numnbesr

[quite-simple-actually]

This is so elegant omg, I never knew how that worked

it's so fast too! It needs more memory, but little time and processing power. I might get my hands on Assembly, to be able to touch individual bits, and write something like this, as an exercise in making things way too complicated to see how they work.

School year is over, so I have free time, so I will use this blog more often. Hopefully.

[quite-simple-actually]

TNMN. SOMEONE BEAT ME TO SOLVING THE CIPHER.

Tragedy.

Well, I'm still gonna solve it without looking at the answer because fuck everything.

Here is the website.

What I know as of yet:

The only letters there are I, O, T, N, and W.

Every word seems to have a number of characters divisible by 3 (didn't check every one of them, though)

The English alphabet has 5^2+1 letters.

This leads me to think that every three characters code one letter. I'll go and hunt for short words, hopefully I can find at least 'a' or 'is'

[quite-simple-actually]

The next thing I'm suffering with: trying to get this to a state where I can actually touch the characters finally. My first instinct was to ctrl-f the text, but that doesn't work -- it would replace stuff in the middle of the words, and not just the three characters I want.

So far, I made line breaks out of the spaces, now I want to segment the thing with spaces, to look like this:

I'll write a little program to do that.By God I hate writing that kind of thing, but it's useful

[quite-simple-actually]

Huh. This was surprisingly fast and painless, I threw c# at it, and it chew the text up and spat out some good good manageable text.

Now I'm going to do something painfully brute force: I will goddamn copy the file, and ctrl-f replace the three letter sequences

[quite-simple-actually]

STATISTICS

Plaintext under the readmore.

I need to sort it, but this is how many time each three-letter segment happens

[OWO, 55] [ONN, 47] [ONO, 47] [OTO, 6] [OOI, 45] [OTW, 37] [OIN, 8] [ONW, 25] [OIO, 77] [ONI, 26] [OON, 30] [OII, 13] [OWI, 10] [OOW, 23] [OOT, 6] [IOO, 10] [OTN, 20] [OIW, 39] [OTT, 34] [OIT, 12] [OWT, 8] [OWN, 2] [OTI, 2] [OWW, 2]

[quite-simple-actually]

OOW ONO ONI ONI e OTT OIT OOI OTW OIT e ONN

OK so I sorted it, i ctrl-fed the most frequent triad (OIO) and replaced it with E, and guess what, look at this word. It's a twelve-letter word. Like the word doppelganger. :)

Almost done.

[quite-simple-actually]

VICTORY! Keys and the decoded text under the cut! Oh my god I'm so happy about this. It revealed some pretty cool That's Not My Neighbor lore!

OIO - E OWO - T OIN - h OOW - d ONO - o ONI - p OTT - l OIT - g OOI - a OTW - n ONN - r OTN - M OIW - i OII - f ONW - s OON - c OTO - j OWW - x OWI - u OWT - v OOT - b OWN - w OTI - k

The text:

[plain text: confidential memorial

trojan horse project funded bi the militari department of the government general director oswald d keppler lead researcher dr afton iear of creation 1945

prominent results from some experimental models:

verbal communication perfectli replicable regardless of language acceptable falsification capabiliti determination to deceive phisical assimilation still to be improved capaciti to act under orders still nil

new project proposal:

evolutionari algorithm project massive training of experimental models leak detected

emergenci protocol activated

contingenci plan:

foundation of the doppelganger detection department current status of the project active

promising project results]

[quite-simple-actually]

TNMN. SOMEONE BEAT ME TO SOLVING THE CIPHER.

Tragedy.

Well, I'm still gonna solve it without looking at the answer because fuck everything.

Here is the website.

What I know as of yet:

The only letters there are I, O, T, N, and W.

Every word seems to have a number of characters divisible by 3 (didn't check every one of them, though)

The English alphabet has 5^2+1 letters.

This leads me to think that every three characters code one letter. I'll go and hunt for short words, hopefully I can find at least 'a' or 'is'

[quite-simple-actually]

The next thing I'm suffering with: trying to get this to a state where I can actually touch the characters finally. My first instinct was to ctrl-f the text, but that doesn't work -- it would replace stuff in the middle of the words, and not just the three characters I want.

