Solutions to Gold Bug puzzles past

Solution to the first set of the New Year

2008-01-24T16:06:00.000-08:00

The first part was a keyword substitution, which told you to take the keyword - EPIPHANY - and place that after snipurl.com. That leads you to a particular edition of Twelfth Night on Amazon.

The second part should simply be read line by line as 'act number, scene number, line number, word number' in that edition of Twelfth Night. So the first line gives you the 5th word of the 34th line of the second scene of the first act 'The'. This spells out to tell you that 'the answer you seek is recompense'. And as the first part had already told you, put that after snipurl.com to find the letter from Moray - www.snipurl.com/recompense.

Answers to the second easy and fourth hard sets

2007-12-21T04:58:00.000-08:00

The second easier conundrum was a subsitution cipher with the keyword DUPIN and read, thus deciphered:

THE ANSWER YOU NEED THIS TIME IS BURIED WITHIN THE DISCOVERIES ALREADY MADE AND PUBLISHED ON THIS WEBSITE. IF YOU LOOK THROUGH EITHER THE FORUMS OR THE UNEARTHED SO FAR SECTION THEN YOU SHOULD FIND EVERYTHING THAT YOU NEED TO BE ABLE TO ANSWER THE FOLLOWING QUESTION. VERY SIMPLY, WHAT NATIONALITY WAS WILLIAM MORAY?

The answer being buried in the letter from Dupin.

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The fourth harder set...

The first puzzle, the Turk was there only to suggest laying out the pieces of text as on a chessboard, like so:

And the clockface was a clue to read it clockwise from the top left corner. If you do, you'll be directed to a page of code.

The second puzzle, the map was a red herring. The grid has 26 horizontal lines, the top representing A, the bottom Z and all those in between. Translate each dot to a letter and read from left to right. It will present you with a googlable phrase to find the name and key of the cipher used on the first page. This cipher is a little tricksy as every letter can stand for several possibilities but it's worth persevering to find my 'Moray speculation'.

For those that have deciphered it in its entirety, it would appear that the date of 20 January is perhaps important.

Solutions to the first easy and third hard set

2007-12-12T01:43:00.000-08:00

For the easier puzzle, the keyword for the substitution cipher was MASQUE and it revealed some thoughts I had about the Beale ciphers and asked you for the alleged middle name of Thomas Beale: Jefferson.

The third set of harder puzzles, each had 3-digit answers.

The first was ROT-9 transposition for the first three word and ROT-12 for the last, deciphering to 'nine cubes and twelve' nine cubed plus twelve that is, 741

Solution to the second followed from its last word 'initially'.,, the initial letters of the sentence were ccliii which in Roman numerals counts out 253

The third was a visual representation of binary code, the keys being 1 and the coins being 0. So it spelt out 1001000001, which is the binary for 577.

Put them together in order and you get 741253577.

My hint highlighting 'befriend' was to point you towards Facebook, where this number is the ID of the person you seek. I will explain more about this person and the letter discovered regarding him tomorrow... when I shall also post new sets of puzzles both easy and harder. I'll also be in touch with those of you who won the chance of tickets then.

Solution to the second set of puzzles

2007-11-26T12:51:00.001-08:00

Each of these revealed sheets of a letter sent by Dupin to Rupert Grandison senior, which can be seen here.

The first sheet
Poe's school The Manor House in Stoke Newington was sited on what is now a wine bar, The Fox Reformed, which a cunning anagram pointed you towards.

The second sheet
This aerial photo is of Sullivan's Island, where the first Rupert Grandison discovered Captain Kidd's treasure as described by Poe in the original story.

The third (and fourth) sheets
A rather fiendish transposition cipher, rotating step by step through the alphabet. So the second word is rotated one letter, the third two letters, and so on right until the blank which is back where we started at the beginning of the alphabet. The blank is actually two words in death, completing an extract of the epitaph of Samuel Taylor Coleridge in Highgate Church, which can be seen here.

Solution to the first wave of puzzles

2007-10-26T12:25:00.000-07:00

Each of these revealed a line of cipher which appears to have been written by Moray and discovered by Dupin, who sent them to Grandison Senior, Mr Grandison's grandfather. The lines deciphered spelt out a message which can be seen in the Unearthed So Far section of The Gold-Bug website.

The solutions to my puzzles were as follows :)

the second line
Captain Kidd, as according to Poe's story

the third line
The obelisk outside the Temple of Luxor is the twin of that now in Paris in Place de la Concorde

the fourth line
the message is written along the diagonals starting in top left corner T, then H-E, etc yielding THE LAST WORD FOUND IN READING THIS DIAGONAL INSCRIPTION

the fifth line
The narrator of Poe's story, whom we now know to have been Moray, notes Swammerdamm in the third paragraph of the original story.

the sixth line
The wise man's route traces out the symbol of infinity.

the seventh line
It's a substitution cipher whose keyword is CHEST which deciphers to WHICHEVER IS THE KEYWORD IN THE ENCIPHERMENT OF THIS SENTENCE IS THE ANSWER YOU NEED