Caesar's Square Mystery Cache
Skypacer: Well, after many years of hiding and a number of successful finds, it;s finally happened. The cache was finally muggled after The Sherman House has turned this small parking lot into a beer garden. Time to shut this one down. Thanks to all for the good finds.
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*** NOTE: THE COORDINATES LISTED IS NOT THE LOCATION OF THE CACHE ***
I've done a fair number of caches that use the ROT-13 method of encryption. The only problem with that is that ROT-13 is so commonplace that apps have been developed to help decrypt them, making ROT-13 almost useless. Because of that, I decided to use a different encryption system that is no more difficult to use than the ROT-13 system known as Caesar's Square.
I became acquainted with this system in one of Dan Brown's novels. The system - said to have been developed by Caesar - starts with a message where the number of characters (no spaces) is a square of a number (such as 81 is the square of 9, 100 is the square of 10, 121 is the square of 11, etc). This message is then written in a column format, meaning that each letter is written under the previous letter until you reach the square root of the message number (again, 9 for 81, 10 for 100, 11 for 121, etc) at which point you start a new column of letters. The end result of a square with the same number of lines as columns. The message is still readable if your start in the upper left-hand corner, read down the column of letters, working your way to the right. Now you would transcribe this square of letters onto another piece of paper – line by line- until you have a string of characters that is totally unreadable.
To decode the message, you only need to count the number of letters in the message, calculate the square root, and start transcribing the message with the square root number of characters per lines as well as the number of lines. Now the message can be read as described above.
(The are many websites devoted to the explanation of the Caesar's Square system, so if you still have question Google the phrase “Caesar's Square”.)
Once you understand how Caesar's Square works, you fill find the coordinates of the cache is the Hint box below. All you will need is the Caesar's Square method. Decipher the hint and go to those coordinates to locate the cache. You'll need to bring your own pen to sign the log and possibly a tool to extract the log with.
This cache is also available on opencaching.com: OX2MD0W
Congratulations to The Romig Boys for the FTF on Jan 20, 2011 at 12:12 pm.
Additional Hints
(Decrypt)
LRINEITEEROTNTIXEDNOCHEEGMIEPN
ATDEHIGGOETHENTNHTITIIGPNBTHNW
ORSOIYYITONTEINWFRFMNYVNEEITOI
ONETSSVEUN
Treasures
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