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 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 2)
The Cambridgeshire Regiment soldiers set up defensive lines around the hill surrounding 7 Adam Park and along The Valley on the slopes of Point 95. Their objective was to hold on to the estate for as long as they can hold off the attacks from the Japanese. The Japanese were attacking from the Adam Road, and were trying to infiltrate to the water pumps of MacRitchie Reservoir. The reservoir is key defence point because the ability cutting off the water supply to the city would almost certainly bring the Singapore campaign to a quick end.
The Japanese managed to infiltrate the defence lines at Adam Park and occupied some of the houses in Adam Park. The British forces fought off the invaders in sniper fighting and house-by-house battles as the Japanese mortar bombard the area. The soldiers in Adam Park dug into trenches in the compounds of the houses and fought valiantly, turning the Japanese forces aim to take the Adam Park quickly and move on into a long drawn out battle that lasted for three days. The Battle for Adam Park would turn out to be the only battle fought in Singapore in which the British objectives were held.
The battle would last until all the way to the Fall of Singapore on the 15th February 1942.
The Enigma Cipher (Part 2)
The Enigma machine and its cipher would become one of the lynchpins of WW II. The cracking of the cipher has been said to have hastened the end of the WW II by a few years.
The cracking of the Enigma had actually begun in Poland, when an Enigma machine on the way to a German businessman was misspent to another address. The Polish authorities quickly got their hands on it, and sent their best cryptographers to study the machine thoroughly before rewrapping it and sending it on its way again.
With that information, the Polish engineers created the first Enigma decoding machines, called the “Bomby”, to begin intercepting and decoding German messages. However, it was not long after that that the Germans annexed Poland, and the Polish cryptographers fled to England with their knowledge of the Enigma cipher.
At the same time, the German military began improving on the Enigma cipher by changing the settings more often, and introducing the plug board settings in the military Enigma machines. The plug boards introduced a huge layer of complexity to the ciphers by multiplying the possible start settings by a 150 million million million times. Finally, the different branches of the military also started using different reflectors in their machines. Therefore, with the increased complexity of the Enigma machines, the Bomby machine created by the Polish could no longer compute the possible settings efficiently.
TAPE Part 2: When Will My Reflection Show?
The reflectors are named as such because they are the mid-point of the Enigma signals’ journey from the keyboard to the lettered bulbs. The signal that passes through the three rotors will be “reflected” back through the rotors in the opposite direction.
In this puzzle, we will utilise the idea of reflections from a mathematical point of view. Consider the word “GEO” as printed in black on the grid below:
The two black lines (one vertical and one horizontal) represent the axes of reflections of the word. The red letters represent a vertical reflection, and the green letters represent a horizontal reflection. The blue letters are a combination of a vertical and horizontal reflection.
In this puzzle, somewhere in the grid below, the coordinates for the cache containing the reflection setting is hidden:
The numbers may have been reflected on the axes, and when the correct set of reflections has been performed, the coordinates will appear. However, not all numbers will be used. Some of them are simply red herrings. There should only be one sensible set of coordinates that should emerge from the grid.
Good luck!
You may check your answers below:
