Also, I visited this site yesterday, because I had to set Japanese keyboard on my friend’s Android tablet. But I didn’t notice the code on the screen…
I have a slight idea: Maybe “physical descendence” means conversing the uppercase letters into lowercase? Including the + and ~? (Until you said that these are Shift + something letters, I didn’t even know that they are, bc I have a non-English keyboard layout.)
If someone wants to pursue that thread, it does remind me that there are “4 bytes worth of entries” in the ASCII table separating lowercase from uppercase letters, meaning that adding 32 (or 0x20) to an upper case letter will yield the index of the lower case equivalent.
The following pseudo code is an example of that:
Edit:
also the “key difference” between U and I is one key to the left/right. I had mulled this yesterday but that runs aground b/c you can’t simultaneously reconcile the ~ and the + characters, you either end up off the keyboard with ~ when you move one to the left, or you end up on the backspace key if you to the right from + (or off the keyboard if you went to the NumPad+)
The difference between う and い on a swipe/slide/thumb/whatever is the diff b/w sliding up to う or sliding to the left for い. Doesn’t seem like a strong lead tho
shifting my fingers one key (difference between U and I) into the Japanese keyboard. The only problem is the + sign, than I’m going to the delete button…
ととみてはほふほれゆやああうひすくはゆあきらおばみせののねせ
とと みて は ほふ ほれゆやああうひすくはゆあきらおばみせののねせ I don’t know where I’m going…
Does any one see any thing?
This is the third phrase, that is shorter and might be easier:
Yeah, working with the shortest phrase seems like the best place to start.
I want to say the solution involves converting the strings into kana and using the spacebar to make kanji, but (a) so far, none of our kana conversions have resembled real words (or sentences) in Japanese (though I confess, ほほれみあやわく is getting pretty close), and (b) how many times do we push space? Also, ( c) like I said before, it doesn’t feel anywhere near as elegant as the first clue.
Alternately, there ought to be some other way to convert them into English words…
…We’re perfectly happy to go along with C being mapped to 無変換? That’s just the “turn everything back into kana” function key.
Honestly, physical shifting of keys makes me far more uneasy than just using the kana keyboard in the first place, if for no other reason than the fact that everyone’s keyboards are different - take the images posted by Masayoshiro and crmf as the perfect examples of that. If the Tofugu article contained an example image of a keyboard, then sure, we could go with that, but if we’re relying on what we can dig up with Google Image Search, I really wouldn’t.
First off: great progress! I have a big impressed~!
Apologies if this was mentioned already, but in the source code of the tofugu article where the next step was found, they tried to be encouraging to anyone that landed on that page but hadn’t found the picture clue yet:
I haven’t read the whole post and it was posted roughly a month before the riddle, but they only got into effect a few days before the riddle was found I think? Does anyone know if the durtle ever answered?
But I didn’t notice the code on the screen…
