|
Post by Xaa on Sept 2, 2006 3:14:59 GMT -5
I'm going to try to update this thing once a week. Don't hold me to that, though, real life has a VERY nasty tendency to intervene every time I start a project like this. This is an adult-level graphic novel, not a children's story. This means the usual warnings apply - nudity, violence, language.
|
|
|
Post by Kilarin on Sept 3, 2006 0:23:31 GMT -5
Interesting begining. I'm looking forward to the series! Daggerfell reminds me a bit of "Dragons of Desolation" by Keith Parkinson. NOT saying it's deriviative! The idea of floating island/fortresses is an old one. Just I always kind of liked that painting, so I'm looking forward to this story!
|
|
|
Post by Xaa on Sept 3, 2006 22:35:54 GMT -5
Interesting begining. I'm looking forward to the series! Daggerfell reminds me a bit of "Dragons of Desolation" by Keith Parkinson. NOT saying it's deriviative! The idea of floating island/fortresses is an old one. Just I always kind of liked that painting, so I'm looking forward to this story! Okay, THAT was annoying. When you give a link a name like that so it's part of the text, the board hides it until you mouse-over and I can't tell it's a link. I spent quite some time searching the web to find a decent-sized copy of image, and didn't even realize you had linked to a copy of it. Soooo... I edited the forum colors to show all links as GOLD so I can SEE the damn things. Makes the forum look nicer, too. Anyway... Here's the picture I found. Artwork copyright Kieth Parkinson, all rights reserved, art is used here only for illustrative purposes, do not reproduce or distribute, yadda yadda. You know, the weird part is when I was making this thing, that's kind of the image I had in my mind. Only with flying ships instead of dragons. And not so blobby looking, more like something dangling from the sky. Like a stalactite. I don't know, but that shape is more evocative to me.
|
|
|
Post by Kilarin on Sept 3, 2006 23:31:56 GMT -5
Ugh! Sorry, I usually remember to underline links. Forgot this time. BUT! I like the new color scheme! Yeah, Kieth Parkinsons painting is more like a great stone in the sky, with a fortress on it. Daggerfell is more like a stalactite, and also much more like a dagger.
|
|
|
Post by Xaa on Sept 16, 2006 2:26:17 GMT -5
Those of you who have figured out the Elf's speech by now, congratulations. Please forgive her language, however, she's a tad stressed.
|
|
|
Post by Kilarin on Sept 19, 2006 0:26:20 GMT -5
I've been slow. I meant to get to it the first week, but works been keeping me up till 2am. BUT, I simply decided work was going to have to wait tonight and took off a little bit of time to crack this. For those of you who have not done much cryptanalysis, this is NOT hard. Well, actually, part of it is hard, but I've done the hard part for you by cutting and pasting all the Elf's speech into pages you can easily print and scribble on! Please note, some of the letters were awfully small to start with, so the picture is not as clear as you might like, but, hey, consider that just part of the encryption! AND, a couple of tools to help you. First, the most ubiquitous and important tool for any cryptographer, some frequency charts for the English language!: Single Letter Frequency (Sorted by Frequency) e:12.31%:XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX t: 9.59%:XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX a: 8.05%:XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX o: 7.94%:XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX n: 7.19%:XXXXXXXXXXXXXX i: 7.18%:XXXXXXXXXXXXXX s: 6.59%:XXXXXXXXXXXXX r: 6.03%:XXXXXXXXXXXX h: 5.14%:XXXXXXXXXX l: 4.03%:XXXXXXXX d: 3.65%:XXXXXXX c: 3.20%:XXXXXX u: 3.10%:XXXXXX p: 2.29%:XXXXX f: 2.28%:XXXXX m: 2.25%:XXXXX w: 2.03%:XXXX y: 1.88%:XXXX b: 1.62%:XXX g: 1.61%:XXX v: 0.93%:XX k: 0.52%:X q: 0.20%: x: 0.20%: j: 0.10%: z: 0.09%: Most common two letter words: of, to, in, it, is, be, as, at, so, we, he, by, or, on, do, if, me, my, up, an, go, no, us, am. Most common three letter words: the and for are but not you all any can had her was one our out day get has him his how man new now old see two way who boy did its let put say she too use Doubled letter frequencies: LL: 2979 20.6% EE: 2146 14.8% SS: 2128 14.7% OO: 2064 14.3% TT: 1169 8.1% RR: 1068 7.4% PP: 628 4.3% FF: 430 2.9% NN: 301 2.0% CC: 243 1.6% MM: 207 1.4% DD: 201 1.3% GG: 99 0.6% BB: 41 0.2% ZZ: 13 0.0% AA: 2 0.0% HH: 1 0.0% AND, perhaps the most useful cryptographic tool available, fiziwig's Pattern Dictionary! www.fiziwig.com/crypto/pattern.html
|
|
|
Post by Kilarin on Sept 19, 2006 0:31:03 GMT -5
