Order of the Stick: November II

[Gorbash Kazdar]

At this rate there's going to be a English - Haley cypher translator program out before Monday.

I predict I won't need the bloody translator by Monday :P

Personally, I though Durkon's last line was hilarious. I hope we hear more "words o' wisdom" from his grandpappy.

[Eloco]

That black eye is priceless, comedy gold indeed.

[BurntOfferings]

The comic went up just before I left for work. I fully expected Haley's speech to be decoded before I ever had time to try, but the Perl translator still surprised me. Too bad it's not in Python. ;)

Another great comic, Giant!

[Ilaun_Undil]

well so much for trying to crakc the code, oh well I stink at it anyway. poor treasure, poor Elan not knowing how much Haley loves him. and Elan waited up all night with her too. soo cute. :)

[mastroyo]

Now THAT is wha I call a classic OoTS strip.

The last ones where funny, but plot-based. Or the development of it.

But this one is just GREAT!

(I hate to have read it so late at night: it's almost 3:00 AM here, so i'm back from a night out)

But hell, that is just what I get for living so far away.

AGAIN: GREAT COMIC!

[Duraska]

You guys are incredible!

Completely awesome! :)

[ADRegner]

I just found this comic a few days ago and after reading through the entire archive, fell in love with it. (That's saying something: on a 2.5 KB/S dial-up connection, I don't often get into things like this.)

Anyways, after reading though this thread I got inspired to make a simple little visual basic program to translate Haley's gibberish. I do that sometimes; I get really interested in a particular thing, and end up spending hours programming something related to it, just because I can.

You can download it from my server here. It is programmed in Visual Basic .NET, so you will need to have the Microsoft .NET framework installed to run it. If you don't have that you can download that from Microsoft here.

I'd appreciate any input anyone may have. If Rich does change the translation matrix, I can easily update it, once someone decrypts it. Also, if any other programmers out there are interested in the source code, let me know and i can send that to you.

Have fun. :)

[Eriol]

The comic went up just before I left for work. I fully expected Haley's speech to be decoded before I ever had time to try, but the Perl translator still surprised me. Too bad it's not in Python. ;)

Ask and ye shall recieve:

#!/usr/env python

# Thanks to JumpingBean for the keys array as the basis of the decrypt. I DID
# alter it to output an "e" instead of a "j" on a "b" input though. I made this
# on windows, though probably this should run just fine on unix

import string
import sys

def populate(crypt, decode, dict):
  for i in range(len(crypt)):
     dict[crypt[i]] = decode[i]
  return

source = "abcdefghieklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIEKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ"
keys =  "retypswqfbzdauikgnvmcjxlhoRETYPSWQFBZDAUIKGNVMCJXLHO"

# Make a dictionary to decode the text with
decoder = {}
populate(keys, source, decoder)

# make one to ENcode with as well for others
encoder = {}
populate(source, keys, encoder)

# Now read in the stream a line at a time
for line in sys.stdin.readlines():
  outstr = ""
  for character in line:
    try:
      # Access the correct keyed value
      outstr += decoder[character]
    except:
      # If the value isn't in the dictionary, check a few things, then just re-output it
      outstr += character
  # Output the reconstructed line
  sys.stdout.write(outstr) # Write instead of print so that the newlines are the same

Similar to JumpingBean's, except this one you'd pipe in the input and it would dump the output.

[Aerysil1]

I'll only say one thing about the most recent strip:

fjki.

EDIT: Actually that's gibberish. I didn't know you guys were actually going to translate the dang thing! How the heck did you figure out the decode pattern!!!?

[evileeyore]

I'll only say one thing about the most recent strip:

fjki.

EDIT: Actually that's gibberish. I didn't know you guys were actually going to translate the dang thing! How the heck did you figure out the decode pattern!!!?

It was a simple letter substitution code. Not that hard as the more Haley spoke, the greater the code base to work with. If Rich really wants to hurt us he needss to do a one-time pad for every seperate word bubble that Haley gets until she is 'cured' of the asphasia.

