new watchmaker!

might be a viginere, but I'm still working on it...

Go, inure! Good luck!

Mouseover says: "Your reward: The ___ is an alias for the ____ of ____. You know what to do."

My guess would be that the Marquis is an alias for the director of the SCP, one Tobias Sentinel!! Makes Sense

Not a viginere. Not encoded in the sense the other messages have been. Have solved and done a little research but not sure about the alias bit yet.

Achievement: Mark of the Suffragist
Points: 50
Description: Put the words together

No idea what the code is yet.

Susan B Anthony was the Suffragist in Rochester History

3rd letter is a pain to decipher. What's with the typos? Not another code within the code...

argh, folks, it would be a great help to let us know where you saw what, what mouseover where, what a viginere is and what it is if it isn't a viginere.

I searched around and found the first post in this thread most likely refers to the Oct 13th post on the Watchmaker's site at http://clockworkexposure.com/

Viginere is a kind of Caesar shift cipher; the Caesar shift code was used in the two earlier sets of documents mentioned in Watchmaker posts. Someone in the Forge forum gave us a good site for decoding both kinds of ciphers -- http://rumkin.com/tools/cipher/

But as a couple posted above, it may not be a viginere cipher. .... Any hints as to what it is?

I've only yesterday finished decoding the earlier two sets of documents and found 1) Eve seems to have an alcohol problem and 2) The Caesar Shift decode doesn't start at N = 20 for either set per an earlier "New Watchmaker" thread, but rather 25. It doesn't seem to matter anyway since after the first paragraphs, the N is random, suggesting a word-scramble code or not.

Mouse-over doesn't yield anything for me, but I've found that if I right-click on the eye icon at the end of a Watchmaker post and look at "Properties," I see the "Your reward: The ___ is an alias..." message in the Title area. I also get this message when I copy/paste the post into Notepad to study it offline.

If I've got any of this wrong, please reply here and save me/us hours of going down the wrong path, or no path at all.

Delos,

Yes. This thread is for the October 13th post on clockworkexposure.

(Note to future Forum subject creators...there are too many "New Watchmaker" forum subjects, so how about we try to add the posting date in the forum subject line too?)

The presumption is that the three missing words in the "Your reward: The ____ is an alias..." when combined, will form the code to get you the latest (suffragist) achievement.

Personally, I haven't been able to correctly guess the three words, so I am thinking I may have to decode the latest document as part of this.

uuhhh...please help to decode this letter. Tried several programs but none have worked so far.

read vertically

link was working last night but now I can't get to the encrypted message. Anyone else having this problem

No problem getting to the site. Just sent you the contents via your "contact me" button.

got it, thank you

sallyamycat is right

ok, i feel dumb....thank you for the direction

delos,

The first set of documents used a simple Cesarean shift coding, where the shifts follow a Fibonachi sequence. Fibonachi sequence is where you add the 2 prior numbers to get the next one in the sequence, 1,1,2,3,5,8,13,...

I found the quickest way to solve (without writing code) was to number each line, run the whole thing thru the Rumkin tool and save each decoded line in text file in numerical order.

Did same with next set of documents, but used different decoder tool.

This one is easiest if you put it in Excel with 1 letter in each cell and then transpose. Be aware there are typos, predominately in the 3rd letter. Probably another code within the code :(

Using Excel is probably the best way to see what is going on with the 'typos'. It's a bit of a pain, but gettable.

I am going the excel route too. It is a pain. Still solving.

Can we meet about this?! Perhaps this Saturday/Sunday during the puzzle meetup at Loving Cup?

We can talk about this on Sunday at the puzzle meet if you want to , just bring any and all materials with you, someone will help if there is anyone there who has done it. Puzzle meet will stay 1-3 so that we can do a hunt after it if possible. Micci

Thank you sallyamycat for the helpful hint!

I got the Mark. Hint: it's spelled out in the reply to Miss Brown, between half and 2/3 of the way through the columns.

Other hints: Treat punctuation marks as letters; give them their own spaces. Sometimes a misspelling is a misspelling, and sometimes it means you need to move the rest of that line, including the misspelled letter, one space to the right.

If you're putting along just fine and suddenly everything to the right of any given point is gibberish (you can't pick out any words at all):
-- look for an overlooked period and give it its own space in a column, or
-- look for a misspelled word in the last column that made sense, and starting with the misspelled letter, move the rest of that line one space to the right.

