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Do Puzzles Drive You Crazy? Ciphers #2 Mystery Cache

Hidden : 10/14/2011
Difficulty:
2.5 out of 5
Terrain:
1.5 out of 5

Size: Size:   micro (micro)

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Geocache Description:

One of a series of geocaches that explain various puzzle types, with examples of techniques that can help you solve them. These caches are dedicated to gsmx2, who has often said that there can never be too few puzzle caches
FTF honors go to zdonb


IF THE CONTAINER OR LOG SHEET NEEDS REPLACING, PLEASE HELP ME OUT AND DO IT.

WARNING!! We had to move this, as the original hiding place was no longer safe. The puzzle has been changed to reflect this. If you solved the old one, and don't want to solve the new puzzle, you can add .092 to the North and subtract .100 from the West.

All of the caches in this series have original coordinates on local freeways and highways, hence the common element in their names. Obviously, the caches are not hidden at the given coordinates.

Now that you have solved the first of this series... er, you *have* solved "Do Puzzles Drive You Crazy? Ciphers #1" (GC32PXD), haven't you? If not, you might want to take a look at it, especially if you are new to puzzle caches.

In any event, Caesar Ciphers are pretty easy to break, once you know the trick, as explained in the cache referenced above. Now let's look at ways to disguise things a little, making the task of breaking the cipher a little tougher.

One of the easiest ways to add a little bit of difficulty is to use symbols rather than letters. Because most of us are so used to seeing the Roman Alphabet, we get very confused when given a cipher composed of other symbols: ancient Runes, the invented Klingon alphabet, various wingdings and so on. This also applies to those who use the Cyrillic or Greek alphabets, or any of a number of other alphabets and ideogram sets.

The way to break these sorts of ciphers is to count up the total of each symbol used. Then, with some knowledge of approximately how often each letter is used in standard English (or Russian, or High Elvish, or...), you can begin to make some inferences about the cipher.

Of course, a good cryptologist will know this, and will take some pains to hide some of the information in other ways. For now, though, let us assume that the original message is written in English, that each group of characters is a single, standard English word, and that no other symbols (numerals, ampersands, parentheses, etc.) are used in the original message. Also, each symbol stands for exactly one English letter, and no English letter is represented by more than one symbol.

There are two things that will help you break this cipher. First, the original message has not been concatenated; as already noted, each group of symbols is an actual word of the original message. Second, the message deals with geocaching in some way, so at least some of the words will be easily recognizable.

There are two ways to proceed. You can take a guess about one of the words, and see how far that takes you. That could actually work with many puzzle caches, merely because of the likelihood of words such as "one" showing up.

The other method, which will be more useful in complicated ciphers, is to count up how often each symbol occurs. As Edgar Allan Poe points out in his story, The Gold-Bug, the letter 'e' is the most common of all letters in English. After that, depending upon your reference material, either 'a' or 't' is most common. Other very common letters are 'n', 'o', 'r', 's' and 'l'. The least-common letters are 'z', 'j', 'q' and 'x'. No wonder those are worth a lot in Scrabble

For this cipher, we recommend the second method. First off, it will get you familiar with this approach, one which is likely to be more useful in the long run. There are a number of puzzle caches out there that are in story form, and which use an alphabet set that is not the Roman one. Also, we threw in a small "twist", one which should be easy to see once you get going. If you use the first approach, though, it might be more confusing, and it will be more difficult.

The container is a camo-painted diabetes test strip container, hidden in a common place for such things.

Good luck! Have fun

Additional Hints (Decrypt)

Jr chg vg ng gur raq bs gur jevgr-hc.

Decryption Key

A|B|C|D|E|F|G|H|I|J|K|L|M
-------------------------
N|O|P|Q|R|S|T|U|V|W|X|Y|Z

(letter above equals below, and vice versa)