Now then, if you don't want any hints on how to get started reading elf, skip this message. But for folks that are new to breaking codes, I'm just going to give a few hints here. I'm not going to give it away, you'll have to do all the work yourself, but I'll show you how to get started and how to use the tools. First, lets go for the easy stuff. The elf's very first two words. Take a guess at what she might be saying in this circumstance, and remember it is probably rude. Note especially that second letter of the first word is the same as the last letter of the third word. That should tell you if you are right in your guess. The answer is very simple and obvious. WARNING! Some of these symbols look a lot alike. The third letter in the first word looks sort of like a Z, so do the 2nd and 3rd letters of the third word, BUT, in the third word that Z has a longer more curly tail. They are NOT the same letter. Alright, lets go to the next really obvious clue. Notice that the symbol that looks sort of like a cursive E (or a backwards 3) shows up several times as a single letter word. There are only 3 single letter words in the English language. A, I, and O. And O is so incredibly rare that you can pretty much ignore it. So, that cursive E looking symbol is almost certainly an A or I. Remember that, its going to be important in a moment. Now I'm going to show you how to use fiziwig's pattern dictionary. Every word has a "pattern" of how the letters repeat. The pattern of the word "letters" is ABCCBDE. L : A E : B T : C T : C E : B R : D S : E See how the "pattern" defines the repetitions in the original word? Each "NEW" letter gets the next unused letter of the alphabet, but each repeated letter gets the same letter that the FIRST similar letter was assigned. heres another one: the pattern for "daddy" is "ABAAC" D : A A : B D : A D : A Y : C Ok, now whats the big deal about these patterns? It means you can find words in a monosubstitution cryptogram (that just means a code where one letter is replaced by a single symbol or another letter), that have an interesting pattern, and LOOK UP MATCHING WORDS in the pattern dictionary!!! In our elf code, notice the last word of page 2 line 5 (from the 3rd page of the comic) that looks like this: The pattern for this word is ABCDEFAAG Pull up fiziwig's pattern dictionary and do a find on ABCDEFAAG The list of possible matches is not very long, and many of the words are city names and things we can probably eliminate immediately. BUT, we can cut the list further. The 6th symbol in this word is that cursive capitol E thingy that we have seen as a single letter word several times. SO, we know that we can eliminate ALL words in that list that do not have an "A" or "I" in the 6th place. AND, we can cut it even closer than that. The last symbol of the word is the first symbol of the second word the elf speaks. If you guessed that word correctly, you know the last letter of this word. And, so, now you are down to about 3 guesses for what this word could be. All of them probably have the same first letter, so you can add that symbol to your known list. And we can positively identify the cursive capitol E symbol since there is only one possibility for it in this list as well. Now you've got several letters. go back and play with other words, look for more interesting patterns, and you'll find you have the entire thing decrypted in no time. If you are having trouble, ASK here, I'll be more than happy to provide guidance. You can also get lots of high quality help at The Crypto ForumHappy decrypting, although after you hear what that elf is saying, you may wish to censor her again!
|
|
|
Post by Xaa on Sept 19, 2006 0:39:04 GMT -5
First, lets go for the easy stuff. The elf's very first two words. Take a guess at what she might be saying in this circumstance, and remember it is probably rude. Oh, yeah. Extremely. She has a lot of interesting stuff to say, but early on in the story, she's under a lot of stress. And she swears like a sailor. =P I realized that what she was saying wasn't actually CRITICAL to know - in fact, it lends the story an interesting element if you're like the Amazon and really have no clue what she's saying - it makes her seem wise and all-knowing when you (the reader) don't know what she's really saying is both rude and very often anatomically impossible. I knew I'd awaken the crypto-hobbyist in you with this one. Her long speech to the Amazon in the cell (after the Amazon asks "If you have magic, why can't you just pop yourself out of here?") pretty much lays out the background elements of the story, for those who are really interested in knowing. Otherwise, you can just sit back and wait, eventually all will be revealed.
|
|
|
Post by Kilarin on Sept 19, 2006 7:12:24 GMT -5
Heh, yep. I can't resist a good cipher. And just to clarify again for the crypto newbies out there. All the elf language is, is a simple monosubstitution cipher. That means each letter of the normal english alphabet has been replaced by one symbol, and always by that same one symbol. It makes cryptanalysis (breaking the code) pretty easy. You can find more advice on how to crack monosubstituion ciphers here. And there is a list of tutorials available on the crypto forum here. (I'm "Donald" on that forum). I'm very much an amateur, but there are a few REALLY fine cryptanalysts over there just anxiously awaiting for someone to post any interesting crypto questions for them to look at.
|
|
|
Post by Xaa on Sept 19, 2006 7:30:56 GMT -5
Heh.
When I was a child, I was fascinated by codes. Well, I suppose every young boy is, really. But, it was 1972. I was ten years old. Personal computers were still a good eight years in the future, and military/industrial computers were really not all that powerful. Well, after playing around with various ciphers, I came up with what I thought was an unbreakable cipher. Well, realistically, I knew I was ten, and I knew that likely it could be broken, but it would be very difficult to do. And, really, in 1972, it would have been difficult to do.
Why?
