I’m also assuming the cipher is not linear, otherwise someone probably would have found it by now, right?
But… if it’s not linear why would the first Q be lining up with the first -? And then NOT be lining up with subsequent -?
One answer might be that different letters are in different rotation ranges (similar to Enigma/Purple), but I’m not aware of many other ciphers that do similar things. A couple challenges with using those, most notably that they have more limited alphabets and wouldn’t result in an output of 28 unique letters of cipher text.
I didn’t skip all numerals as I said, so that much makes sense I guess? I noticed, I think I didn’t count the 例 in the picture though (because I missed it), but it’s only getting worse if I do… sigh
That’s a good thought. I tried counting them as ‘x’ just as a placeholder. It didn’t exactly matter what placeholder I used because none of them fell on the important positions.
I didn’t convert kanji to kana and count it as multiple characters.
AA could correspond to different characters in a polyalphabetic cipher like ENIGMA or PURPLE where the alphabet scramble changes deterministically every time you use it. I’m not sure that falls into the “riddle” category though, that’s more like a “professional mathematicians spend months or years breaking it with a very large example set”-level problem. Unless we have the key and don’t know it.
That was one of my thoughts, we’d have to have the key for it to be reasonable. Tried the stroke order again, 4-1,8,20-16 it’s “close” to being a valid type of key for PURPLE, right number of digits, but the last two digits need to be in the range [1-3], so unfortunately it doesn’t fit.
Could you possibly explain how this clue skip came about in the opening? It may help to reverse engineer a solution to the previous steps (also I have no idea where these page numbers/isbns were found!)
Yeah, I tried XORing them like we discussed somewhere above, and just got nonsense. Trouble is, I had the results sitting in an open Notepad file, and stupid Win10 rebooted overnight, so they’re gone now.
Not quite following you. If I knew AA was “ho”, what then does the B mean next?
Edit: ok, I think I’m getting it. So if AA means +7, then AB means +8 and o + 8 = W. convenient.
But then BQ is 15 apart, so 15 + 7 = +22.
w + 22 = somehow a hyphen?