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October 24, 2005
HINT FOR CHALLENGE 4B
By now it's no secret that Challenge 4B is in Morse. We used our new auto-transcriber to read the stream of Morse signals and encode them as 0's and 1's. Each 0 represents a dash, and each 1 represents a dot.
Turns out there are a lot of unfamiliar Morse characters aside from the usual 26 letters of the alphabet. Look around online and you should find the ones you need. By the way take a look at the layout. Seems the Soviets are using a grouping in sixes. That breaks down just once, and that is no accident.
By the way don't forget to look for cribs, they can make life a LOT easier.
Good luck,
Posted by Harry at October 24, 2005 09:34 PM
Comments
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Cribs are always useful. Any knowledge of the text is useful infact. But I've hinted on this enough. Hope everyone understands the concept now.
Posted by: Jason at October 28, 2005 09:02 PM
Jacob - cribs are bits of text that you know or assume to appear within the message, so it enables you to search the cipher text for possible points at which a crib appears. For example in some messages a full stop is encrypted using the plain text "STOP" so you know that the last four letters of the message will be stop; this can enable you to help find the key :)
The stop was a crib that I believe many used in last years competition. Cribs are very useful in this years aswell too :)
I can remember using alchemy or alchemisten as cribs last year because they contained a fair few common letters so were fairly easy to locate...
Posted by: Andy at October 28, 2005 12:38 AM
"don't forget to look for cribs" - Waht are cribs? Where can I look for them?
Posted by: Jacob at October 27, 2005 09:22 PM
i know this is a random statement and that we are not yet onto challenge 7, but in the *cipher room* section of the website, when you click on the tab labelled *7*, it flicks and jumps back to tab number *6*.
just thought you should know.
[Thanks, I'll check it out. Harry]
Posted by: laura at October 26, 2005 09:30 PM
You know roughly what each message in the challenge is about. This means that you can much easier guess words in the plaintext and you can look for words that you are almost sure will be present ("cribs"). These can provide you with a breakthrough as they have many times in the past e.g. working out the hieroglyphs.
So always remember to look back at previous messages on both sides for key words.
Jason's Big Hint #2
Pattern = Weakness
Posted by: Jason at October 26, 2005 04:38 PM
I'm not whinging, but I would like to know the answer to the question! I'm really sorry if I'm getting on people's nerves, I'll try not to in the future. With regard to the actual cipher though, can we expect the 0s and 1s system for Morse to stay for the rest of the challenges?
[Apologies for not editing out the "whingeing comment", it slipped through. I couldn't possibly comment on future parts of the Challenge. Wait and see!
I think the previous comment about whingeing was supposed to be a joke, but in general could people try to keep the tone friendly here? Thanks, Harry]
Posted by: Jess at October 25, 2005 09:42 PM
I think Jess should be deducted points for everytime he/she asks about the timing. That would be them well and truly out of it.
Posted by: Tired of whingers at October 25, 2005 09:32 PM
What will the timing intervals be for Challenge 5? I can't wait for Thursday...
Posted by: Jess at October 24, 2005 10:29 PM
The sixes actually break down twice, two blocks apart.
Posted by: Ruth at October 24, 2005 10:14 PM