Well, because what I'd come up with was essentially a version of the Vignere Autokey, which is NOT easy to break. What really made this one tough (though I didn't know it at the time) was that I didn't use the standard tabula recta - instead, the tabula recta I had devised was one that included punctuation, spaces, numbers, and so on. Well, my dad had worked for the USAF in their "codebreaking" department back when he as a young lieutenant, so I took it to him.
Unfortunately, dad was drunk at the time. He took one look and said "That's nothing, modern computers could crack it in ten seconds flat."
In Dad's defense, it should be mentioned that he wasn't just some USAF flunkie. At that time, he was the Squadron Commander of the 1838th EIS at Clark AFB in the Phillipines. Vietnam was going full swing, and lots of men from his squadron were sent into the jungles to set up TacAN stations so that the fighters and bombers could navigate. It was very important, really - without precision knowledge of navigational position, one was only guessing where you were dropping bombs, and you might kill your own troops. Or innocent civilians. It was a critical job, and some of the men he sent out there into the jungles didn't come back. He went himself a couple times, on certain missions. Missions he still can't talk about, because they're still classified. So, he had a reason to get shnockered. Today, at fourty-four, I know that, and I forgive him. At ten, however, I didn't know that.
Well, not to sound too melodramatic, but my youthful entheusiasm for ciphers and codes was literally crushed. I had spent weeks working on my little project, inspired by my father's stories of codes and codebreaking, as well as by a cub-scout merit badge (at the time, you could get a merit badge learning how to fiddle with codes and ciphers). But, after all that, my father simply dismissed it all as nothing, with barely a glance. I only got about halfway through the explanation, really. So, crushed and disheartened, I put my little notebooks aside, and never fiddled with codes again.
Well, not quite 'never', actually...
When I turned forty, I got interested in codes again. I suppose I was seeking to recapture my youth. Not that there was a whole lot of pleasantness to recapture, but that's as may be. And I discovered that I had, at age ten, re-invented the Vignere Autokey cipher, with a twist. And, I discovered my father had been wrong. It would have been a major pain for a computer to break this cipher back in 1972, because the true key - the tabula recta - was not just a simple alphabet. Today, it likely would only take a computer with the right software a few seconds to crack it. Maybe not. The key would be in discovering the tabula recta, and that would depend a lot on the skill of the person using the computer in the first place.
Well, after I figured this out, I wasn't certain whether I should be pleased or saddened. I mean, I was happy that I had re-discovered something of my childhood. After all, 1972 was a pretty pleasant time to be ten. Sure, there was a war on (Vietnam), but that just didn't register at the time. It was just something on the TV, really. And there were men walking on the moon, and scientists talking about building a space-station like in the movies (a big ring), and on and on and on. The future looked very bright to a ten-year-old in 1972. Very bright. So, I was happy to have recaptured a bit of that.
Yet, at the same time, I was saddened that I had abandoned something I loved as a child simply because of one sharp incident. Where would my life have gone, had my interest in codes continued? Mathematics, certainly, perhaps statistics...
Ah, well.
|
|
|
Post by Kilarin on Sept 19, 2006 7:53:26 GMT -5
Hmmm, I've never tackled an auto-key. Gaines has a whole chapter on them in her book: Cryptanalysis. Looks hairy! We've got a couple of guys over on the crypto forum who could quite possibly break it though. They are absolutely amazing. A guy with the handle Rot13 is able to crack things I thought were impossible, and he does it almost all by hand! and Insecure is incredible. You might want to join up over there and post a challenge with your cipher! That's too bad. My seven year old is a member of the American Cryptography Association's "Junior Tyro's" club. I try to encourage his interest in ciphers. He's actually pretty good, he was breaking simple monosubstitution ciphers when he could barely read. Huzzah! Ciphers are fun! Are you an ACA member? Well, Xaa the story teller is probably more interesting to most of us than Xaa the Statistician...
|
|
|
Post by Xaa on Sept 19, 2006 9:22:43 GMT -5
Looks hairy! We've got a couple of guys over on the crypto forum who could quite possibly break it though. They are absolutely amazing. A guy with the handle Rot-13 is able to crack things I thought were impossible, and he does it almost all by hand! You might want to join up over there and post a challenge with your cipher! Alright, but remember - this was YOUR idea if they all start screaming at me. Ummm... No, I'm a guy who, at age ten, re-invented something that a REAL cryptographer invented a couple hundred years before. I'm interested in codes and I study them, yes - but don't ask me to break them. Oh, I do hope so, truly I do.
|
|
|
Post by cypherwulfe on Sept 20, 2006 12:27:05 GMT -5
Heh, yep. I can't resist a good cipher. You spelled it wrong, its cypher
|
|
|
Post by Kilarin on Sept 20, 2006 12:39:19 GMT -5
Ha! First time I saw your nick I thought you were into cryptography. But yes, despite the facty that it's crYptanalysis and crYptography and crYptograms. Cipher is spelled with an "i". Except when we are talking about you. Hmmm, now that I look at it, there is a military UAV called "Cypher".
|
|
|
Post by cypherwulfe on Sept 20, 2006 15:16:04 GMT -5
I am into cryptography as a passing hobby, and sometimes I enjoy cracking cypto puzzles, but I am not that serious into it.
I remember us having this discussion when I first came to this board I think.
|
|