Fermilab Calls For Code Crackers

atrocious cowpat passes along a call for help from symmetry magazine, the joint publication of Fermilab and SLAC, noting: "Could be just plain gibberish, it could be something like those wonderfully weird letters to the Mount Wilson observatory, or it could be a message from aliens who just happened to have gotten their hands (tentacles/exoskeleton) on a fax machine." "A little over a year ago, the Fermilab Office of Public Affairs received a curious letter in code (4.4-MB image here). It has been sitting in our files all that time and we haven't had much of a chance to look into breaking the code, nor are we particularly expert at this!"

Comments

Re:Well, obvious stuff:

[morgan_greywolf]

Mirror here. I think Google's servers can probably handle the traffic. ;)

Mirrored Copy

[LaptopZZ]

I mirrored it on my server as well as made a scaled down version which is just as readable as the original (unless you're making a poster).

http://www.pixabug.com/aliens/fnalcodeletter.jpg

http://www.pixabug.com/aliens/fnalcodeletter_sanesize.jpg

Happy Cracking

Re:Google recruiting?

[snaFu07]

Picture here: http://images.fastcompany.com/blog/121503billboard.jpg

Real problem solvers comment here

[Jhan]

(trying to move the interesting stuff to the top) The top and bottom part of the code code the same data. The little indentation at the beginning of the line is important and means that the previous line continues. The indentation in the bottom bottom part is of, perhaps because of writing conditions. The top part consists of five trinary numbers of lengths 29, 46, 14, 14, 8 digits. The bottom part consists of five binary numbers of lengths 75, 110, 37, 36, 8 digits. My best transcription, probably with errors:

char trinary[8][40]={
"323233331112132", // 15
"33323132212331", // 14 29
"2111331132312233", // 16
"333212123213113", // 15
"311333313331111", // 15 46
"211333323232211", // 14 14
"232313331121231", // 14 14
"33231312"}; // 8 8
char binary[8][40]={
"111010110101010101101010101110101101", // 36
"1101101101011101011011101011011101111", // 37 75
"1111010101101101011101010101110111011", // 37
"0111010110110111011101110111011101110", // 37
"111011011101110101101110100011101011", // 36 110
// Should have been more clearly to the left?
"1010110111011101110110111010101110111", // 37 37
// Should have been two steps to the left?
"011011011101101110110111010110111010", // 36
"110101011"};

Re:FRANK SHOEMAKER WOULD CALL THIS NOISE

[Anonymous Coward]

It's true:
remove the linebreaks from the first block, interpret # of lines as trinary digits 0,1,2 (|->0, ||->1, |||->2) and you get

212 122 220 001 021
222 120 211 012 201
000 220 021 201 122
222 101 012 102 002
200 222 202 220 002
002 222 121 211 022
120 222 001 012 022
120 201

Converting to alphabet by 000->a, 001->b, ... , 221->z, 222->' ', we get:

xrybh pwftayhtr kflcs uycc qwip bfipt

Write a script to check possible letter substituions against a dictionary, and you find that the substitution cipher
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
nl  o ki wu   strdec hfa

converts this to "frank shoemaker would call this noise"; maybe a coincidence, but looking likely.