The other caches in the series:
Part 1: The Confounding Compounds
Part 2: When Will My Reflection Show?
Part 3: You Need To Be More Flexible!
Part 4: This Isn’t My Type of Thing
Part 5: “…the Things No One Can Imagine”
Introduction to TAPE
The Adam Park Enigma (TAPE) is a series of 5 mystery caches placed around the Adam Park residential estate. 4 of the caches (Parts 1 – 4) are ordinary mystery caches where you have to solve a puzzle to find the coordinates of the final cache. The puzzle for Part 5 is requires information placed in the first four caches, so you will need to complete the first four caches before you can attempt Part 5.
Each part of the series contains a write-up of the history of the area and a description of the Enigma cipher, which is the code that needs to be cracked to obtain the final cache in the series. You will find the puzzle that you need to solve for this part of TAPE near the end of the listing
The History of Adam Park (Part 1)
Adam Park looks like a quiet and beautiful old estate today, filled with colonial black-and-white bungalows. It’s an excellent place to talk a walk around: the roads are lined with old trees that provide a nice shade and birds and squirrels forage among the houses’ gardens. This peaceful façade, however, hides a darker history.
In the final days of the Battle of Singapore during WW II, Adam Park was the scene of some of the fiercest and most intense gunfights in the entire campaign. The areas surrounding Adam Park: Adam Road, Sime Road and Lornie Road were along the final perimeter and line of defense of the city of Singapore, and the men here were tasked to defend the line at all costs against the oncoming Japanese forces that were already very close to victory.
The Cambridgeshire Regiment of the 18th Division of the British forces were tasked with the defence of the Adam Park Estate against the Japanese 5th Division. The British forces use the house at 7 Adam Park as their headquarters and a base to defend all of the houses in the area surrounding it.
7 Adam Park is strategically located on a hill and is adjacent to another hill, Point 95. The two hills flanked a valley (known, unsurprisingly, as The Valley), through which Arcadia Road runs through today.
The cache for Part 1 of TAPE is located at the entrance to The Valley.
The Enigma Cipher (Part 1)
The Enigma cipher is perhaps one of the best known solved cryptographic problems of the 20th Century. The Enigma machine is an electro-mechanical coding machine used by the Germans to transmit messages during WW II. The Enigma code was thought to be unbreakable by both the Axis and Allied forces, and that confidence was maintained even until the last days of the war.
The ingenuity of the Enigma cipher was its simplicity to operate, which is matched by the sheer complexity of possible combinations of initial settings. In the days before the computational power we have today, breaking of code with billions of possible keys was thought of to be impractical, if not impossible. Furthermore, the code is changed on a daily basis, meaning that even if the key could be discovered, it would only be useful for a day.
The working principle of the machine is simple: pressing a lettered button on the front of the machine will send an electric signal through a plug board, three rotors and a reflector (which sends the signal back though the rotors and the plug board). The signal then lights up one of 26 lettered bulbs.
Encoding and decoding requires the same process: enter the letter you wish to encode/decode, and the encoded/decoded letter will light up. To be able to encode and decode messages successfully, the operators will need to share 5 vital pieces of information:
- the ring setting (Ringstellung) of the three rotors
- the order (Walzenlage) of the three rotors
- the type of reflector (Umkehrwalze) used
- the plug board settings (Steckerverbindugen)
- the initial positions of the rotors (Grundstellung)
This puzzle, when solved, will provide you with 1 of the 5 settings: the Ringstellung. Good luck!
TAPE Part 1: Confounding Compounds
Argh! I asked an acquaintance to figure out how the rings work in the Enigma machine. All got in return from her are these strange chemical compounds (to be fair, though, some of them have rings). Well, lesson learnt... never ask a chemist to do a cryptographer's work. They're no good, I need to send them back. Now, what's her name again?
You may check your answers here:
