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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!"
Three "stanzas" maybe.
Starting with the "middle" stanza, that appears to be some sort of "key" perhaps. Each of the different symbols correspond to a different hexadecimal digit.
In the first stanza, each grouping of lines has 1, 2 or 3 lines.
In the last stanza, each group of lines is only 1 or 2 lines.
Maybe the last stanza is binary?
And maybe the first stanza is base 3?
Anyone else care to wager a guess?
My blog
My question is: Are the tiny dots in the background a dirty fax or photocopier artifact or are they, in fact, the code.
Perhaps Google is targeting Fermilab scientists for hiring.. Don't they have a history of using strange riddles and puzzles for hiring purposes?
Any hint on the source, or at least why they consider it important?
Not to be harsh, but if I send some random code letter to some lab, I guess (hope) it won't make the news, even on slashdot.
Don't take my posts literally; it's just code to control my botnet.
Considering that the ticks are vertically aligned, I would consider the interstitial spaces important parts of the message. Also note that the top block contains no more than three ticks consecutively, while the bottom block contains no more than two. Neither contain consecutive spaces, and both appear to start with a tick (not a space).
Part of it bears a striking resemblance to UPC code for "8200019288".
If I change the 1s to 0 and the 2s to 1, I get some interesting bits.
"J)IEQ)"""$curren;\QHquot;$)T
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
Seriously though, what the frack are these symbols? I think most of them fit into extended ascii, but not D and 4 (at a minimum, i'm basing this on knowledge from 20 years ago...)
Check out our infosecurity industry blog: http://securitymusings.com/
It's Caveman analysis.
Someone is counting the number of something. Day one, it was 3. Day 2, 2. on day 4, 2 show up. Probably animals at a watering hole. Then one of them dies... or maybe the hunter kills it.
Then he starts analysis again, to see how long it takes for a 3rd to show again.
How much is your data worth? Back it up now.
I'm not certain your statements are entirely correct. I attempted to create a binary pattern to start with and there are some ambiguities in the coding positions. For instance, on the left hand side of both code blocks some of the "first" ticks don't align with other first ticks. There are also some places in the code where the vertical alignment is ambiguous. If there cannot be consecutive spaces and there *can* be spaces in the first and last columns then I'd read the first block as:
Line 1) 11101101110110111011101110111010101011010111011 (47 digits)
Line 2) 01110111011101101110101110110110101101110111010
Line 3) 11010101011101110101011101101110101101101110111
Line 4) 0111011101110110101101011011101101011101010111
Line 5) 0111010101110111011101110101110111011101010101
Line 6) 1101010111011101110111011011101101110110110101
Line 7) 1101110110111010111011101110101011010110111010
Line 8) 1110111011011101011101011 (25/26 digits)
Consecutive spaces allow the coding to always hit 47 characters, but dramatically increases the complexity of the problem. I'm wondering if the whole code is continuous, meaning that the last tick on line 5 and the first two ticks on line 6 are actually one code three ticks wide (also 6-7). The spaces in the first and last columns of the first two lines seem to imply this...
the assumption in other posts is that the spaces are singular. It seem to me that it can't be true, if you count the | marks and the spaces as singular you get: /. demands fewer junk characters...
47
46
46
46
46
46
46
25 not counting final space.
Tried to give | || representation of the bits, but
This leads me to believe there is a double space in there, and with the crooked lining up of the |'s it is hard to tell exactly where... but i believe it is in the bottom most 5-6 lines.
