Thursday, November 17, 2011

The Ginter Code, finally some progress

The last four tweets that the Codemaster blasted out a few weeks back did limit the search field, and also sucked me back in for a bit on the code.

Since he was nice enough to tell us that the the clocks on the ad cards pointed to baseball cards my brain was focused enough to finally see the connection.  I've shared this revelation with a couple people thus far, and one other code-head(?) agreed with me.  So perhaps me, I, we, us, they, them, all ya'll are onto something finally.

That being said, even if you haven't landed on which cards the clocks point to, what would you do with those cards?

I had been thinking about that right after I read the tweets.  I thought to myself "even if I had the cards, how would I know they were the right cards and what would I do with them?"

That's the kicker this year, you have to believe enough in your method to get from times on a clock to baseball cards to move blindly to the next section of breaking the code.  If you haven't already read the account on how the 2008 code was broken, you should do yourself a favor and do that now because I feel like this code will have some similar properties.

Okay, so we're back to the 2011 code in all its backwards-clocky-goodness.  You have 10 code cards infront of you.  Some of the corners of these cards have symbols on them which you have translated into numbers by either using your decipher cards (which have the numbers on the back in some way shape or form) or you put the puzzle together and realized the first row of the puzzle, plus the next symbol from the second row represent numbers 1-30.  I'm sure after 4 months this isn't news to anyone who has looked at the Ginter Code.

What may boggle your mind is what the heck to do with the numbers on each of the corners of the cards you've pulled.  And it should, because that's what's stopping you from decoding the message this year.  And it's stopping me right now too.

So, if you are burned out on trying to figure out how to find the gosh darned correct cards, sit back and think about how you'd use the numbers in each corner of the cards to decipher the Codemaster's poem.  It's not going to be magic, but it's certainly not going to be straightforward either.

Just remember, no one ever solved a code by staring at it, you've got to roll up your sleeves and get your hands dirty.  Just keep trying different things, but above all else try to think about how you'd turn a message into numbers using the poem.

That is all.  I'm out for now.

5 comments:

  1. If only I had the time, I'd give it another go...

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  2. I'm as burned out counting my way through the darn poem as I used to be trying to find the cards.

    Although the apathy level is high after four months.

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  3. i've been slowly putting the set together for fun but do you think its unnecessary for the puzzle? I was thinking of trying it for fun/challenge

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  4. I don't think the puzzle is important. I think it was more of a time suck for those people who hurried out and bought all the cards. But I do think the code cards are important. All of this is just my opinion.

    Now, how many code cards will be necessary, I'm not sure, because I haven't figured out what to do with the first 10 cards yet. My gut tells me you'll need more than those 10 though.

    I have some trade if you are interested.

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  5. In hindsight, at this point I had transformed the clock times into degrees from using their hour and minute hand placements.

    Or in other words, I had the "card values" from the code. I did NOT at this point figure out the backwards keys to put into topps web domain and thus had no idea what the card values were for. I thought I just needed to round them and use the code cards (puzzle cards?) for something. Boy was I wrong.

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