The Orange Belt:
In American Tae Kwon Do, the orange belt is the second belt in the color belt ranking system, and is the first belt earned after an examination. At this level, a Tae Kwon Do student begins to learn forms, which combines some of the individual punches, blocks and kicks previously learned. In our orange belt, we are going to advance to the next level of instruction, that of simple number substitution.
8-5-12-12-15 20-8-5-18-5
Those must be the coordinates! Sorry, they're not. They're actually letters, encoded as numbers. This is one of the very first substitution ciphers that kids learn. Each letter is replaced with the number of its place in the alphabet. A=1, B=2, C=3, etc. The message above translates simply to:
H E L L O W O R L D
Any computer programmer should recognize that one!
Likewise, numbers could easily be encoded as letters:
C C B H J B G A A B B J I C E
3 3 2 8 0 2 7 1 1 2 2 0 9 3 5
The information could be a bit more difficult than that. Look at the following paragraph:
20-8-9-18-20-25 20-8-18-5-5 20-23-5-14-20-25 5-9-7-8-20 16-15-9-14-20 26-5-18-15 20-23-15 19-5-22-5-14 15-14-5 8-21-14-4-18-5-4 20-23-5-12-22-5 20-23-5-14-20-25 16-15-9-14-20 14-9-14-5 20-8-18-5-5 6-9-22-5
Seems like a lot, doesn't it? Let me introduce you to one of my friends, Rumkin.com
http://rumkin.com/tools/cipher/
Copy and paste the numbers above into the letter number substitution cipher page and hit "decrypt": http://rumkin.com/tools/cipher/numbers.php
Pretty easy, wasn't it?
Now remember that numbers can be hidden or displayed in lots of different ways. They can be spelled out, displayed in Roman numerals, even the product of basic math equations.
Here's another one for you. Try this:
ORTX.0FL DENCMS.NHWV
Give up? What if I displayed it like this:
OR TX.0 FL DE NC MS. NH WV
The states of the union. Now think about how you could use this information to get a number value. What about the order they were admitted to the union:
33 28.0 27 1 12 20. 9 35
Numbers can be concealed in dozens of different ways, as you saw above. Morse code, Unicode (computer encoding standard), colors, periodic elements and pool balls can all directly translate to a specific number or digit. Think outside the box, and as we learned in the first puzzle, look all over the page for clues on how to solve the puzzle.
With this in mind, see if you can solve the Orange Belt puzzle:
The Flying Dutchman, The Bambino, The Hawk, Arriba. Sparky, Nellie, Dizzy, The Mick, The Mechanical Man, Stan The Man.
Note: At the request of security, please do not search for this cache at night, only during the daytime. Thank you!
