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[LeoLeonardoIII]

I posted this in Happy Thread but got no replies, so here's the puzzle.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Avery tested every able oiler over eighty five. Our only gripe about aliens earned earnest envy. Under my humble bum each essay absorbs energy. August saw my love elope ... et tu, Amelia? Untold danger, deception, and hardship awaits - and treasure! I spy with my little eye, something ... orange. Ivory comes from one itty bitty elephant poacher. Agony Ale, drink Agony Ale and age acutely! Over hill side, over dale, Anna escaped death. I find the stench of Earl's bread revolting. Ago, it was, in ages indigo and afar. Orgying got him chlamydia, herpes, and a wife. Eat lead, stupid insipid cat ... wait - no! NOOOOO-. Ice water filled his open mouth and lungs.

I'm sure you guys will get it really quickly.

[LordBucket]

I'm sure you guys will get it really quickly.

Under 3 minutes to notice what's unusual about the paragraph, but here I am over 40 minutes later and I still don't know what to do with it, and I've lost track of how many things I've tried. Usually bay12 figures out puzzles in 5-10 minutes tops, but since nobody ever figured it out in your other thread, and this thread is over two hours old with no responses...I'm guessing it's something relatively obscure that you either know or you don't know, and figuring it out without already knowing how to reach the solution is probably unlikely.

That said:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

There are 14 sentences with 8 words each. That makes an 14x8 grid. The problem is what to do with it.

First letter of every word:
Ateaooef
Oogaaeee
Umhbeeae
AsmleetA
Uddahaat
Iswmleso
Icfotbep
AAdAAaaa
OhsodAed
IftsoEbr
Aiwiaiaa
Oghchaaw
ElsicwnN
Iwfhomal

Last letter of every word:

ydyerree
ryetsdty
ryemhysy
drndpsde
Iyhyeege
ysmeyytr
yekyedey
rlereadh
Idehfsdg
otsnsodr
gtmasdae
tdddttoO
erdsnhds

I've tried converting to decimal, converting to ascii, coverting to "number of letters in each word," but nothing turns up. None of the sentences appear to be palindromes, and there are no obvious anagrams. All letters exist except j, q and x. I've tried checking to see if the decoder is implied by the paragraph. For example, "Avery tested every able oiler over eighty five" would be a clever way to say to test using only ascii characters over 85, but that leaves W,X,Y,Z and every lower case letter, which doesn't help us. The "Over hill over dale" line is a reference to A Midsummer Night Dream, and "Et tu" is from Julius Caesar, and having two Shakespeare references suggests that a decoder might be related to that, but if so I'm not seeing it. We could try looking at the grid and removing every letter that isn't in "Shakespeare" but once you start going down that route it can rapidly become a terrible lot of trial and error.

There are some peculiar things going on with capital letters. "Agony Ale" and "NOOOOO" are both capitalized out of place, along with titles and names. But pulling out capitals gives us: "AOUAAUIIAAAAOAIEAOE NOOOOO I" and I don't see anything useful to be done with that. Related, there are also a lot of vowels, and a curious tendency of vowel themes. For example, if we look at the first letters of every word in "Avery tested every able oiler over eighty five" we get" ateaooef." Two a's, two e's, two o's. There are a number of patterns evident, but again...what to do with them? At this point, I'm concluding that I'm finding things that are not intended.

I guess we could try assigning colors to letters and putting the 8x14 grid into paintbrush and see if it draws anything, but at this point, there are so many things I've tried that haven't worked, and you insist it's a "short" "little" puzzle, and that seems like a like of effort to go to.

*shrug*

So again, pretty much expecting that when you post the solution it's going to be something that people would only get if they already knew some particular thing.

[GreatWyrmGold]

I think you've put more thought and effort into it than Leo did.

No offense, Leo, but...wow.

[LeoLeonardoIII]

Yeah LB you are a very clever person. Those are excellent ideas, and I wish I had thought of them The point about two Shakespeare references is cool but I just dredged those up from my reserves.

Spoiler: hint level 1 (click to show/hide)

You're on the right track converting the code text to blocks of letters.

