So I was just browsing Puzzling as usual, when I stumbled upon a... to put it mildly, "strange" question:
The question seems to be permanently deleted now...
For those who disabled GIFs in their browser, here are pictures that together form the whole webpage of the question: One, two, three. The question score constantly gets lower and when you hover over the word "clouds" (sorry for forgetting doing that in the GIF) a tooltip appears which says:
to which I always returned to for orientation and only changed the height when I had to
Edit: Thanks to Sleafar for stitching all three parts together. The missing parts between part 2 and 3 do not contain anything important.
Since the colored ciphertexts are hard to read:
Orange: HUSOQTLNBSSALRDIDPNOKHFTHEXJVMDDJCCNCMMOTRTFRETJTXZGSBUPWRNOLZYVIRSHDEQKDRXVTQGRNMOSXDFNWEAINGWSQBBQYXFTWFHECINGVSO
Yellow: NJVZVOGYEVSGOGSJRKBASPBFOQMFHFJKUFEG
White: ITLAFSGWHOBTCHIEUOHETLHDVENSLESECDOAI
Blue: MGQPHPGRNKEAWQYG Edit: Another mistake on my part, the intended ciphertext is MGQPHPGRNKEAVPXF. But as you can see only the last few letters were wrong, so it's not a major mistake and you would've still gotten part of the plaintext with the intended method before.
Green: UDWTTERUDCTONOHGON
Red: ESTXHMWETZOYRIJOM
Gray at the bottom of the page:
To the █████ of the ███
The profile image is also a GIF, and since the quality of it in the video is bad, here's a larger version of it. I didn't want to include it directly in this post since it's kind of annyoing.
And again, for those who can't run GIFs, the profile image consists of six parts: First, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth.
Hint #1:
The substring "I started from the seemingly perfect state, with clouds(to which I always returned to for orientation and only changed the height when I had to) in front of me and earth below" primarily gives instructions how to rotate the cube when labelling it (keeping the "seemingly perfect state", of course), although one part of it also tells how to hold the cube when starting to "reconsider the self-image".
IMPORTANT EDIT: (SPOILERS/PARTIAL GIVEAWAY)
How do I put this... I apparently used a fake Rubik's cube when making this puzzle (without me knowing it). Sorry for the waste of energy and time if you tried to solve this, I have no excuse for it. The color scheme my cube has is this one. I also gave away the orientation here. You can downvote this into oblivion if you want, I'd certainly understand it.
Hint for Orange:
This isn't really a cipher, even though it does have to do with cryptology. Most of it is just junk, so the plaintext isn't actually 115 characters long.
What are the plaintexts of all the ciphers (including the gray text at the bottom)? Please add reasoning, not only the solution.
Answer
Please upvote the other answers as well. ffao solved half of the ciphers on his own, and dcfyj solved the cube shortly before I did.
As known from the hints the OP is using a non standard layout for the Rubik's Cube. We also know that the front of the cube should be white ("with clouds in front of me") and the bottom blue (as clarified by the OP). Applying the cube faces from the question gives this:
Rotations
In the copy of the deleted question we can see names of angels on the right side. The capital letters in these names are instructions that should be applied to the cube.
R U LI DI B FI LI FI R DII have created a tool which performs all these rotations, while preserving the orientation of the letters. This is the final result (click on the image to see all steps):
We can see some words on some cube faces: "GOD", "CUBE", "REPEATING", "PRIDE", "SKIP", "MY HOUR". Each face is a hint for the cipher with the corresponding color of the starting position.
Orange
"son of the morning" (Isaiah 14:12)
Yellow
This is not a hint for the God's Number, but for the Trifid cipher (which works with a 3×3×3 cube). There are many variants of this cipher, therefore I will simply paste a screenshot created with this online tool:
"I will exalt my throne above the stars of God" (Isaiah 14:13)
White
"I will ascend above the heights of the clouds" (Isaiah 14:14)
Blue
This is a variation of the Ceasar cipher (aka. ROT-n). First we need to decrement all letters by 7, giving:
FZJIAIZKGDXTOIQYThen we increment the first letter by 0, the second by 1, the third by 2, and so on:
FALLENFROMHEAVENor:
"fallen from heaven" (Isaiah 14:12)
Green
The hint for this face is to use the rail fence cipher (because of the arrangement of the W's) using an offset of 7, which gives the following:
.U.D.W.T.T.E.R.U.DC.T.O.N.O.H.G.O.N.or:
"cut down to the ground" (Isaiah 14:12)
Red
"brought down to hell" (Isaiah 14:15)
Gray
All currently found solutions are quotes from Isaiah 14 (probably from the King James Bible - thanks to ffao for correction). Assuming the last quote would be also from this text, this means the solution for the gray part is probably:
"Yet thou shalt be brought down to hell, to the sides of the pit." (Isaiah 14:15)
No comments:
Post a Comment