So far, I made line breaks out of the spaces, now I want to segment the thing with spaces, to look like this:

I'll write a little program to do that.By God I hate writing that kind of thing, but it's useful

[quite-simple-actually]

Huh. This was surprisingly fast and painless, I threw c# at it, and it chew the text up and spat out some good good manageable text.

Now I'm going to do something painfully brute force: I will goddamn copy the file, and ctrl-f replace the three letter sequences

[quite-simple-actually]

STATISTICS

Plaintext under the readmore.

I need to sort it, but this is how many time each three-letter segment happens

[OWO, 55] [ONN, 47] [ONO, 47] [OTO, 6] [OOI, 45] [OTW, 37] [OIN, 8] [ONW, 25] [OIO, 77] [ONI, 26] [OON, 30] [OII, 13] [OWI, 10] [OOW, 23] [OOT, 6] [IOO, 10] [OTN, 20] [OIW, 39] [OTT, 34] [OIT, 12] [OWT, 8] [OWN, 2] [OTI, 2] [OWW, 2]

[quite-simple-actually]

OOW ONO ONI ONI e OTT OIT OOI OTW OIT e ONN

OK so I sorted it, i ctrl-fed the most frequent triad (OIO) and replaced it with E, and guess what, look at this word. It's a twelve-letter word. Like the word doppelganger. :)

Almost done.

[quite-simple-actually]

I am planning my code to be a one-off, so I can get away with doing shit like this >:)

[quite-simple-actually]

TNMN. SOMEONE BEAT ME TO SOLVING THE CIPHER.

Tragedy.

Well, I'm still gonna solve it without looking at the answer because fuck everything.

Here is the website.

What I know as of yet:

The only letters there are I, O, T, N, and W.

Every word seems to have a number of characters divisible by 3 (didn't check every one of them, though)

The English alphabet has 5^2+1 letters.

This leads me to think that every three characters code one letter. I'll go and hunt for short words, hopefully I can find at least 'a' or 'is'

[quite-simple-actually]

The next thing I'm suffering with: trying to get this to a state where I can actually touch the characters finally. My first instinct was to ctrl-f the text, but that doesn't work -- it would replace stuff in the middle of the words, and not just the three characters I want.

So far, I made line breaks out of the spaces, now I want to segment the thing with spaces, to look like this:

I'll write a little program to do that.By God I hate writing that kind of thing, but it's useful

[quite-simple-actually]

Huh. This was surprisingly fast and painless, I threw c# at it, and it chew the text up and spat out some good good manageable text.

Now I'm going to do something painfully brute force: I will goddamn copy the file, and ctrl-f replace the three letter sequences

[quite-simple-actually]

STATISTICS

Plaintext under the readmore.

I need to sort it, but this is how many time each three-letter segment happens

[OWO, 55] [ONN, 47] [ONO, 47] [OTO, 6] [OOI, 45] [OTW, 37] [OIN, 8] [ONW, 25] [OIO, 77] [ONI, 26] [OON, 30] [OII, 13] [OWI, 10] [OOW, 23] [OOT, 6] [IOO, 10] [OTN, 20] [OIW, 39] [OTT, 34] [OIT, 12] [OWT, 8] [OWN, 2] [OTI, 2] [OWW, 2]

[quite-simple-actually]

TNMN. SOMEONE BEAT ME TO SOLVING THE CIPHER.

Tragedy.

Well, I'm still gonna solve it without looking at the answer because fuck everything.

Here is the website.

What I know as of yet:

The only letters there are I, O, T, N, and W.

Every word seems to have a number of characters divisible by 3 (didn't check every one of them, though)

The English alphabet has 5^2+1 letters.

This leads me to think that every three characters code one letter. I'll go and hunt for short words, hopefully I can find at least 'a' or 'is'

[quite-simple-actually]

The next thing I'm suffering with: trying to get this to a state where I can actually touch the characters finally. My first instinct was to ctrl-f the text, but that doesn't work -- it would replace stuff in the middle of the words, and not just the three characters I want.