Spoiler: hint level 2 (click to show/hide)

There are some red herrings, such as punctuation and capitalization, but the 14 rows of 8 letters each does seem pretty suspicious ...

EDIT: Also I noticed LB's first-letter transcription block is off. His line 7 should be: Icfoibep

[GreatWyrmGold]

Um...are you confusing me and LordBucket? The first time you mentioned me it seemed like you were being sarcastic about my not attempting to solve it, but the second doesn't fit with that.

[LeoLeonardoIII]

I was totally confusing you and LordBucket. Fixed!

[LordBucket]

It's been a week and nobody's figured it out. Just post the solution so we can roll our eyes in annoyance at the probably ridiculous, arbitrary thing that you thought anyone would guess.

Spoiler: hint level 1
Spoiler: hint level 2

Your hints are worthless. You're telling us things we already posted. Like I said in my previous post, the grid was the obvious thing that was apparent in the first few minutes.

The number of things that could possibly be done with it is effectively limitless, and without any way to narrow the field one could easily spend hundreds of hours trying things that could legitimately be the solution, but we have no way to know. For example, rot13 is a standard cipher. I tried it. You're not using it. But hypthetically, if you wanted to be difficult you could have used rot- any number from 1 to 26. That would be a competely legitimate thing to do. So, what...shall we try every single rotation from 1 through 26? No, have to do it 26 * 4 times because the message could be read left to right, top to bottom, bottom to top or right to left.  We could probably guess that's it's not top to bottom or bottom to top because you have that "AAdAAaaa" line in there, and it's probably unlikely that any encrypted message would contain five of the same letter in a row. So that reduces it to only 52 thingsto try...just for that one method.

Or we could go through various other lists of standard substitution ciphers, and simply try them all. Or maybe you recently saw Futurama, or played Starfox or saw some movie or game and decided it would be fun to use a cipher from some arbitrary pop culture reference. Or hey, maybe you made one up of your own in which case there are only 26 * 25 * 24 ... = 403,291,461,126,605,635,584,000,000 possibilties. Oh, and multiply that by four because again it can be read top to bottom, left to right, etc. Either way, if that's the case, then the encoded message is literally any possible 112 character string and there's absolutely no possible way to vet it because literally any possible text of that length might be the answer.

On the other hand, it's noteworthy that there seems to be no punctuation, so maybe it's not any of those at all. For example, I already suggested it might be a paintbrush image.

Your puzzle is not interesting enough to spend literally multiple lifetimes trying all the things it could possibly be.

[LeoLeonardoIII]

(HAHA wow ninja'd by LB)

OK it's been another day, so here's another pair of hints. And I consider pointing out which avenues of speculation are worthwhile to be a good hint - it keeps you from running down rabbit holes forever.

Spoiler: hint level 3 (click to show/hide)

LB tried converting to decimal, ASCII, and converting number of letters in each word. What else can you convert the message to if you have a bunch of sets of 8 letters?

Spoiler: hint level 4 (click to show/hide)

LB noticed that there are an awful lot of vowels in the letter block. You could say that the letter block consists of vowels and consonants. What could you convert it to that consists of two types of information per character?

[LordBucket]

A prize is you.


Yes, it was stupid and arbitrary.

[Toaster]

Spoiler: Answer (click to show/hide)

A prizm is you

Spoiler: Solution (click to show/hide)

Looking at the first letter of each word, a vowel is 0 and a consonant is 1.  Each sentence is a binary code for a letter (or space.)

\


Hello ninja.  Unless someone screwed up a letter block, I got a slightly different answer.

[LeoLeonardoIII]

I checked earlier, and the m is from LB's transcription error I mentioned above.

I don't think it's arbitrary. Binary encoding is a regular thing, people know about it. I think translating the text block into some kind of image would be even more arbitrary because it relies on someone making a leap to a block-shape. You're right that noticing the eight-word strings is easy, and trying to grab the first letter is pretty easy, although using the last letter instead would be diabolical.

