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Fermilab Calls For Code Crackers

Posted by kdawson on from the finding-patterns-where-none-may-exist dept.

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!"

3 of 392 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Mathamatically speaking.... by Impy+the+Impiuos+Imp · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The interstices would not represent zeroes, unless the message just happened to have no more than 1 zero in a row. Hence | represents 0, || represents 1, and ||| represents 2, or some rotation of that.

    By the way, this is apparently some kind of "unary" notation, though what zero it is remains to be seen. Similarly, the bottom set, having no more than two | in a row, might be another unary notation of something in a base 2.

    As for the little dots, some, like the symbol for E, are repeated, so it's safe to assume they're part of the symbol. Others, like 6, are repeated without the dots, so it's probably a stray mark. Still others, like 5, 0, and 8 are not repeated, so we can't tell for sure whether the odd marks are stray or part of the symbol.

    It's also possible they are an additional notation applied to the base symbol, giving it a slightly different meaning, or adding more info.

    --
    (-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
  2. Context? by Z00L00K · · Score: 3, Insightful
    To be able to decrypt a message it is usually necessary to know the context to where it belongs. Without context it's hard.

    And is it really a message, it can be other things too:

    1. A data sampling done by hand with two samplings, the first has three alternatives the second has two. The code in the middle is just thrown in for good measure by a joker.
    2. It's someone's way to compose music. The first part is for a simple instrument with three tones, the last part is another instrument with two alternatives (bongo drums?). The middle part is just markers used to remind the performers about what to sing.
    3. Someone's idea of a prank to pull.
    --
    If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
  3. Re:FRANK SHOEMAKER WOULD CALL THIS NOISE by femtobyte · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Last stanza:
    consider the || separators between trinary digits |, | |, | | |; decode as for first stanza, gives:
    tadcfmtt blaztr zyppt pioqttb ->
    "employee number basse sixteen"

    thus, the central numbers are probably the employee # of the prank letter writer. Someone at Fermilab could probably check this (maybe Frank Shoemaker?)

    I think we've solved it!