Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[piecewise]

Codon.

[Egan_BW]

Something something genetics?

[Harry Baldman]

Excellent, now we just need to figure out what the start and stop codons are.

Or maybe the initiation region and the termination region. Depends on how molecular this analogy is. Quick, see if you can figure out complementary loops. Maybe there's a cryptographic attenuation mechanism (presumably the point where an enlightened cryptographer says "balls to that" and gives up) that you need to understand first.

Seriously, though, that implies digrams or trigrams with some degree of redundancy in them. And perhaps a degree of universality between other encoded notes of the Doctor (except the ones he's cribbed from others - those probably have a few trigrams with different meanings).

[NJW2000]

As far too goddam tired to google coding, are codons a bit like the constantly changing alphabet cyphers of the Enigma machines?

[Toaster]

I submit these as less likely:
Rhyming as important
medical knowledge as important
baconian cipher
punctuation

PW said one of these was important: I'm guessing it's that one.

There's 5 symbols, right?  Our DNA has 4 bases; maybe this the genetic code of something (COUGH ORIGIN) that has 5 bases instead of 4.

[Egan_BW]

Five bases doesn't make much sense to me, but I don't know what else it would be.

[Toaster]

Five bases doesn't make much sense to me, but I don't know what else it would be.

Well, four bases is great and all when you're talking about Earth genetics, but this is ER; earthly limitations need not apply.

[Gentlefish]

5 bases and 3 connections hoo boy.

[Toaster]

Assuming that they are all trigrams and the line lengths are irrelevant

Assumption one is that there is a start trigram and a stop trigram.  They are, respectively, the first and last trigram.  This leads to 6 starts and 14 stops.  Obviously wrong.

Assumption two is that there is no start trigram, and the last trigram is stop.  This leads to 14 sections.  Of note is three sections are a single trigram long:

ΩθФ
θΩΩ
ΩθФ

Two are the same, which is noteworthy.  The other is the same as the very first trigram.

Hmmm... codons have redundancy, which implies it's just a substitution, but with redundancy.  I'm not sure the best path forward on that.

[Urist McCoder]

He said condone as in ran and Dan that makes five bases not four acgtu

[Egan_BW]

But five is a prime number, meaning that it's either a single-helix or it's actually ten bases and this is converted to base-five. Or that origin genetics break math?

[NJW2000]

Or the base relationships could be like a pentagon:

AB, BC, CD, DE, EA

Or a pentagram: AB, AC, AD, AE, BC, etc.

Or one base could only join with itself.

I'm probably totally missing the point here.

[TheBiggerFish]

ACTGU.

[Egan_BW]

I'd be a bit confused if I saw T and U in the same place though.

[TheBiggerFish]

Well if they bond like DNA...