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[Harry Baldman]

Maybe he encrypted it twice, first with a polyalphabetic method, then with a digram or trigram-based substitution cipher? That might be why he's curious as to whether anyone would be able to crack it at all, and also why the potential reward is so massive.

[Egan_BW]

PTW

[Gentlefish]

..,Now I'm looking into four-square and bifid/trifid ciphers.

What have you done to me, PW?

Except it can't be a repeating series of bifid ciphers; there's no pattern for that.

[piecewise]

Feel free to collaborate or bring in other people from outside the game. Then claim the prize for yourself alone!

[Kriellya]

PTW

THERE'S A WATCH/NOTIFY BUTTON! USE IT *ahem*

Yeah, I don't *think* he used a classical cipher. At least, not just a classical cipher.
I mean, if he wanted to be an ass about it, he could have used a One Time Pad, which is a classical cipher, is doable by hand, and which *is* unbreakable when used correctly.

The 5-symbols thing is unusual, as ciphers go. I think that's our biggest hint to figuring this out. Most ciphers use the same characters for the plaintext and ciphertext.

My current assumptions

• The 5 symbols is not just an 'encoding' of characters (we're looking for more than just bi-grams or tri-grams)
• It's not a OTP (unless the pad is something PW has said to us before)
• The separated lines are important. (i.e, each line is 'complete', which means different things depending on the cipher   For most ciphers, it means that 'characters' and/or 'words' are not split by the end of a line. This kind of reinforces part of the first assumption, since the lines are not all a multiple of 2 or 3.)

Feel free to collaborate or bring in other people from outside the game. Then claim the prize for yourself alone!

You say this as if we weren't already doing that. Pretty much the only 'restriction' I've assumed there is about working on this is that asking you questions is useless

[AkumaKasai]

Feel free to collaborate or bring in other people from outside the game. Then claim the prize for yourself alone!

I tried using a vigenere decrypting website. It concluded that it probably used one of 26 equally likely single-letter keywords.

Maybe he encrypted it twice, first with a polyalphabetic method, then with a digram or trigram-based substitution cipher? That might be why he's curious as to whether anyone would be able to crack it at all, and also why the potential reward is so massive.

I think he had to have. I'm guessing that bigrams correspond to letters, but from what I know of Piecewise he isn't going to make it anywhere near that simple.

[FallacyofUrist]

This thing is worse than that encryption from the Warrens!

[Gentlefish]

The watch button only sends you emails, kri

And bluh.

Spoiler: number of chars per line (click to show/hide)

1 - 103
2 - 102
3 - 100
4 - 100
5 - 100
6 - 103
7 - 101
8 - 103
9 - 103
10 - 36

Funny how it comes you to ten lines even. I wonder if it's ten words.

E: Aside from the prime numbers 101 and 103, the only common divisor between the groups is 2. lines 10 and 2 share 3 and 6 as divisors, and lines 10 and 3/4/5 share 4 as a divisor.

Now that I've done a little extra work, I'm actually seeing repeating placements and possible words within the code.

Piecewise, I'm coming for you.

[Empiricist]

Maybe the five characters each correspond to one of the Nucleobases and we need to use the cipher as a set of instructions of genetically modify an organism which will then either produce the cleartext or at least decrypt the first layer?

[Gentlefish]

I almost gave you trimmed and split tables, but that's work you can all do. Now to see if I may be on the right path.

[Toaster]

With 951 characters, digrams are highly unlikely.  Is it possible there's a mix?  There's 20 ways to combine 5 characters into digrams, plus the five original equals 25, which could be a skipped/combined letter.  Splitting that out into the correct split though...

[Empiricist]

Wait, how much is a Stevebot body? Is it over 50 tokens?

[Gentlefish]

I'm assuming trailing nulls. If this doesn't pan out, I might decide to assume null headers. I'm down to 946 characters, which, if it is a bigram cipher, means 473 chars. And I have double-pairs.

[Kriellya]

The watch button only sends you emails, kri

What else does the *PTW* do? I've never seen anything interesting except emails

[Gentlefish]

PTW makes it show up in your "new replies" section, haha. PTW won't send you emails.

E: What's hilarious, while trying to figure out if the last line is a signature, "L O V E D O C T O R V O N N O S T" fits perfectly in a bigram.
EE: ... Using that. Rules may or may not be forming.