Frac Mystery Cache

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The Rat: Time for this one to retire.

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Hidden : 5/8/2009
Difficulty:
5 out of 5
Terrain:
1.5 out of 5

Size: Size: micro (micro)

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Geocache Description:

The cache is not at the posted coordinates but is within two miles.

For those of you who are fans of Battlestar Galactica the title may remind you of the inventive way the writers skated past the FCC language guidelines. You may be inclined to say it a few times yourself while trying to solve this one. However, the title is just short for Fractionated Morse.

This cache is an academic exercise in programming and cryptology. It is intended to be a collaborative exercise in the logs like GroMARK was. In fact, the log sheet is the old GroMARK log sheet. Below is a Fractionated Morse cipher of the same type described by Cycling Cacher in his cache of that name (GC121W2). It is enciphered consistently with the description given by the American Cryptogram Association (ACA) here. The plaintext is in normal English with words separated by spaces. Unlike Cycling Cacher I am not providing a crib, although I can't stop anyone from guessing one. The key is a phrase.

The idea is to devise a program that will solve this automatically. As with the GroMARK hill-climbing can solve it if modified appropriately. My hillclimber required some tweaking to solve (not specifically designed for this text, but tweaks I would do for any text I was having difficulty with). After tweaking it broke the first two words and several others within the text in less than three minutes, certainly enough to complete the job by hand if necessary. After that I entered the two words as a crib (but without specifying where the crib was located) and restarted it. It solved 100% in about a half hour, so I know this is solvable in the manner I have described. I would like to see what it takes to get your program to solve completely, not just identify a few words. I think it would be fun for other watchers to read of your failures or difficulties, too. I encourage plenty of posting as long as there are no spoilers. This cipher type is harder than most to solve using hill-climbing. I am hoping to see every contributor post ideas and describe their successes and failures as happened with Gromark at the beginning. If you succeed in solving, please do not post actual code or links to such code or, of course, the coordinates or plaintext or physical information that would allow for brute forcing. What I'm looking for is for a collaborative effort to identify the characteristics of an effective Fractionated Morse autosolver so that others can write their own. Unlike GroMARK I do not intend to post hints that will enable solution without the ability to write an autosolver to find it, but in my experience there are some really smart people out there who will be able to solve it by paper and pencil or with only minor computer use, or maybe just brute force it.

JUQQN HODYX JIFMJ IFWIH QQNCR JCWAC IFXCJ VYHZJ DXCIL SFWQW LSOTX SURAD ZJLJY NBHUL YRICL JLWYY NUWJJ DMQLN ERRFS UNOCV ALLVK QLSUR YMLGM QLNUW ZXWJI QLSUI HUXQY ADZJL LJIHC WGQBA KILWG QEAWQ IBAUQ YR

Additional Hints (No hints available.)



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