specific location”. So, maybe it’s something like “degrees minutes seconds long, degrees minutes seconds lat”… or is it the other way around?
I thought about that, but the numbers don’t (at least as given) go high enough to be practical. For instance, here’s the latitude and longitude of somewhere in NYC:
New York, NY (city)
Location: 40.66980 N, 73.94384 W
I also couldn’t figure out a good system of finding useless values if the code is numerical.