I used Notepad and spaced the letters into columns, in groups of three to make it easier to find my place. Halfway through I thought of using Excel, but it seemed just as tedious.

Ms. Brown's letter had no mis-spellings or oddities. The Chevalier's letters did. At first I thought I had accidentally deleted letters as I moved them. I double checked several times and the misspellings and oddities are part of the letters. I hope they're a red herring. I started to track misspellings and missing letters. My 1st reaction: if it's a code, it'll be a tough one to solve.

I lost most of the day doing this puzzle. I'm amazed that so many got it already. There's probably a website somewhere that has a handy-dandy tool for deciphering this code, and we'll find it in November.

In 1st letter, any idea what word(s) they are looking for in line/column 18? This line reads "[yo]ur suidence." I can't think of anything that will fit.

i think it's "guidance", but keep reading, because the important part is later on.

Wow... that was a heck of a lot of work for 50 points.

Honestly, unless there is some on-line code breaking tool I missed, there are many more easier ways to get 50 points! (I probably spent 4 applied hours on this.)

I used excel and just powered through it. For the code breaking I just used the text function (MID) to parse out the letters of the code.

This got me through the first two letters to decode. (Start with the second letter (the one from Miss Brown) to test your decoding logic.)

Getting to the code words for the achievement a lot brute force and trial and error to try to figure out mis-spellings and errors. (Either the idea was that the person doing the encryption had to do this by hand and so made mistakes --- or I missed some key to the code.)

I'd also advise wasting time trying to guess the code from the achievement description or name. Never in a million years would I have guessed it.

Maybe someone can chime in if they found the super duper easy way to do this one...

That S in "[yo}ur suidence." (see jfilion's post, above) is an example of a misspelled word. I tried shifting it and the rest of that line (it's the 3rd line down in the 1st coded letter) one space to the right to see how it affected columns 19 and 20; it messed up cols 19 and 20. I tried shifting two spaces to the right - still no good. I left the S where it was originally. It worked.

I capitalized that S, and other misspelled letters, in the decoding, so that I could find them more easily later.

When I came across a letter that turned out to fit better in the next column to the right, I put a _ in the place where the letter had been to show the correct letter was missing, so that I could find that group of letters later.

The resulting groups of misspelled letters, plus a period or two, and the missing letters looked difficult to decode. Combining the groups didn't help.

I agree with Rochrach; it's a lot of time spent for 50 points. I did the entire jigsaw puzzle set today in less than 10 minutes for 80 points. If those misspelled and missing letters will be used later for big points, it'll be worth it.

Hi, I'm still working on the mark of the suffragist. I decoded the Jan 13, 1854 letter but did not find the code there. Then I read delos' post about it being in the reply to Ms. Brown (the May 3, 1854 letter??) Did you find a lot of nonsense in this letter? I am worried I made a mistake somewhere along the line because about 1/3 of it isn't forming words and the "typos" seem to be increasing as I forge through it, so I'm thinking I have to start over. hmmm...

There are missing letters and typos in the 3rd letter. What you deciphered so far is right. What you need to do now is go thru it line by line and if you see a typo, check to see if adding a space, which will push that letter to the next line so that that line make sense now.
This is why I used Excel, because if you separate the letters into columns, you'll notice not all lines are the same length. The short lines will need to be shifted to the right at some point to decipher it fully.
It is a lot of work for 50pts, but I'm hoping all of this back story is leading to a high scoring pt puzzle in the end.

Excel short cut ...
Instead of translating the entire note, just look for the clue "Your reward: The ___ is an alias for the ____ of ____. You know what to do."
I used conditional formating and highlighted some of the key letters. Things kinda stood out after that ;-)

you can also put this into excel by utilizing the text to columns tool under data. cut from twitter, paste into excel, highlight entire selection if not still highlighted, select text to columns from data menu. Select fixed width, NOT delimited, click next, then click in between each letter and you will see a vertical line with an arrow appear, keep going all the way across, click next, then next, and then finish.

they should all be in their own cell now. If in narrow the columns, rehighlight and then cut, go to the bottom of that area and then use the paste special function under edit to transpose....please note that part of the clue is in there at least twice and it took the second siting for me to get the spelling right! Also, you only put the missing words in for the submission. Email with questions.