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Edit: all the unhelpful clues, including bad hinting and misleading ASCII art, were removed and other, (hopefully) more sensible ones were added.

You just moved to a new city, and your childhood friend, who happens to live nearby, has invited you for lunch. On your way, however, you get too engrossed in counting the fire hydrants and stray from the correct path. Before you know it, you end up in a strange park surrounded by all kinds of bizarre stone sculptures.

Upon closer inspection, you discover that each stone has some sort of code written on it.

The first stone is shaped like a boiler and has the following inscriptions on it:

3928034946501434558
8970719425863987727
5471096295374152111
5136835062752602326

The second stone is shaped like a bowl of macaroni, decorated with these digits:

9711147174
5715745732
0393520912
2316085086
8275588901

The third stone is a sculpture of Rudolph, the red nosed reindeer. There is a quite verbose branding on him:

83479775356636
98074265425278
62551818417574
67289097777279
38000816470600

The fourth stone looks perfectly normal. It looks like a bottle of champers with all the numbers from 674 to 702 listed on it. Apparently, there was not enough space left for 703.

674
675
676
...

701
702
7--

This doesn't seem to make any sense!

The question is:

What is this place?

BaSzAt
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  • Is it really [tag:history] and not [tag:story]? – Alessandro Apr 19 '16 at 08:23
  • @Aleeeeee It is really history, but that has little to do with cracking the code itself. Only a reminder to prevent you from jumping into wrong conclusions. – BaSzAt Apr 19 '16 at 08:53
  • Is there any hint included in the original question that is a clue to the kind of encryption needed? – fffred Apr 21 '16 at 12:25
  • @fffred I think the fourth stone is the biggest giveaway. – BaSzAt Apr 21 '16 at 13:37
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    Is the description of the second stone's "ladder on the right and snake on the left" deliberately the opposite of what we see? Or typo? – Dan Russell Apr 21 '16 at 14:38
  • @DanRussell Nice observation, but I think you shouldn't think about that too deeply until you find out the general encryption method. – BaSzAt Apr 21 '16 at 14:41
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    @BaSzAt That doesn't make sense - why would we (the POV character in the puzzle) describe something completely incorrectly just because we don't know the encryption method? – question_asker Apr 26 '16 at 12:39
  • @question_asker It might be the genius loci of the park. – BaSzAt Apr 26 '16 at 12:42
  • @BaSzAt So we can't trust any of the other information in this post about the stones, since it is likely also wrong. – question_asker Apr 26 '16 at 12:45
  • @question_asker Did I say the genius loci tricks you into making wrong observations? There is a specific subtype of sculptures that explains this nonsense. Then again, you're concentrating on the wrong thing. – BaSzAt Apr 26 '16 at 12:56
  • Let us continue this discussion in chat. – question_asker Apr 26 '16 at 13:11
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    When you say "lossy," do you mean that we can't unambiguously reconstruct the plaintext from the ciphertext? – 2012rcampion Apr 26 '16 at 22:28
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    @2012rcampion That's what I mean. But I made it so you wouldn't have a problem with ambiguity. – BaSzAt Apr 27 '16 at 05:55
  • @2012rcampion I took "lossy" to be related to images...maybe the JPEG format? – stackErr Apr 29 '16 at 15:46
  • Any hints? My bounty (half of it, anyway) was auto-awarded when this hadn't been answered in a week. – question_asker May 05 '16 at 11:56
  • I agree with @question_asker, some more hints would be nice. We seem to be stuck. – elias May 10 '16 at 21:30
  • Stuckity stuck stuck stuck. BaSzAt, is there anything you can say to help us that won't give everything away? – Gareth McCaughan May 16 '16 at 16:34
  • @GarethMcCaughan Sadly, any hint I can think of is either too vague or too cheap. What aspect of the mystery would you like me to hint about, specifically? – BaSzAt May 16 '16 at 21:38
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    I was afraid of that! Still, here are a few questions you might choose to answer one or more of. Whether the answers will be any use to us, I don't know. 1. Will reflection on the "framing" -- the story about the park, the fire hydrants, the sculptures, etc. -- give us any clues that may help figure out the code(s)? 2. Is it the same code in each case? (I take it the numbers on the fourth statue are something altogether different. I'm asking about 1-3.) 3. Do the numbers on the pillar indicate a span of time, [... continues ...] – Gareth McCaughan May 16 '16 at 22:11
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    ... a range of some other thing (page numbers, latitudes, catalogued musical compositions, ...), some kind of key to the code, or something else? 4. Does decoding the code require some sort of nontrivial factual knowledge -- details of someone's life, words in a famous quotation, etc. -- or is it something "purer"? (As an example of where the boundary lies, if the digits represented letters via the usual telephone-number mapping I'd put that pretty much half way between.) [... continues ...] – Gareth McCaughan May 16 '16 at 22:14