Binary Hex Dec
1 11100101 E5 229
2 11111111 FF 255
3 10011011 9B 155
4 01111110 7E 126
5 11000001 C1 193
6 11111111 FF 255
7 10001010 8A 138
8 01111111 7F 127
9 11100001 E1 225
10 10111111 BF 191
11 01011110 5E 94
12 11111111 FF 255
13 11100001 E1 225
14 10111110 BE 190
15 01011111 5F 95
16 10110101 B5 181
17 01101011 6B 107
18 11110110 F6 246
19 11011011 DB 219
20 10111101 BD 189
21 01100011 63 99
22 11111100 FC 252
23 01010111 57 87
24 10111111 BF 191
25 11101011 EB 235
26 01110100 74 116
27 01001111 4F 79
28 00111011 3B 59
29 01111101 7D 125
30 00010110 16 22
31 01101111 6F 111
32 00111000 38 56
33 01110111 77 119
34 01011000 56 88
35 00100111 27 39
36 01111110 7E 126
This is where i lose my confidence on lining up the bits.. But in total there should be 48 rows... Oh, and I don't believe i mentioned this is the first stanza from the top of the page. Hope something from this helps,
Cheers
This reminds me of the movie Zodiac. It was based on the true story of a serial killer in US that sent code letters (similar to this one) to the press. Actually I just noticed that tomorrow Zodiac the movie was released precisely one year ago. The sender of this letter could be inspired by the movie.
thomasdamgaard.dk.
Not a critique as such and only vaguely on topic: Does anyone else find it interesting that parent found it natural to represent ternary using 1-2-3 and binary using 0-1?
That was actually my first instinct too when I was "reading" the thing...
"I think I am a fallen star. I should wish on myself."
while it may not be terribly relevant to the solution, it's worth noting a few oddities about the author's writing style. first of all, the second set of vertical lines is likely to be read right to left. notice how well justified the right side of the message is, while the left side terminates at various locations. we also know he writes the individual clusters from left to right based on the strokes left at the bottom of the bars.
secondly, i assume the author is writing with a felt tip pen and is transcribing this from another source. notice how some bars will have a larger dot at one end or the other. i postulate that the author has set down his pen and is checking another sheet to determine what to write, while his felt pen bleeds a little too much ink onto the paper. this, however, doesn't happen with a ball point pen. perhaps this will be of assistance in determining the order strokes were written in, giving us some insight into the author's intent.
thirdly, notice that the author writes the number 0 with a slash through it, but not the number 7 with a dash through it. i'm not an expert on handwriting identification, but certain groups will often be more keen on the selection of particular stylistic numbers, so this may help us to understand something of the author's background.
finally, note that many of the chars used in the second section are letters from other char sets. the letter i is obvious to the english readers, but less apparent is the instance of one that looks suspiciously like a greek capital phi. also, several bear a striking resemblance to chars that appear in a masonic cypher alphabet. http://www.odr.org/anonymous/fam-code.htm can the other chars be identified as belonging to specific alphabets?
The first part is ternary, with 3 substituted for 0. It's somewhat miswrapped, but it appears to say "FRANK SHOEMAKER WOULD CALL THIS NOISE".
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
If you break this up into tuples of 4 and Google it, you get some interesting matches from geomagnetic observatory data.
-- Terry
The first and last parts *DO NOT* look like terniary and binary to me.
Instead, they look like an RLL encoded pattern, similar to what you'd see on a hard drive. Maybe NRZI.
In fact, the first looks surprisingly like (1,3) MFM RLL.
Also reminds me of the old Apple Floppy drive "between any two ones there can only be a maximum of one zero" data writing rule.
Reposting higher up (look in lower posts for more explanation):
Stanza 1 -> "frank shoemaker would call this noise"
Stanza 3 -> "employee number basse 16"
Middle: probably an employee number, Base 16
There is indeed a Frank Shoemaker working at Fermilab on the BooNe experiment; perhaps this is a reference to him?
We've mostly solved it further down the thread. The top section is in ternary (with 0 replaced by |||), 000-space, 001->a, 002->b, etc. It's strangely wrapped: the spaces and non-spaces at the beginnings and ends of lines count. It says "FRANK SHOEMAKER WOULD CALL THIS NOISE".
The second part we haven't deciphered yet. It's possible that we'd need a Fermilab insider for this.
The third part is RLL. Once you decode the RLL (number of | between consecutive ||), you get the same code as part one, which says "EMPLOYEE NUMBER BASSE SIXTEEN", or so I've been told. This suggests that at least one part of the puzzle requires help from Fermilab people.
My uninformed guess is that once we solve the middle section, we'll get someone's name. His or her employee number at Fermilab spells something out in base 16, a coincidence which Frank Shoemaker would call "noise". Another possibility is that the middle section is hex-encoded employee ID numbers, which would mean that we can't solve it.
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.