In total we have three steps of pattern recognition - identifying 8-character strings, separating out just the first letter, identifying the important feature as vowel vs. consonant - and one translation using binary. I don't think that's in the realm of "you'll never get THIS one nya-ha!" although my perception as the puzzle-writer is gonna be off.

You might just be sour that you didn't get it without any hints ;P Although I agree that it wasn't that interesting-looking. Maybe if it were more interesting people would have put out more effort and solved it without hints?

[IronyOwl]

Well, quick acid test for that: How many possibilities do you think the average person would have to evaluate and discard to get it?

That's where the arbitrariness comes from. It's simple working back from the answer, but without any hints beyond 8 words a sentence and the sentences appearing nonsensical there's kind of a lot of directions to go in.

[LeoLeonardoIII]

Sure, that's why it's a puzzle. I mean, I wouldn't put this kind of thing in a D&D game because (1) it's technological, (2) it's kinda hard, and (3) it requires looking stuff up online.

I guess I assumed people would spot a bunch of 8-character strings and think perhaps it has something to do with bits. It would be like if you saw something in 26 or 24 or 10 or 12 units and start trying things related to those (letters, hours, fingers, months). There aren't a whole lot of 8-related things.

That's ok if it wasn't very good; I haven't done many of this kind of thing so let's call it a learning experience

[LordBucket]

Binary encoding is a regular thing, people know about it.

I assumed people would spot a bunch of 8-character strings and think perhaps it has something to do with bits.

Yes., people know about binary. It even occured to me. When I saw 8 characters, I immediately thought ascii, ebcdic and binary. I didn't do any testing ebcdic with either. Binary was one of the things I discarded as unlikely, like using "Shakespeare" as an additive cypher, which incidentally I think would have been far more clever since you made two references to his works. Why did I discard binary? Because I didn't see anything intuitive about reducing 26 possible letters into 1s and 0s. For example, it could just as easily have been:

 * Upper case letters are 0, lower case are 1
 * Upper case letters are 1, lower case are 0
 * Divide the alphabet in half, first 13 letters are 0, second 13 are 1
 * Divide the alphabet in half, first 13 letters are 1, second 13 are 0
 * a=1 b=2 etc, even numbered letters are 0, odd numbered are 1
 * a=1 b=2 etc, even numbered letters are 1, odd numbered are 0


And incidentally, when you gave clues 3 and 4, I had to choose whether to assign vowels a value of 1 or 0. I guessed wrong, because....ask yourself, which would you be more likely to say: "ones and zeros" or "zeros and ones"? So when I plugged it into a binary to text converter it gave me high ascii gibberish. Even if I had gone ahead and tried it before you gave the hint, I probably wouldn't have kept testing after that.

Even knowing the solution, the only clue that it's vowels and consonants are 0s and 1s is that looking at the letter block, the entire leftmost colum of letters is all vowels. If you happen to know that the letters portion of ascii is encoded exclusively in the first 7 bits of data (which honestly, didn't occur to me at the time and I seriously doubt it occurred to you when you thought of this) then, yes it makes sense to assign vowels 0 rather than 1. The problem with that is that the leftmost colum of letters is also all capital letters, and if you decode it that way you get a bunch of gibberish punctuation.

What reason is there to guess the particular encoding scheme you chose rather than any of the others I mentioned?

There needed to be some way to narrow the field, or else it becomes millions of things to try.

[ShadowHammer]

No offense, but I feel like it would be a better puzzle if it had a more relevant answer: as far as I can tell, "a prize is you" has nothing to do with anything.

It's just so arbitrary that it's like me saying 'My username. Solve.' and then presenting the solution 'covalent', because the words in my name start with S and H, and since they're in capitals and are letters you should know that it has to do with elements on the periodic table, and from there you can deduce that it's a formula and then figure out that it is hydrogen sulfide which is a molecular compound, and molecular compounds are held together by covalent bonds. This is a perfectly logical train of thought, because I just finished a chemistry unit in science, but it makes no sense for anyone else to follow it.

The riddle could no doubt be adapted fairly easily to a different solution, which I think would have been a good idea, but it is still too arbitrary to solve in a reasonable amount of time and effort.