Cipher Clock

[Elhuracan]

Think carefully, it is not as hard as it looks and you definitely don’t need to make a program or 3d print a copy often machine. When you find the algorithm, you can easily do it by hand.

[Teymour_aldridge]

Some absolute genius on my part here – my program kept crashing.
Apparently I forgot to feed it the ciphertext.

[I know I should have favourites, but I think this is close to the best Forum post this year! Harry]

[Leo_yates]

My brain has been put through hell and back already for this challenge but that doesn’t mean I’m stopping yet

to those of you that have solved it did you do it algorithmically or through cribs because neither of those approaches seems to be getting me anywhere.

[Good on you, keep working at it. We will publish an update to the Technical report in the next few days and that should help, but we want to give you all time to work on it without too much help. Harry]

[Awilliams]

I think I have the first two words [Edited by Harry], but I cannot work out if this is correct (It seems too much of a coincidence to not be) and I cannot work out a 3rd/4th word that fits

[Keep going, Harry]

[Madness]

@Jbintcrypt and @Code_cracking and @Everyone_else, the spyclist device is *similar to* but not the same as the Wheatstone device.
The research report entitled “The Spyclist Cipher Clock” is the one that describes the device used to create the ciphertext
(even though the report uses asterisk instead of hashsign).

The description of the Wheatstone device is some historical background, I guess.

[Teymour_aldridge]

A red herring?

[No Soviet fish were harmed in the making of this challenge. Harry]

[Iamdaboss1977]

My brain hurts. (._.)

[Teymour_aldridge]

I would also like to raise a moral objection to Harry’s actions. Keeping those poor souls trapped in the basement is a flagrant abuse of power and labour law violation.

[Which poor souls? Harry]

[Teymour_aldridge]

“p.s. Please send food and water. We are suffering here in the dark and dank sub-sub-basement. Have some human pity on us.”

[Tommystorm]

I’m still thinking about those crossed out words in “TECHNICAL REPORT 1937-213 – The preliminary report on the spyclist cipher clock”.
Part of the key, or a red herring?

[Inside joke, sorry. Harry]

[Xantali]

Agh nooo! I was reading wayy too much into those crossed out letters of “Devcie six, dis tr outer”. Like I was tryna make it an anagram haha. Oh well, at least I know now. Hope the inside joke was worth it, Harry… (I’m joking – my fault for falling for the red herring)

[Well it is worth it now! Harry]

[Teymour_aldridge]

I’m learning more about combinatorial optimisation problems than I ever thought I would – it’s brilliant!

[Artyferny]

I was kicking myself last night not being able to decode it after kung fu (9) and before 11…. now I’ve just been kicking myself the entire day! How is this even possible to decode without the key?!

[Xmask]

#52599 “I know I should have favourites…” ?

[Xmask]

have had quite a bit of trouble getting excel to decode, given a key, for some reason vlookup doesn’t like #. It successfully works for encoding however, which was nice. There was a stint where i tried decoding using the encoder and realised my plaintext shouldn’t have ‘+’s in.

[Author]

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