talkmagic.co.uk

This post is the complete solution of the challenge I posted here. I opened a new thread in case somebody still wants to try and solve it.

THE ROAD TO THE SOLUTION
First of all let's have a look at the puzzle:

0 f353:76e6:1327:2733:8446:3325
A 0302:0708:0a01:0407:0605:0c04
D 4b01:4306:4308:1401:5202:7608
Y 7301:6f04:3303:7c03:3401:8805

As it has been correctly guessed by many people, everything (except the characters in bold) is in hexadecimal.

FIRST LINE
As I told (clue 16), the first line is just a red herring. In particular, the first character (the 0) means nothing (i just wanted to be sure that the characters in bold were in some kind of order). If you take the rest, erase the ":" and reverse it, you obtain the sequence 52336448337272316e67353f
if you feed this sequence to the "Hex" section of
http://home.paulschou.net/tools/xlate/ (clue 6) you will notice that the "text" section will give you
R3dH3rr1ng5?
which is just the LeetSpeek translation of "RedHerrings?" (I had to make it of the exact length). I put the first line because I wanted to give a special clue to people who contributed and because I wondered whether also magicians (like most people) would have focused their decrypting efforts starting from the beginning…

CLUE 3, 4 and 5
These clues reveal the exact nature of the cipher I used. Clue number 3 reads as
39167A398849 x2y3
If you substitute the capital "A" with "p" and x,y with l and n respectively (as per clues 9 and 12) you obtain
39167p398849 l2n3
if you point your browser to any particular post (it must be a post, not a topic) on this forum, you will notice something. For example, the address of the first post of the challenge is
http://www.talkmagic.co.uk/ftopic41720.php#p421963
thus the first number (before the "p") gives you the address of a thread, while the second one (after the "p") gives the particular post I want to bring you to. In the case of our clue, you should have pointed your browser to
http://www.talkmagic.co.uk/ftopic39167.php#p398849
the 3rd word of the the 2nd line (that's what "l2n3" stands for) of that post is "book". In the same way (as per clues 18, 21, 14) clues 4 decodes as "book" "cipher" "Italian". The puzzle, then is a book cipher in Italian. A short glance to wikipedia will reveal that a book cipher consists in a series of "coordinates" of letters or words in a given text (the key). In fact these clues were book ciphers as well.

Unfortunately I realized only today that these clues were browser dependent, I gave the correct decoding in the clues, so it didn't matter too much, but this rendered the solution basically impossible in the first 15 days of the challenge. Shame on me.

CLUE 8
This clue was actually about the key of the cipher. As clue 13 suggested, you could have put together 10 and 8 to obtain
0x8499
This suggests that we are dealing with a hex number (look on wikipedia for "0x" if you want to know why). If you convert this number to decimal, you obtain
33945
again, this is the number of a thread on TalkMagic. Point your browser to
ftopic33945" target="_blank
and you find a topic titled "Dante's Inferno". This, together with clue 15 suggested that the key for the cipher is Dante's "Divine Comedy", IN ITALIAN (clue 5).

ABOUT CLUE 2
All that was found so far could have been found with clues 19 and 2. The address reported in clue 19 is the complete solution of the Crypto challenge found in Simon Singh's "The Code Book" (an excellent introduction to cryptology, by the way). "The infamous stage number 5" of that challenge, which has been considered one of the most daunting, was in fact a book cipher. I'm not completely sure, but I think that if you read the attempts at cracking that stage on the website I reported, you will find that one of the first tries was Dante's Divine Comedy.

PUZZLE DECIPHERING
For those who do not know (shame on you!), the Divine Comedy is divided into 3 volumes (Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso) clue 15 someway suggested that each line of the actual puzzle referred to a different volume.
As I said before, the coordinates of a book cipher can point to whole words or letters, in my case (as per clue 23), in my case they pointed to words. Let's have a look at how to decode the first line:
A 0302:0708:0a01:0407:0605:0c04
Each volume of the Divine Comedy is divided into 33 "Canti" (34 in the case of Inferno) and each "Canto" a several verses. So to identify a single word we need to know the number of the "Canto", the number of the verse and the number of the word in that verse.
In the puzzle I used a single "Canto" from each volume. The characters in bold refer to the number of the "Canto" with a very simple substitution (A=1, B=2, …).
So to decode our line we have to look at the first canto of the Inferno. If you don't have an Italian edition of the Divine comedy, you could have googled "Divine Comedy" and one of the first results would have been http://www.divinecomedy.org, which has also a very convenient browser. Each group of 4 characters is actually made of 2 hex numbers, the first referring to the verse and the second to the correct word in the verse (and this is why the second pair of digits is always a number smaller than 10). So, for example "0302" means the second word of the 3rd verse, which in the first canto of the Italian edition of the Inferno is "La". In the same way 0708 = "morte", 0a01=10 01 = "io" (this was actually an unintended complication: it should have been 0a02="non" I'm SO sorry for that) etc.
The whole line decodes as "La morte io è la via" (but should have been "La morte non è la via".
The second line and third line (D=4th Canto of the Purgatorio and Y=25th Canto of the Paradiso) read as
"Se vuoi pensare con la testa"
and
"La tacita risposta è la mente"
Which is a riddle in Italian:

La morte io è la via (Which should have been "La morte non è la via")
Se vuoi pensare con la testa
La tacita risposta è la mente

Which google translates (it took me ages to get something that made sense with google translate) to

Death is the way I
If you think with your head
The implied answer is the mind

Of course the first verse is screwed up because of the mistake that I made in the first line of the puzzle (it should have read as "death is NOT the way"). Anyway, the solution (as the third verse quite clearly states) is
"The mind" or, in Italian, "La mente" (I would have accepted both).

Cheers.

That's exactly the answer I arrived at, but I wanted to let someone else win.

/lies

DJBenz wrote:That's exactly the answer I arrived at, but I wanted to let someone else win.

/lies

Oh, the selfless soul

I understand the answer even less than I understood the original puzzle..... pass the paracetamol again please.....

Welcome to my world

Not fair with the leetspeak and foreignese imo

I did really enjoy it though, and would have a pop at another!

Mancunian Lee wrote:Not fair with the leetspeak and foreignese imo

I did really enjoy it though, and would have a pop at another!

I could agree for the Italian, but I couldn't think of another work of literature fitting so well for structure (3 volumes, 33 canti each and few hundred verses for each canto) and the only way I had to refer to a standard version of it was to use the original version.

For the leetspeak, I added it at the very last moment: my first version had only random characters in the first line