So far, I made line breaks out of the spaces, now I want to segment the thing with spaces, to look like this:

I'll write a little program to do that.By God I hate writing that kind of thing, but it's useful

[quite-simple-actually]

Huh. This was surprisingly fast and painless, I threw c# at it, and it chew the text up and spat out some good good manageable text.

Now I'm going to do something painfully brute force: I will goddamn copy the file, and ctrl-f replace the three letter sequences

[quite-simple-actually]

TNMN. SOMEONE BEAT ME TO SOLVING THE CIPHER.

Tragedy.

Well, I'm still gonna solve it without looking at the answer because fuck everything.

Here is the website.

What I know as of yet:

The only letters there are I, O, T, N, and W.

Every word seems to have a number of characters divisible by 3 (didn't check every one of them, though)

The English alphabet has 5^2+1 letters.

This leads me to think that every three characters code one letter. I'll go and hunt for short words, hopefully I can find at least 'a' or 'is'

[quite-simple-actually]

The next thing I'm suffering with: trying to get this to a state where I can actually touch the characters finally. My first instinct was to ctrl-f the text, but that doesn't work -- it would replace stuff in the middle of the words, and not just the three characters I want.

So far, I made line breaks out of the spaces, now I want to segment the thing with spaces, to look like this:

I'll write a little program to do that.By God I hate writing that kind of thing, but it's useful

[quite-simple-actually]

TNMN. SOMEONE BEAT ME TO SOLVING THE CIPHER.

Tragedy.

Well, I'm still gonna solve it without looking at the answer because fuck everything.

Here is the website.

What I know as of yet:

The only letters there are I, O, T, N, and W.

Every word seems to have a number of characters divisible by 3 (didn't check every one of them, though)

The English alphabet has 5^2+1 letters.

This leads me to think that every three characters code one letter. I'll go and hunt for short words, hopefully I can find at least 'a' or 'is'

[blackleatherbag]

[maplesynth]

so i spent far too long on this.

for those unaware, the spaghetti wall of letters and numbers is a base64-encoded JPEG image (and not a URL as some guessed). in certain cases when you tried to insert/paste an image into what’s ostensibly a text-only box, this could happen.

the thing that’s bugging me however is that there’s image data there. we have fairly a clear (albeit with JPEG artifacts) screenshot of text that, thanks to how Windows ClearType renders text, each character is identical to each other, that is to say, an uppercase Q will always look more or less pixel-perfect each time, meaning we don’t have to guess what a Q looks like, we simply have to pixel-accurate match it.

as an aside, this is why regular OCR struggles so much with this kind of data retrieval, such as code even when it’s clearer than a physical paper scan. ordinarily, OCR will try to best-guess every single letter because it expects each letter to be slightly different from each other (as would be the unpredictable nature in a scanned document), and on top of that most OCR today will try to autocorrect because it expects the scanned text to contain words in some human written language.

so, all we have to do is make a program to recognize each character and piece back together the whole base64 string, right? well…

first i stitched all 7 images back into a single block of text, observing the consistency of the line spacing. some of the screenshots have little bits of the previous one sticking out of it, which helps with alignment and to make sure they’re in the right order.

after that i had to sample every single letter off this file. this means going around the file and finding one example of each different character we’re trying to identify, saving it as its own separate file so that the program can load them as references to compare against in the full image. for base64, the alphabet consists of a-z, A-Z, 0-9, +, / and =. once i had the initial code in place…

…close! but oh so far. if any one single character in a base64 string is wrong or missing, the resulting decode will be wrong. the issues i was having were mostly with the lowercase r and j because of how the kerning affected the pixels around those letters. i was also getting false matches for r where there should be an m. what followed was grueling hours of tweaking the matching code and my known font set to better fit the original image and get as close as possible to a 100% match. here is the resulting code, maybe it’ll be useful for someone and this won’t have been a complete waste of time.

once i was confident through the verification image that i had all characters recognized, i put it through a base64 to JPEG decoder. i actually did this several times as i improved the recognition and what follows is the best result that came out of it yet. i suspect some of the data might be missing (perhaps a line or block of text got lost in between screenshots), or i have a wrong character somewhere resulting in a wrong value. this is the image extracted from OP’s base64 string:

we can finally know what they meant when they said “me in a relationship” and i can finally go the fuck to sleep.