[Kizor]

Or at least one per strip. That'd be pretty nifty, but rather time-consuming for the Giant. It's fairly easy to get started - there's only so many letters that can follow a ', F is a single-letter word always capitalized, "Ui" a two-letter one usable in distress and separately.

[Kish]

And someone who knows that Haley always says "Sneak Attack!" when she sneak attacks has a very good start on what she says when she kicks Belkar.

It is interesting to note that Haley can still understand normal speech perfectly.

[Dark]

I don't think mnbrvcnp was a mistake. I think it was clever of the Giant to use two substitutions for some letters, since he wasn't using all of them anyway. That made it a bit harder to crack.

[JessmanCA]

Off topic, here's a really easy way to do letter substitution: just type one key to the right of the letter you were going to type.

upi [rp[;r jsbr ypp ,ivj yo,r pm upit jsmfd '_

[Penguin_King]

EDIT: Actually that's gibberish. I didn't know you guys were actually going to translate the dang thing! How the heck did you figure out the decode pattern!!!?

Presuming that the spaces and punctuation are left intact, substitution ciphers (that is, ciphers where one letter is swapped for another letter on a one-for-one basis) are pretty trivial - you can learn to crack them in your head, with a little practice. You just have to look at the "shapes" of the words. For example, if you see:

fnq

... repeated frequently in the ciphertext, you can be pretty sure it's "the". Now you have three letters solved, including the two most commonly-used letters in the English language: "e" and "t".

If spacing and punctuation have been removed, it's harder, but all single-letter substitution ciphers are vulnerable to a letter-frequency attack. Basically, you count up the symbols, and see which ones appear most frequently, then "try" those symbols using common letters in the English language, until something clicks. One such handy trick is that given a message of sufficient length, the most frequent symbol is virtually guaranteed to be "e" - though this can be defeated by a clever cipher-monkey who paraphrases the original message oddly to throw the letter frequencies out of whack.

Other tricks that don't depend on spacing and punctuation include double-letter analysis; there are only so many letters in the English language that frequently appear in pairs, even across word boundaries (like "oo", "ee", "tt", and so forth), so you can make some educated guesses about what a given symbol isn't in this fashion.

Back to the topic, tho'... ^^;

[Theo]

I'll only say one thing about the most recent strip:

fjki.

EDIT: Actually that's gibberish. I didn't know you guys were actually going to translate the dang thing! How the heck did you figure out the decode pattern!!!?

Actually? I started out with 'What? No!' and the rest pretty much followed from there. Considering what was going on, her expression, and that's what she/I'd say in that situation (given punctuation), it was a fairly safe guess.

That really was enough letters to get the rest. (That's why my partial cypher started there, then wrapped to the beginning).

[JumpingBean]

Ask and ye shall recieve:

Similar to JumpingBean's, except this one you'd pipe in the input and it would dump the output.

Thanks for the ref Eriol. Let's just hope that if this stuff is ever used again, Haley doesn't say "I just need some time alone with what's left of my gold." That "j" might cause issues.

Back to the regularly scheduled OotS...

[Elethiomel]

I loved solving the cryptogram on this strip! Please change the cypher for next time, and feel free to make it harder to crack. Punctuation and spacing makes for very easy entry into the cypher. Personally, I started with "it's", moved on to "to", from there to "don't", and then the rest went on autopilot. I did copy one word down incorrectly, but I only realised that after the entire thing was cracked. Also I thought it wsa good how there was multiple letters used for "e" -- this might be taken farther next time.

Assuming there is a next time, of course.

Also, Lilly, great to see your Kaylee-style avatar back. I missed it.

