A few years ago I bought a Japanese manga monthly and it came with a sheet of stickers of all 22 members of an idol group. They were postage stamp size, and prime for adding to postcards. But they were also nearly identical, and it seemed a shame to separate them. A plan was hatched.
Rain Of Frogs had been a great success the previous year, but it had been a passive exercise on my brother’s behalf, and I think I needed to step things up a little. I’d had a few ideas in my mind, and the stickers made them all coalesce: I’d send him a puzzle across a series of postcards. Twenty-two, to be precise. And here is what he received:
There’s a message encoded in the cards, and my hope was he could decipher it. Two cards were sent at a time over about a month. There’s a staggering amount of potential combinations in which the cards have been arranged, so I encoded them with hints and icons. The hints themselves were of course received with each card, and the idea was as he got them he could use the hints to work out the correct order and therefore the message.
Some hint examples were:
– “Squirrels are next to cats.” (referring to the cat/squirrel stamps on some cards)
– “I’m in the first five positions.”
– “The colours of the letters are significant.”
– “There is a typo: one O should be a U.” (this was unintentional).
It’s worth mentioning that the nature of the puzzle meant I had to devise a message of precisely 44 letters, which wasn’t at all easy. I didn’t want it to be grammatically strange, or use unfamiliar words, or be the sort of thing that wouldn’t jump out at him after he managed to decode portions of it. In the end I believe I chose something familiar – indeed expected – to make the task easier.
I started sending the cards in early September, and gave him until Thanksgiving to solve it for a prize (which was going to be a second wave of frog/toad cards). He didn’t solve it in time, so I extended the date and provided more hints. Eventually they became explicit to the point of almost giving things away: such as telling him that the colours of letters on adjacent cards matched (which massively reduces the potential combinations) or identifying certain two-card combinations. I issued an ultimate deadline of mid-January (2023). Alas, he failed to solve it.
Could you have solved it? Here’s the answer:
Confucios say Gary Oldman is younger than Gary Numan.
I thought it was easy 🙂
This was very hard. I even tried writing code to try to brute force the words using dictionary lookups. This was before ChatGPT, I wonder if it could figure it out?
I tried ChatGPT. It seems to be able to unscramble single words, but struggled when unscrambling multiple words. This is the same problem I had, not knowing where the word boundaries were made it difficult.
My thought was you’d get GARY by brute force use of the knowledge that colours matched, then that would trigger NUMAN, and then you’re a third of the way there 🙂
Skynet Jr was probably thrown by your spelling of ConfuciOs, not ConfuciUs. Let us store that knowledge away for the war to come.