A few weeks ago I told you about the “next” set of Geocache swag I was in the process of making. Well, I finally finished the first batch last week and started putting them in caches I found around the area.
First, a little background.
The inspiration for this project was a certain puzzle at the puzzlemonster.com site called “Kahn’s Cons”. I have been working on this thing on and off for many years and I think I am ready to throw in the towel. Oh, and by “on and off” I mean that I believe that if I had put the level of effort into the fourth section of the CIA's Kryptos puzzle as I have with this one I would have solved that one long ago...
All for a lousy t-shirt. And the glory, of course. You... you can't put a price on that...
Oh, who am I kidding? I’m not gonna throw in the towel (yet), but I sure would like to see someone solve it, if only to see how close I was. The problem is that, if I am right about the encoding mechanism, the cipher is mathematically intractable with the current amount of ciphertext available. It is possible I am missing something - a hint in the storyline that goes with the code, maybe. It is more possible I am just plain on the wrong track. It is even more possible that my “mathematically intractable” comment is more “sour-grapes-based” than “fact-based”...
In my effort to solve that puzzle, a while back I built myself a “decoder ring” of sorts comprised of two stacked wooden wheels. There are 26 spaces on each wheel that I can fill in with letters in any order I choose which is great for trying different combinations of letters but 100% useless if the author of the puzzle decided that base-26 was too easy and went for base-25 (combining ‘i’ and ‘j’, or using a particular letter as a “pointer”, say) or base-27 (including a “null” or “pointer” character, for instance).
The things I currently believe about the Kahn’s Cons puzzle: 1) The first and last letters of each word are important 2) The lengths of the words are important - possibly an odd/even thing going on there 3) All of the seven encoded messages use the same “key” 4) The letter Q may have a special significance since it is not used whatsoever in any of the messages - it might be a pointer or it might be “invisibly paired” with single letters 5) If I am right about the encryption scheme it might take about three times as much ciphertext to solve enough of it through statistical means to get a foothold on the rest of the puzzle. 6) 25 or 26 ciphertext pairs can stand for any one plaintext letter.
Sigh... Anyway...
The geo-swag cipher disks I made (WIkipedia tells me they are officially called “Alberti Cipher Disks”, although I know them as “Civil War Cipher Disks”) are based on the “decoder ring” tool I used in one of the attempts to solve this puzzle.
My goal is to make 43 of these - each one encoding a quote from a different U.S. president. As of the writing of this post, I have made five. Another 11 are prepped and ready for the wood-burning stage and raw materials for the rest have been cut and are waiting further processing.
Sigh... I feel this should go without saying but here it is anyway. I don’t care what your political affiliation is. I really don’t. If you are reading this because you found one of the disks, decoded the message, and are offended because you think that Jimmy Carter is history’s greatest monster, I really can’t help you. I chose - from brainyquote.com - a saying from each and every one of the presidents. I tried to pick quotes that did not make any of them sound overly heroic or overly buffoonish. I neither agree nor disagree with their viewpoints; the quotes were picked primarily for their ability to fit, encrypted, in a two-inch by two-inch square using a font that was easy enough to see. That’s pretty much it.
Back to the construction.
Each of the two disks you see has 27 spaces - the 26 letters of the alphabet, all randomized, and a “pointer” (the copper nail-head). Not only is the order of the letters random for each disk, no two of these have the same order - each one of these devices is different.
The message to be decoded (just a presidential quote, remember - no more, no less) is on the back. Also on the back the finder will see the key to the puzzle - the words “HELLO WORLD” are given with how they would (well... could) be encoded with that particular set of disks.
Writing the software to automate the otherwise tedious encryption process was fairly straightforward. Harder was finding the centers of the circles so they could rotate around a common point. Oh, finding the center of a circle is pretty easy - bisect a couple of lines and there you go - but actually making the transition from a paper sketch to the real world was a lot more difficult. Drill bits like to wander, you see, especially small ones, so “center” might not be “center” any more...
Although I cut the two-and-an-eighth-inch bases and two-inch oak plyboard disks myself, I got the smaller one-and-a-half-inch disks are pre-fab units from Lowe’s. I am not really sure what type of wood those disks are made from - Google, Lowe’s, and even the website of the company that makes them (The Hillman Group) seem to disavow their existence. The letters were burned into the surface of the disks and the nail that centered the circles was permanently secured with a bit of solder in a countersink on the bottom.
After adding a bit of wood putty to fill in the countersink the message to be decoded was pasted to the back, the final copper-coated nails were added, and the whole thing was shellacked to seal it and give it an aged look. To be honest, I wasn’t really pleased with the initial look of the shellac - I thought it looked way too yellow. Overnight, though, the yellow...uh... mellowed a bit and the units ended up looking pretty nice.
I have lots of projects in the queue right now (paint is drying on one of them as I speak) so I am not sure how long it will take me to crank out and distribute all 43 of these things. I am enjoying the process but I might stop in the middle, build different swag, then continue on with this work. Who knows?
We will see.
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