UNKNOWN ARTIFACT: Signal Fomat Decrypted?
- Thread starter jspoto
- Start date
https://m.soundcloud.com/ben-ockmore/elite-dangerous-genuine-unknown-artefact-200-speed
This links to the audio sped up to 200x, how did people figure out it needed speeding up, how did they realise it was a binary message?
Do all ED players need a working knowledge of binary to be able to take part in the game story?
Is this fair to the average player?
Has anyone seen first encounters of the third kind, have you tried playing it as music?
I see it could go both ways.
1. Every player can work it out. This is "fair". It also means it gets discovered on day one, added to every wiki and becomes common knowledge.
2. Astronomy exists because of extraordinary minds. And this game exists because of astronomy. It would be fitting that the biggest secret of the game demand advanced individuals to discover it. It takes a lot longer to find and becomes meaningful.
Not that I think all these theories are correct (and they may be a waste of time or over thinking it). But if they enjoy it, it's good.
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I really hope you meant "astronomy" there.
First off, this problem doesnt exist for everyone of all abilities. There is nothing wrong with a game having a 0.2% element of the game content reserved for individuals who actually bother trying to solve something. The other 99.8% of the game content is there for "everyone else" to play with, isnt that enough?
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I really wish this was a case of Stargate Atlantis, where this is a real world intercepted transmission that they plugged into a computer game just to see the power of the internet pewpew spaceship fans ability to collectively work together to solve a problem.
Now, alien transmission or not, the problem solving part has actually been done before.
Certain intelligence agencies have in fact placed difficult problems on the internet to see if anyone would be able to figure it out, and the individuals who did figure it out were subsequently contacted by said intelligence groups and offered a position working for them. Sounds ridiculous, but actually happened.
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Granted im pretty sure this isnt one of those instances, but my point is. It is always a good idea (and good for the mind exercise) to stay interested and engage in such problem solving. It makes life more interesting, and sure as hell makes a game more interesting when it has more substance to it than just "PEWPEW I R PIRATE LUL U DEAD".
I applaud Frontier for having the mature and intelligent balls enough to NOT treat all gamers of their product as just drooling idiots. They flatter us by introducing such a problem to be solved.
And frankly, I think the intelligent people out there amongst you are definetly more than capable of figuring it out, no matter how difficult it was to create said problem.
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Godspeed.
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Edit: FOR GODS SAKE FRONTIER, can you PLEASE fix the forums so line breaks WORK? Why must everything become a solid wall of text? It is 2015, we could accomplish line breaks in windows 95 notepad.
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Astrology? You might want to check your definitions.
I agree though. If there's stuff hidden out in space, why not have puzzles to find out where it is?
The game could use some mystery. It's science fiction after all.
I think they know the average game does not do anything apart from wait for the speed games to crack the code and post the results.
Win Win
Win Win
Oops, good spot. I'll edit that. Need that first morning coffee
Of course I meant astronomy.
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Yeh
Combination of bad phone auto correct and lack of coffee at 7am. Edited.
I don't think the galaxies leading astrologers would solve this puzzle. But hey, who knows? Maybe in an expansion.
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According to https://mothereff.in/binary-ascii, if we have an ASCII code, it can be translated to "5$KfRV36".
Not very meaningful... Hey! It includes 36!
Not very meaningful... Hey! It includes 36!
Have you tried anything other than English? Korean (which is a highly mathematical written language) or Chinese for example? (since you mentioned special characters and seemingly garbage data, if it wasnt encoded into romanic characters, it may make more sense)
Goose4291
Banned
I read this and all I think is: DON'T GO TO GREEN MOUNTAIN.
http://forums.dayzgame.com/index.php?/topic/62330-the-myth-of-green-mountain/
http://forums.dayzgame.com/index.php?/topic/62330-the-myth-of-green-mountain/
From what I can gather without being able to access any of the links posted here while I'm at work, it's an audio message. What would it mean if it's translated from Morse Code?
from not knowing to much about all this stuff i have to say, that it would be make much more sense if you would actually have byte values there (8 bits).
If you change your format you get:
01110010
00110101
01001001
00101111
00110101
00101010
11000110
01011001
10110110
which does not tell me anything, its: r5I/5*�Y� in ascii.
If you change your format you get:
01110010
00110101
01001001
00101111
00110101
00101010
11000110
01011001
10110110
which does not tell me anything, its: r5I/5*�Y� in ascii.
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digitalscream
Banned
For what it's worth, I definitely think there's something here - in an environment like the Elite: Dangerous galaxy, problems don't have to be solvable by everybody (and it's not, primarily, a puzzle game). The solution is most likely going to be a trigger point for whatever comes next in the story...however, they're concentrating on Power Play at the moment. If we do solve it, and it points to one of the inaccessible areas of the map, then I'd imagine that we'll see a scientific expedition mentioned in Galnet.
If anybody's read the Commonwealth Saga by Peter F Hamilton, I'm expecting the expedition to go much like the first visit to the Dyson pair...
If anybody's read the Commonwealth Saga by Peter F Hamilton, I'm expecting the expedition to go much like the first visit to the Dyson pair...
Wow OP, i just woke up and checked the forums and saw your post, ..... reaches for more coffee.
Ok so i start with a number and reverse it, then i .......... ok ya got me, not a clue to what it means, i think maybe folks are just over thinking this, and it's probably just a prelude to a bigger story that might be coming.
If it is something amazing, then hey, i'll be opening a bottle and not drinking coffee, but i don't think so yet.
Ok so i start with a number and reverse it, then i .......... ok ya got me, not a clue to what it means, i think maybe folks are just over thinking this, and it's probably just a prelude to a bigger story that might be coming.
If it is something amazing, then hey, i'll be opening a bottle and not drinking coffee, but i don't think so yet.
digitalscream
Banned
Aye - I killed her a couple of times in a Sidey and once in a Cobra. Saw Nigel Sheldon once too, but no sign of Ozzie yet...
Some things to note when trying to decipher this thing:
The most likely output of a short message like this is a set of numbers, such as a set of coordinates. Looking for a header in the data is sensible but may be unnecessary if the format is not variable in length.
- Binary is a good "universal" numerical representation. Base 10 is not (it's arbitrary based on the number of digits on our hands).
- Reversing the digits is an arbitrary step, and would only serve to obfuscate the information. Reversing the binary, however, is entirely sensible as there is no universal convention as to whether binary should be transmitted LSB or MSB first.
- ASCII would only be used if the object is human in origin, and the likelihood is that by 3300, ASCII would have been ditched anyway.
- Ditto something like morse code. Morse code is a binary encoding scheme which bases the length of information per character on the frequency that character occurs in the English language. See Huffman coding. This could be such a scheme, but you effectively need a dictionary to be able to decode it, so it's unlikely.
- 8-bit bytes are also a human convention that we came up with for convenience. A byte doesn't have to be 8 bits in length. There may even be some sort of variable length encoding going on.
The most likely output of a short message like this is a set of numbers, such as a set of coordinates. Looking for a header in the data is sensible but may be unnecessary if the format is not variable in length.
digitalscream
Banned
While those things are true...as I said previously, if it's a direct communication attempt then any aliens within 1350 light years would almost certainly have received transmissions based on the EM signals blasted out by Earth from the mid-20th century onwards; that puts Morse and ASCII (or other encodings) back on the table.
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