Below is a list of movie titles with something in common. The movie titles were broken into five pieces, and then the following occurred:
One piece was left as is. Two other pieces exchanged first letters. One of the remaining two pieces had its letters shuffled. The final piece had its letters encoded using a simple non-random letter substitution code (ATNWGQKR). The five pieces were then alphabetized.
Can you discover the movie titles and find the common factor?
Which ones do you still have left to solve? I thought perhaps that once you discovered the coding of the fifth part, this would quickly get easy…
Here’s an example for anyone just starting on this puzzle:
Say the movie was: Gone with the Wind.
Break into five parts: GO NEWI THTH EW IND
One part stays the same: THTH
Two parts exchange first letters: IW END
One part shuffled: OG
Finally one part encoded: VMEQ
(The code in the example, but not in the actual puzzle, is CXMQOPB— which decodes to “Up Eight”. Hence, each letter has moved up eight in the alphabet, with any letter going past Z circling back to A and up. Theoretically, if you can discover just a few movie titles, you should be able to determine the non-random coding for the entire puzzle.)
No. 6 was the first to fall, and then no. 2. That’s as far as I got Sunday. No. 17 provided five more letters of the cipher and helped me knock out about three more titles. Then I finally figured out what ATNWGQKR meant. After that, the next five titles were relatively easy. It’s still quite a challenge to sort out the chunks, though, even with the whole cipher.
As of this moment, I’m still working on 1, 3, 7, 10, 11, and 16.
[I’ve already hit “Submit Reply” once, but that was maybe thirty minutes ago, and it still hasn’t gone through. I’m going to be really crazy and hit it again.]
I now have seventeen titles. As for the common factor, I’m not so sure. Most of them seem to have to do with going somewhere, but I can’t force 1 or 11 into that theme no matter how I stretch.
Wait a minute…
I knew it! I knew there had to a more consistent common factor. I just had to knuckle down long enough to find it. Yes, once I put my shoulder to the wheel, all the parts came together.
Bravo! You finally found all the movie parts and sewed this Frankenstein of a puzzle together. I figured that once you located the encoding key (or should that be " keys"), it would only be a matter of time.
I’ll give any others who are still working on this monster a chance until tomorrow morning, and then post the solution.
Congrats again! I just knew you wouldn’t go down to…defeet.