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    ... 5. Are all those 0s in the last line of the third statue a giveaway, if only we were clever enough to figure out how they might arise? What about all the 7s near the bottom of the same statue? 6. Does the left/right business discussed above indicate some connection with mirrors? 7. Is there some single person (historical or not) who's in some sense key to this -- as I thought Dante might be, and another solver thought Pepys might be? OK, I'll stop there. – Gareth McCaughan May 16 '16 at 22:24
  • which field of science is involved? my first instinct was chemistry, but i could not tell a single reason why. – elias May 17 '16 at 22:06
  • about the last digits missing from the 4th stone. might this suggest, that the other stones are missing some digits as well? or should it give us the idea, that in fact the 4th stone does not contain a sequence of consecutive nunbers, is it just mere coincidence, that the first 29 elements seemed to have this property? – elias May 17 '16 at 22:08
  • i think on a 'snakes and ladders', snakes are typically have their heads on the top. is that 2nd stone mirrored or rotated? – elias May 17 '16 at 22:09
  • @elias You are right about what the 4th stone implies. I'll include this in the new hint. The numbers are in the correct orientation. – BaSzAt May 18 '16 at 07:44
  • strictly speaking, no digits are missing from the fourth stone. – question_asker May 18 '16 at 12:01
  • @question_asker, I'm not sure what you want to imply with your statement. English is not my native language, sorry. can you elaborate a little bit, please? thanks! – elias May 18 '16 at 15:20
  • @elias I'm just saying that, based on the description of the fourth stone, that stone contains every (base ten) digit. It's only "missing" digits if that is indeed a sequence and not just a (massive) coincidence. – question_asker May 18 '16 at 15:22
  • is it only a coincidence, that numbers on the 4th stone take up 30 rows, and it's exactly the digits of 30 which are missing at the end? – elias May 20 '16 at 19:36
  • @elias Unfortunately it is. – BaSzAt May 20 '16 at 20:25
  • Tryng to answer the question in hint 6: other digits missing can be 704705... and more, continuing the sequence. Or we may add the same prefix 30 times to each line and they still stay consecutive numbers. Probably I'm off track, at least I cannot see any of these iseas leading to somewhere. – elias May 22 '16 at 06:10
  • Elias, an obvious way for it to lead somewhere would be if there were a 1 missing at the start of each row, the rows then indicating years ~300 years ago. Then the missing digits on the last row might signify something that ended part-way through 1703. But we don't seem to have had any luck finding what that might be, and there's no particular reason in-puzzle to think there's a missing 1 at the start of each row. -- Of course they could be years ~1300y ago without anything missing, but that too doesn't obviously lead anywhere. – Gareth McCaughan May 23 '16 at 11:08
  • Fourth stone could also be missing numbers before the start of the sequence: ...672673. – Gareth McCaughan May 23 '16 at 11:09
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    So. Looks like another hint is probably in order. – question_asker Jun 01 '16 at 16:44
  • I agree. (Or I suppose BaSzAt could declare victory on the grounds that clearly we are all too stupid to solve the puzzle, and tell us what the answer is. But I'd rather another hint.) – Gareth McCaughan Jun 10 '16 at 09:57
  • Pleeeeeaaaaase? – Gareth McCaughan Jun 13 '16 at 14:07
  • @GarethMcCaughan Honestly, I think I was quite a klutz with the formulation of this puzzle. Maybe, rather than adding a 7th hint, I should redecorate some of the stones and introduce a fifth, possibly even a sixth one. But that is hard to pull off (and I'm in the middle of my exam period), so please don't expect any change for at least a week. – BaSzAt Jun 13 '16 at 19:32
  • OK, we'll wait... – Gareth McCaughan Jun 13 '16 at 19:46
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    Still hoping for some sort of hint or resolution or something! I hope the exams have gone well. – Gareth McCaughan Jul 08 '16 at 14:04
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    Ping. I hope this gets solved at some point...still want to know what's going on here! – Dan Russell Aug 02 '16 at 21:18
  • Any hope to see an update on this one? – elias Nov 21 '16 at 15:21
  • @BaSzAt, can you please say something about this? – elias Jan 23 '17 at 16:16
  • I made up my mind. I sacrificed backward compatibility with the original clues because at the time I wrote the original clues, I had no idea how to make a puzzle. Save for the codes, I removed basically everything; they were just idiotic, overcomplicated, carrot-on-a-stick clues anyway. I hope the new clues will be much more helpful. I apologize for not making this edit earlier. – BaSzAt Apr 01 '17 at 19:12
  • Science tag could be hinting to encoding through periodic table of elements. Ex: 01 = H, 02 = He, 05 = B and so on.1 – AstroMax Apr 01 '17 at 20:24
  • Can we get some hints maybe? There wasn't any progress for like 5 days now, my bounty is about to expire. – elias Apr 06 '17 at 08:31
  • Are you in the USA? Are the numbers phone codes? – it's a hire car baby Apr 07 '17 at 22:21
  • @RobertFrost They are not. Nothing country-specific is used. – BaSzAt Apr 09 '17 at 14:33
  • I'm bumping this one in the hope of seeing some more hints. – elias Oct 25 '17 at 14:09

