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Have you heard about Cicada 3301? If you like mysteries, if you're into cryptography - you likely have. It's a long story, which is hard to describe, but basically it's an interet puzzle devised by a secret organization (unconfirmed) in order to find "highly intellectual individuals".
The first puzzle was pretty famous. It originated on that notorious anonymous board - 4chan - and after a certain time it was solved. After a some time, the second one was devised - and solved too.
The purpose of this gemlog isn't to recite the history and the essence of the puzzles - it's been done before me numerous times. Maybe I'll make some account of it later though.
For some initial information, Wikipedia is a good-enough source (here I link to a distraction-free rendition of the article, as provided by Marginalia's encyclopedia mirror):
The purpose of this gemlog, instead, is to let you know that the third puzzle was not solved yet (at least, it is not publicly known to be solved). Started in 2014, considerable progress was made on solving it, until sometime in 2016 everyone got stuck. The effort to solve it continues to this day.
If you're like me - you probably thought it was long solved. I'm on vacation now, and I was willing to find some ARG (alternative reality game) to solve. My idea was "to find something like Cicada, but unsolved". Little did I know that Cicada itself is unsolved! Once I found it out, I was hooked.
The current stage of the puzzle is a 55-page document written in encrypted runic script.
It's not just English text written in runes, nor is it text in any known language transcribed in runes.
It's not some text written backwards, shifted by some value (Caesar's cipher), or by some word key (Vigenere cipher) transcribed in runes.
Those possibilities were almost ruled out by the solvers community. It's something way more difficult, intriguing and challenging. It has to do with prime numbers.
I've spent last week trying to do things. I found a lot of beautiful things about it, but of course, I was not able to solve it yet. For now, I'm taking a rest to concentrate on other things (such as Gemini). But by no means am I done!
If, like me, you love ciphers and mysteries - maybe it's your turn to try? What if you could unveil the secrets of Cicada?
Here are some links for the curious. (All HTTP)
An introductory podcast about Cicada
One of the Reddit communities related to the puzzle
272 138 341 131 151 366 199 130 320 18 226 245 91 245 226 18 320 130 199 366 151 131 341 138 272
Good luck. Enlightenment awaits.