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The A.S.P. Alphabet Soup Puzzle

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Interbane

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Re: The A.S.P. Alphabet Soup Puzzle

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What you said makes more sense now. There are full words in the mix, but with transposition according to some algorithm. The algorithm is probably similar to the one they used to make the 'secret pictures'. I'll take a look with fresh eyes later.

This morning I had to travel from one branch to another, and needed to carry some credit card information with me. So I wrote it on a sticky note in a cipher. My fascination with ciphers actually only started two weeks ago, when I started Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson. The timing of this puzzle is good.
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Re: The A.S.P. Alphabet Soup Puzzle

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Interbane,

Check out these two videos by Numberphile about the German Enigma machines.

Excellent.

Fun cipher info dump.

http://www.numberphile.com/videos/enigma.html

http://www.numberphile.com/videos/enigma_flaw.html
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Are you pushing your own short comings on us and safely hating them from a distance?

Is this the virtue of faith? To never change your mind: especially when you should?

Young Earth Creationists take offense at the idea that we have a common heritage with other animals. Why is being the descendant of a mud golem any better?
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Interbane

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Re: The A.S.P. Alphabet Soup Puzzle

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That's good stuff. Stephenson write about the Enigma quite a bit in Cryptonomicon. I was just listening to a chapter about it this morning.
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Re: The A.S.P. Alphabet Soup Puzzle

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Possible hint:

Start from upper left corner. Divide ASP into blocks of 17 lines and 17 columns.
From each section take the first 7 characters of the bottom line.
These represent a little-endian number in base 25 with 'a' representing zero.
Divide that number by its ordinal index within the message, then divide that value by 50411. The result will yield the corresponding letter in the clear by indexing into the first 26 odd primes: that is a=3, b=5, c=7,...z=103; 107 represents a separator.

Does anyone understand this?
n=Infinity
Sum n = -1/12
n=1

where n are natural numbers.
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