The Grey Labyrinth is a collection of puzzles, riddles, mind games, paradoxes and other intellectually challenging diversions. Related topics: puzzle games, logic puzzles, lateral thinking puzzles, philosophy, mind benders, brain teasers, word problems, conundrums, 3d puzzles, spatial reasoning, intelligence tests, mathematical diversions, paradoxes, physics problems, reasoning, math, science.

Icarus · Daedalian Member

I'm not submitting this as a puzzle. If someone wants to move this to another section, go ahead. I just thought most folks here might be interested.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_thelookout/20110329/ts_yblog_thelookout/fbi-asks-public-for-help-breaking-encrypted-notes-tied-to-1999-murder#mwpphu-container

Lepton* · Guest

I looked at it a bit. What bothers me is... this guy's cryptographic system is probably full of shorthand or individualized tricks, which is why throwing computer analysis at it hasn't worked. The FBI says that he's been writing notes like this since he was a kid, yet, they don't give us any of the other (potentially figured-out) notes. There are a lot of smart people out there, but without all the background, this is probably just an exercise in futility.

JohnP · Icarian Member

Maybe it's a decoy. Maybe the murderer used a random number generator ahead of time to produce a letter sequence that had no meaning and then wrote the letters in shorthand to make it seem off-the-cuff. The more time the FBI spends trying to decode a meaningless message the less time they'll spend looking for better clues.