On Sat, Jul 10, 2010 at 1:51 AM, Lee Berman <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:severiansola@hotmail.com">severiansola@hotmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;">
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Anyway, the group came to one puzzle that none of us could make heads nor<br>
tails of, including Mantis, (at least I inferred that from his silence). It<br>
regarded a series of numbers, arranged in a pattern which was found on the<br>
Seal of Pas.<br>
<br>
5553 8783 4223 9700 34<br>
<br>
2221 0401 1101 7276 56<br>
<br>
SEALED FOR THE MONARCH<br></blockquote><div><br>Some facts:<br>They are not SSCC-18 barcodes - the check digit is incorrect.<br>They are not credit card numbers - they fail the Luhn test.<br>The sum of the digits of all the 4 digit numbers and the sum of the digits of all the 2 digit numbers is the same: 9.<br>
<br>Odd observations:<br>All 4-digit numbers have two digits that are the same. That seems unlikely.<br>None of the digits in the two-digit numbers are doubled in the same row.<br>Each 4-digit number is larger than the one below it.<br>
Subtracting the bottom 4-digit number from its corresponding top yields another set of 4-digit numbers, all of which have doubled digits.<br><br>My guess is that the 4-digit groups are the "product" code, and the 2-digit groups are checksums. This is similar to how lots of different encoding schemes work and makes sense in this context. It only gives one-bit error detection, so there may be another layer of checking I've missed. Maybe something having to do with the doubled digits.<br>
<br>As far as the product code itself goes, that might take a little more work. Wolfe was an engineer and did some robotics work, so maybe Gray or Huffman coding is being used.<br><br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;">
I am no cryptographer type but I gamely gave the puzzle a few days of<br>
intense thought and effort. I mostly tried combinations of adding the<br>
numbers together, since Silk makes the sign of addition over them<br>
(and various other things) I tried working in base 9 since that<br>
might be in use in Viron math. No luck. I could not come up with an answer.<br></blockquote><div><br>It shouldn't be base 9. There is a 9 in the code, and base n doesn't use a symbol for n.<br><br></div></div><div style="visibility: hidden; display: inline;" id="avg_ls_inline_popup">
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