I was going to play with the purple machine later and type out the kana then turn it into romaji and then use the machine. I doubt it would work but you could try that.
Side note - The on’yomi for 紫 (purple) is し same as 死.
Does purple gives you numbers as an output?
I haven’t had a chance to play around with it so I’m not positive on how it actually works but from everything I’ve read/seen so far has an output of letters.
I applaud you brave souls for still trying to solve this
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Regarding Purple’s numbers:
" However, that was the not the end of the code. The Japanese “falsely added” an arbitrary five-digit number segment, called an additive, from a separate codebook to each pre-encoded five digit group.
In “false addition”, if two numbers add and the result is greater than 10, only the 1’s digit is used. For example, 68238 + 32490 = 90628 rather than the traditional result of 100728. A similar process is used for “false subtraction” in the decryption process."
This is a 40 page document on Purple that I only skimmed…might be some goodies inside.
*Edit: not sure why it copied this way, here is the link
We discussed Purple a bit in the spoiler thread (SPOILER EDITION) Descent of the Durtle into Madness - #228 by ctmf
Came to the conclusion that:
a) The alphabet is too large to be purple output
b) They wouldn’t give us Purple unless they also gave us a key
c) We got a fairly clear hint that this was not a good path:
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Incidentally if you want to play with purple:
pip install purple
will do the job.
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Would have been so much easier if the difference between you and I was the difference between Turtle⇒Durtle. Not much counting to do.
I wonder if the answer will be a face palm one in the end…
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You are hopeful…
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GAH HI THERE KOICHI
I feel so honored 
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Hopeful? Hmmm… more of a delusional turtle, it’s a different kind of durtle…
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I agree. We’re all delusional durtles
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Delusional durtles with Stockholm syndrome … ><
Sorry Kumi couldn’t help miiself
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By the way, if we fused the threads, why are we still trying to dechipher the 4 lines not using the information from spoiler thread? Or am I wrong and missing something? I thought we had to do book ciphers and stuff…
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Search mii… I have no idea what’s going on anymore…
You can go all the way up and read the wiki (if you haven’t already).
I’m still of the opinion that the solution to the four codes leads to the book cipher, not the other way around. If you can spot a way that the book cipher solves the codes instead, then by all means toss out a theory.
Think the main reason why work has stalled on the book ciphers is that even though we appear to have all the information we need (unlike this puzzle), we still can’t solve it (just like this puzzle).
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Yup… cart before the horse. Or unko before the Turtle, as the case may be.
Also, exploring existing encryption methods may not be useful if the Durtles have crafted their own.
It’s painful to look back at the date part of the puzzle and realize how close many of us were without actually seeing the solution. Stroke count was one of the early things I tried, but I had them written vertically, so I didn’t see “2016”, which probably would have set off alarms in my head. It wouldn’t surprise me if we are similarly blind in the current cipher step.
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Oh, I’ll say. Even in the B2 puzzle, I was actually the first person to think of using Shift-JIS encoding, except I just applied it directly to the numbers we were given, and obviously just got gibberish back.
I’ve been trying to look over the posts between when we solved the first clue and when Koichi said some of us were pretty close, but I’m having as much success at spotting anything as I did after the Regular Durtle’s “you’ve got everyhting you need” clue in B2.
Yrah, I thought just that, but unfortunately, I have no theories anymore.:c That’s why I was hopeful when book ciphers were found, that was something new and, well, it at least led to words that meant something. Even if we were skipping a step…:DD
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I am a bit confused about this xD
From what I got, we went from kanjis → date → 4 codes.
That is when the threads have split, right? How did the codes became the books? And why were we stuck with the books?