3 Answers3

7

Possible partial answer perhaps maybe (mainly based on Hint 1 and the fourth stone):

First stone and Hint 1:

Samuel Pepys's diary, in which he provided an account of the Great Plague and the Great Fire of London

"counting the fire hydrants"

The Great Fire of London

Fourth stone:

Pepys died in May 1703

Second stone:

Pepys rose up the social ladder but was susceptible to giving way to pleasures [this connection may be a stretch]

Hopefully unrelated:

Pepys suffered from bladder stones

I have no clue about the code. Might be related to:

Pepys used shorthand in his diary, which could be considered a form of lossy compression in the sense that at an abbreviation could be ambiguously expanded.

KeyboardWielder
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  • Unfortunately, this answer doesn't fit with his statements of the story not being part of the puzzle, and the stones not having a direct connection to each other in the comment to the other answer. :( – Khale_Kitha Apr 26 '16 at 18:01
  • Hmmm, I'm really bad at giving clues. One of your spoiler blocks contains something that is close to the truth behind the stones (not the bladder stone one), but even that wouldn't get you anywhere in itself. – BaSzAt Apr 26 '16 at 18:47
6

I am completely stuck on the codes, so far at least, but would I be right in discerning

a connection with Dante Alighieri and the Divina Commedia?

It looks to me as if there are at least two indications of this (and I wouldn't be surprised to learn I've missed more):

"stray from the correct path" is a rather unusual turn of phrase and just happens to be rather close to what Dante describes himself as having done at the start of the Inferno; and there's no obvious reason why angels' wings should make a statue "comical", but it happens that for reasons largely unrelated to what we now call "comedy" that Dante's poem has the title it does.

If so, then one possibility would seem to be

that the first three statues represent the three books of the D.C. -- an overgrown closed book for hell, the ambiguous snake and ladder for purgatory, and the angel's wings for paradise

though in that case I'm very puzzled by the last statue.

674 is probably approximately Dante's age in months when he died, but so far as I can tell no one knows his dates with much precision so I bet that's coincidence even if the puzzle is in fact about Dante.

Gareth McCaughan
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    Interesting idea, but only a coincidence. The clues don't have a direct connection between them. And the story is just a story. Without loss of solvability, I could have said you were teleported there. – BaSzAt Apr 19 '16 at 05:56
  • Oh, that's a pity! Then I'm even stucker than I thought. – Gareth McCaughan Apr 19 '16 at 08:44
4

Here is a possible partial answer:

About statue 4:

For the last one the numbers are 674-702 not finishing 703. I think this could relate to the Provinces of East and West Jersey which were two distinct political provinces of the Province of New Jersey from 1674-1702. In 1702 the two provinces were disestablished and Queen Anne's government took over in 1702 (see this wiki article for more info). The clue could either mean the answer is something related to New Jersey, or Queen Anne.

About statue 1 and maybe the other statues:

If the numbered statue is related to Queen Anne, then the first statue may be related to the diary of Anne Frank, and the other two sculptures may have some relation to an Anne

I'm going to see if I can follow the trail any deeper, but maybe someone else may find this helpful (if it is accurate)

Edit:

Unrelated to previous findings, here are the thoughts I have on the 2nd sculpture:

It features a snake and a ladder. This could be a reference to the game snakes and ladders (later renamed by Milton Bradley as chutes and ladders). I can't seem to find any connection to an Anne or New Jersey so it's possible this is merely a red herring (or my other assumptions are incorrect)

Gordon Allocman
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  • Another impressive piece of research, but don't follow that trail. And I'm really surprised no one has paid any heed to the [tag:science] tag so far. About the snakes and ladders, you are right. – BaSzAt Apr 29 '16 at 16:05
  • @BaSzAt the only thing I could thing about for science was 03 was o3 or ozone and that it had to do with space since no ozone, but that seemed too much of a stretch – Gordon Allocman Apr 29 '16 at 16:45