[Marller]

Hehe, i smell a sidequest for Haley. :)

Now a bit offtopic:

HaleyPerl - that one worked for me.
HaleyPython - i had to use !#/usr/bin/python (ver. 2.4.2) and got that error:
File "./haleypython", line 12
dict[crypt[i]] = decode[i]
^
IndentationError: expected an indented block
(please look at Dark's post below, if you get that error. Thanks Dark :))

HaleyVB# works with .net but not with Mono ;)

[Dark]

Hmm, the forum doesn't seem to show the whitespace in the python code properly, even though it's in a [code] block. Try hitting 'Quote' to see the raw text of the post, and then cutting and pasting from between the [code] tags.

[jw]

Well, we've had perl, python, vb - I suppose an obfuscated c version was inevitable eventually.

hayley.c
-----------------------------------------------
#include <stdio.h>
main(){long l[]={135398156,285869053,201657350,-183827449,-269225993,-983559,61931,0},a,z;while(a=getchar
())putchar((z=26,a<'a'||a>'z'&#124 ;|(z=a-'a'),z!=26||a<'A'||a>'Z' ||(z=a-'A'),a+*(z+(char *)l)));return 0;}
------------------------------------------------------

So don't blame me - if I hadn't done it then someone else would have...

--
jw.

[TarSheva]

I started off with "Rdd is fm, wiup!" Knowing that there are so few 3-letter words ending with double-letters in common useage I was left with 'E' 'S' and 'L' to choose. Once I figured that phrase out I had 4 vowels (AEIO) and 5 constenants (LFTGN).

Thanks Rick. Great job. (as usual)

[Eriol]

Hehe, i smell a sidequest for Haley. :)

Now a bit offtopic:

HaleyPerl - that one worked for me.
HaleyPython - i had to use !#/usr/bin/python (ver. 2.4.2) and got that error:
File "./haleypython", line 12
dict[crypt[i]] = decode[i]
^
IndentationError: expected an indented block
(please look at Dark's post below, if you get that error. Thanks Dark :))

HaleyVB# works with .net but not with Mono ;)

Ya sorry about that. The forum is throwing off the indentaion, but as Dark said below, just "quote" my post and you'll be able to copy-n-paste it raw (hopefully).

Or just figure out the indentations. Pretty obvious usually. ;)

[thatwolfguy]

i'm actually a whiz at letter substitution codes (aka cryptograms) and i didn't even think to try that. i'm slightly dissapointed that it was a cryptogram, i guess i was hoping it was a completely un-crackable random substitution but i guess i'm also glad to know what she was saying. now i'm just dissapointed that i didn't think to try to solve it because i probably would have gotten it pretty quickly too.

[Archonic Energy]

i looked at it. and thought "that's odd she repeats a word, so it can't be random..." then i jumped over to the forum to share my thoughts only to find it's already been translated ! thanks Guys/Gals i would have had to do it myself!

[Lucky2]

If he wanted it hard...

Remove all spaces and puncuation. At every 5th vowel, switch substition...Group the words into groups of four. That'd keep people busy.

[Chaos]

If he wanted it hard...

Remove all spaces and puncuation. At every 5th vowel, switch substition...Group the words into groups of four. That'd keep people busy.

Switch substitution according to a pre-determined rhythm - like 4/4/6/6 (first, four letters in each substitution, then 6 each, then four each again).

Use three or more substitutions.

Group letters into random groups.

(Boy, am I nasty tonight... ;))

[Penguin_King]

Group letters into random groups.

Better yet, group letter according to a defined pattern, then pad all the groups to the same length with gibberish.

F'rex, group 3/4/3/4..., then pad to 5.

Somjr ethit nglop iketz hisiu.

[Nightfall]

Note to Rich about using codes in future comics: take a page from "Windtalkers" and use another language no one knows. ;) Too many people here have too much time on their hands (myself included!). Add to our frustration by cryptogramming Latin, Classical Greek, or something like Chaucer's Middle English. Now THAT was hard to read back in college! ;D

[Duskrider_Moogle]

Note to Rich about using codes in future comics: please don't do what some people are suggesting and make OotS something that, if syndicated, would be in the puzzle section of newspapers and not the comics.

Kthx.

Also, awesome.