[maplesynth]

update: i found that the string that i used to decode the image in the previous reblog actually had one letter wrong.

with this it still doesn’t parse as fully valid base64 in strict mode so i think there’s still another letter in there that’s wrong, but i couldn’t find it. however this gives us a better look:

and this is finally enough to do a reverse image search. i present to you, the HD version of our intrepid massive backpacker:

still have no idea what they mean by “me in a relationship” with that, though.

[almost-correct-quotes]

#they have baggage

[quite-simple-actually]

Hey do you know the game Unlikely on Itch.io?

I am. Very close to just going hog wild and simulating it to calculate odds of winning.

Mostly because of a roleplay involving the game. I have some precise numbers already, but not the odds of winning.

The eventual goal is to just. Make a theoretical perfect player and count what odds it has to win. Maybe even throw machine learning at it.

So far, what I got is that on average, every roll is worth exactly one point. Not even approximately, exactly.

And I think rolling with the big dice is worth, on average, 1/3 points - it has a 2/3 chance to give you a card, and the rest of the time, you lose either a card or a point.

I haven't even touched the rerolls or how the extra cards work over multiple rolls. Hhh

[quite-simple-actually]

The average amounts of card you get by rolling the big dice seems to be a sum of an infinite series and I am about to eat the sheet of paper I am writing this on. I'm way too sleepy and I am so angry because that means I cannot math

I am contemplating getting a coffy

[quite-simple-actually]

Just a little look at what I'm doing

I need to try this when I'm less sleep deprived and frustrated because I am getting nowhere.

The first idea is figuring out that, if you start with five card and roll with the big die every turn, how many cards can you draw on average, which is a bitch to calculate while this eepy

The other thing I have in mind is that I try and simulate all goddamn games that start with five cards, with simplified car draw+dice roll mechanics. Instead of drawing a card and rolling the dice, I would just generate one number and give a number of points according to that. But that would mean SO many recursive calls I'd be guaranteed to run out of memory.

I'll make a post with a more detailed explanation of the game, but that will have to wait until I get home and down some coffee

[quite-simple-actually]

Hey do you know the game Unlikely on Itch.io?

I am. Very close to just going hog wild and simulating it to calculate odds of winning.

Mostly because of a roleplay involving the game. I have some precise numbers already, but not the odds of winning.

The eventual goal is to just. Make a theoretical perfect player and count what odds it has to win. Maybe even throw machine learning at it.

So far, what I got is that on average, every roll is worth exactly one point. Not even approximately, exactly.

And I think rolling with the big dice is worth, on average, 1/3 points - it has a 2/3 chance to give you a card, and the rest of the time, you lose either a card or a point.

I haven't even touched the rerolls or how the extra cards work over multiple rolls. Hhh

[quite-simple-actually]

The average amounts of card you get by rolling the big dice seems to be a sum of an infinite series and I am about to eat the sheet of paper I am writing this on. I'm way too sleepy and I am so angry because that means I cannot math

I am contemplating getting a coffy

[quite-simple-actually]

Just a little look at what I'm doing

I need to try this when I'm less sleep deprived and frustrated because I am getting nowhere.

The first idea is figuring out that, if you start with five card and roll with the big die every turn, how many cards can you draw on average, which is a bitch to calculate while this eepy

The other thing I have in mind is that I try and simulate all goddamn games that start with five cards, with simplified car draw+dice roll mechanics. Instead of drawing a card and rolling the dice, I would just generate one number and give a number of points according to that. But that would mean SO many recursive calls I'd be guaranteed to run out of memory.

I'll make a post with a more detailed explanation of the game, but that will have to wait until I get home and down some coffee

[quite-simple-actually]

Hey do you know the game Unlikely on Itch.io?

