Crack it.

[Riven]

  

      

[ra4king]

Quite easy, took me about 15 minutes. However drawing this image in Paint.NET took 30 minutes!

There actually 2 answers to this:

[lhkbob]

I don't think its just a sudoku puzzle.

Games published by our own members! Check 'em out!

[ReBirth]

What's wrong with that hex numbers, cross and bow?

[namrog84]

asdasd ar

arghh
if you follow the hex around the outside following the arrow

"0D61F 0CA D1D F80 B84D E"

However, if you then insert the numbers that are in the soduku puzzle solution you end up with
0D61F 837 0CA D1D 412 F80 B84D 143 E 1257

16 total groups:
0D 61 F8 37 0C AD 1D 41 2F 80 B8 4D 14 3E 12 57


Which I haven't been able to convert to anything
The + and bow must mean something

I wonder if its then encrypted somehow, and maybe "bow" is the keyword


On the site that this image is posted
I found this screenshot of cas
http://indiespot.net/files/published/jgo-profile-post-highlight.png
Which clearly means we must use this puzzle and a bow to kill java applets!

If that plus , were to be called a cross
We could say
Crossbow

[philfrei]

If it were a straight-up cypher, there would be some duplicate "letters" but all the hex pairings are unique.
 
If it were another common form of encryption, wouldn't the number of chars be a multiple of 5?
 
Yes, very likely Hex, unless that is a really devious red herring.
 
It seems to me the presence of "0" characters indicates something structurally. 0 is a placeholder. So the string of chars (derived via using the combo of written and suduko) make use of placeholding, somehow?
 
Unfortunately I don't know anything about encryption except that there is a tree branching algorithm used in it, and I lent out the book I had that discussed it.
 
One encryption method typical of Java is "serialization". Can this string be deserialized?
 
One more observation: this is not a 'real' Sudoku. Commercial Sudokus are always have some symmetry, do they not? And they don't have multiple solutions. So I'm guessing the puzzle creator made a Sudoku with the numbers on the arrow path as the starting point, and either didn't test it with a software sudoku puzzle-maker or didn't care that the puzzle is "defective". (Or the defects are a really really devious clue.)
 

[Riven]

Don't make it too hard for yourselves. The puzzle is very doable.

[ra4king]

O_O There is more to this? I don't even know where to begin. namrog84 has stated everything I could think of.
A hint maybe?

[Riven]

A hint maybe?

The answer is not what it seems.

[ra4king]

A hint maybe?

The answer is not what it seems.

Nahh doesn't help.

Games published by our own members! Check 'em out!

[Riven]

The topic title gives two hints about the sudoku part.

[ra4king]

I already cracked the sudoku part, the letters and numbers don't seem to mean anything, and if your earlier hint is to be applied, we shouldn't be thinking of them as hex, but as.............idk :S

[namrog84]

"Crack it"

somehow represents 2 hints about the sudoku part


additional things Ive noticed

look at where the curved arrow line goes through.
on the other locations it all goes through a corner of each block but on the far left side its slightly off centered



Which when you take into account the earlier
0D 61 F8 37 0C AD 1D 41 2F 80 B8 4D 14 3E 12 57
If you were to move that line over to be symmetrical wit hothers
you should substitute out 1257 with 873
0D61F 837 0CA D1D 412 F80 B84D 143 E 873

[Mike]

Or it was just too hard to get a sudoku with the correct numbers in all places

It can't be that the groups of two are to be converted to letters (at least not in their current state as some start with an F and some with a 0). Backwards doesn't really give anything either. It might be that you only are to take the first and last number of the intersections of the sudoku, but that will still not solve the issue with the 0's.

Conclusions: It's either not hex letters that we can translate straight away to letters, or we need to do something with the letters/numbers first (+1 to represent the + or +D as the bow looks like a D?).

Another option is that we need to add some of the signs together (adding all together one by one gives "CD", maybe only the ones in the sudoku? only the free standing ones? Add them as groups of two (gives 523)?)

Either way it's probably easier than that seeing as Riven said that we were thinking too complex

Mike

[princec]

The only thing I'm clever enough to guess at is the reference to "cross bow".

Cas

[pitbuller]

Maybe this is the evil punisment becouse of that story thread.
Unsolvable mystery.

[Riven]

It's just hex.

[namrog84]

It's just hex.

So far this is what we got.

0D61F 837 0CA D1D 412 F80 B84D 143 E 1257  (my vote)
or
0D61F 837 0CA D1D 412 F80 B84D 143 E 873  (probably grabbing at straws useless)
or
0D61F 0CA D1D F80 B84D E  (Concrete given, 100%)


Maybe we have to add together some of the soduku numbers to form better hex that can be converted to text


My other assumption:
The final answer will be text,  probably the last thing will be a hex conversion. But only after we figure how to properly construct the hex sequence.

[kevglass]

Interesting that hex string is the MD5 hash of "C"

Kev

[theagentd]

Interesting that hex string is the MD5 hash of "C"

Kev

WHY DO YOU KNOW THAT?!

EDIT:

0D:61:F8:37:0C:AD:1D:41:2F:80:B8:4D:14:3E:12:57

is with decimal numbers

13 97 248 55 12 173 29 65 47 128 184 77 20 62 18 87

which when entered using ALT-numbers yields

♪a°7♀¡↔A/Ç©M>↕W

Awesum. Not really helping though. xD

[namrog84]

http://home2.paulschou.net/tools/xlate/

a little easier than the manual method...

[theagentd]

http://home2.paulschou.net/tools/xlate/

a little easier than the manual method...

I used that, just explaining the reasoning...


Hints so far (not using quotes for readability):

"0D61F8370CAD1D412F80B84D143E1257" or "0D:61:F8:37:0C:AD:1D:41:2F:80:B8:4D:14:3E:12:57" - THE CODE
"The topic title gives two hints about the sudoku part." - Probably an important hint...
"It's just hex. " - I think that indicates that we're on the right track with the above hex string...
"The answer is not what it seems." - Not really helping...
"Don't make it too hard for yourselves." - It shouldn't be too far-fetched I suppose.
The bow and the plus/cross. - Crossbow...

Also, I'm kinda assuming this whole riddle is somehow connected with Java. It's the Java-gaming forum, right?

[Mike]

Interesting that hex string is the MD5 hash of "C"

Kev

True, http://md5.gromweb.com/query/0d61f8370cad1d412f80b84d143e1257
So if + is the operation and we need to add c to bow, we get cbow (short for crossbow? )

Mike

[Riven]

     

[Eli Delventhal]

Phonics?

Which means correlating sounds with meaning. So maybe it's one of those things that if you read quickly sounds like something else, like in the game Mad Gab.

So, the answer is "placebo"

[Riven]

Phonics?

Obviously it was "phone" + "ethics" => "phonetics"

So, the answer is "placebo"

Correct.

[Eli Delventhal]

Phonics?

Obviously it was "phone" + "ethics" => "phonetics"

So, the answer is "placebo"

Correct.

Meh, same root word, I got the meaning. Also it's funny that you were using phonetics to get people to guess phonetics. I could see a lot of people saying "phone ethics, huh?"

Hooray for the right answer.

[Riven]

The best part of this puzzle was writing the sudoku generator that calculated the grid.

[ReBirth]

I dont understand at all

[ra4king]

I'm clueless about how any of this relates to the original picture.