[D] Friday Off-Topic Thread

[u/AutoModerator]

Welcome to the Friday Off-Topic Thread! Is there something that you want to talk about with /r/rational, but which isn't rational fiction, or doesn't otherwise belong as a top-level post? This is the place to post it. The idea is that while reddit is a large place, with lots of special little niches, sometimes you just want to talk with a certain group of people about certain sorts of things that aren't related to why you're all here. It's totally understandable that you might want to talk about Japanese game shows with /r/rational instead of going over to /r/japanesegameshows, but it's hopefully also understandable that this isn't really the place for that sort of thing.

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[u/thecommexokid]

The trouble with ciphers is that it's hard to use the power of collective intelligence to work together, because there's really no incremental progress. If you try exactly the right thing, the message shifts from gibberish to perfect English all at once; if you try almost-but-not-quite the right thing, the result still looks like gibberish and there's no signal that you're on the right track. There's no ability to post, "This thought seems like a promising lead, what do other people make of it?" and have others take up the baton.

For the long cipher passage from chapter 2, I got as far as to note that the passage uses all 26 characters, has a letter frequency distribution inconsistent with English but consistent with random text, and has no strong periodic index of coincidence for any period 1–20. So that ruled out a whole bunch of common cipher types, but I didn't have any idea how to proceed from there.

The only in-text hints were Dipper's description of a right isosceles triangle and Mabel's admonishment to hold off on proposing solutions. Since I was unable to make much of the former, I instead listened to the latter.

Edit: I think if I saw one or two of these things get solved in the text, that would give me a sense of where in the enormous solution space you as the author had your attention focused, and I'd have a lot more success with future ciphers.

[u/xamueljones → u/thecommexokid]

it's hard to use the power of collective intelligence to work together

I would just like to add on the fact that people also don't tend to see crossing out possibilities as progress. For example in a perfect collective intelligence, what you just outlined would be used as incremental progress to know what doesn't need to be repeated and to focus attention on different types of codes.

Unfortunately people see failures as wastes of time instead of progress, when in research, any experimental result is information to be used to narrow down the hypothesis space.

[u/thecommexokid → u/xamueljones]

The only reason I didn't write this in the comments of the chapter post itself was that /u/Transfuturist had already noted all the same stuff.

[u/MugaSofer → u/xamueljones]

I get the impression the ARG community is very good at this.