I am. Very close to just going hog wild and simulating it to calculate odds of winning.

Mostly because of a roleplay involving the game. I have some precise numbers already, but not the odds of winning.

The eventual goal is to just. Make a theoretical perfect player and count what odds it has to win. Maybe even throw machine learning at it.

So far, what I got is that on average, every roll is worth exactly one point. Not even approximately, exactly.

And I think rolling with the big dice is worth, on average, 1/3 points - it has a 2/3 chance to give you a card, and the rest of the time, you lose either a card or a point.

I haven't even touched the rerolls or how the extra cards work over multiple rolls. Hhh

[quite-simple-actually]

The average amounts of card you get by rolling the big dice seems to be a sum of an infinite series and I am about to eat the sheet of paper I am writing this on. I'm way too sleepy and I am so angry because that means I cannot math

I am contemplating getting a coffy

[quite-simple-actually]

Hey do you know the game Unlikely on Itch.io?

I am. Very close to just going hog wild and simulating it to calculate odds of winning.

Mostly because of a roleplay involving the game. I have some precise numbers already, but not the odds of winning.

The eventual goal is to just. Make a theoretical perfect player and count what odds it has to win. Maybe even throw machine learning at it.

So far, what I got is that on average, every roll is worth exactly one point. Not even approximately, exactly.

And I think rolling with the big dice is worth, on average, 1/3 points - it has a 2/3 chance to give you a card, and the rest of the time, you lose either a card or a point.

I haven't even touched the rerolls or how the extra cards work over multiple rolls. Hhh

[nonexistent-creature]

I love when a textbook has a theorem that is just the most obviously true shit, like girl I sure hope so, if that weren't true I think math would fall apart!

[eiimblr]

[machine-unlearning]

I especially love the conjunction of "this problem is intuitively plain as day" and "it took mathematicians centuries to formally prove this." What do you mean it takes advanced topology to prove every closed curve has an inside and outside

[moltengoldveins]

legitimately fascinating how I sat here for a long moment, staring at this, slowly sliding from “it’s literally common sense. If you’ve got a curve that goes up and then goes down again, there’s gotta be a point where the curve stops going up and starts going down again. Duh.” To “wait…. Wait. How would I… how would I prove this?” And then frantically googling it because What The Heck. What. Why.

[quite-simple-actually]

YES this is very very interesting, because math is even more abstract than lines and curves on the paper

My favorite definition of it is "making up rules and then seeing what those rules result in"

The rules we made about graphs might aim to describe lines and surfaces but the things are just rules regardless. The duh-obviously takes rely on your intuition, because of course there is a stationary point, I can see and imagine the curve!

But that's not coming from the rules themselves!! That's coming from you knowing what the rules represent!

And those duh-obviously takes are sometimes stupid wrong.

The birthday paradox comes to mind. When I ask you something like, is it likely that among these thirty people, there are two whose birthday is the same? You would say, not likely, that many people don't even cover a tenth of the calendar, duh! And then when you actually go and calculate the odds, it turns out it's a 70 percent-ish chance.

Or my ex comes to mind who insisted that 0.99 repeating ad infinitum MUST be smaller than one, because duh! (It's not smaller, no.)

Or the gambler's mistake. If you flip the coin ten times, and you get ten tails, how probable is it that the eleventh flip will also be a tails? You say, duh, so low, what are the chances of getting eleven tails in a row? And the moment you touch math, you find out that it's fifty percent. No more, no less.

Sometimes, the things your child could prove because geez, obviously, are very wrong.

[beewulf]

no offense but if i exit out of a program that program should close. none of that running in the background shit.

[soratayuya]

If you kill something it had better be dead

[tanadrin]

you know, some branches of mathematics are absolutely dogshit at naming things, but credit to the fellas over in higher-dimensional geometry, they're knocking it out of the park

[silverserpent]

Coding is fun because most of the time your thing doesn't work is because of things like "forgor a pair of parentheses" or "you need to put this thing three lines up"