Series A -- Let's Talk

[Maximus]

MotherEarth,

Are you looking for help with a riddle involving falling snow?  I wasn't sure I understood your post.  I'd like to help.

[MotherEarth]

The riddle is:
Two are now many,
Many are now few,
Snow is falling.

Will accept hints, gratefully! 

Three stars, Maxi...atta boy!

[MotherEarth]

Since Udo came back..finished up the "A" group!

What a good guy he is 

[MotherEarth]

Any one with ideas of whether the enigma is a straight substitution or not?

[Josh]

I highly doubt it. All 26 letters are used, and no discernable patterns are present. So I threw that possibility out pretty early on. But who knows. Maybe I have just missed something simple...after all, the one I did manage to solve was not nearly so hard as the other two seem to be.

[MotherEarth]

Any ideas here?  Newcomers, there is a great opportunity for you to solve the riddles and
join us in mulling over what may be possible!

[daveh]

Any one with ideas of whether the enigma is a straight substitution or not?

I concur with Josh; the frequencies seem wrong for anything like that.
I'm focused on Vigenere ciphers right now.  Once I run out of keys to try; I'll go to another cipher.
What have you guys tried so far?

Also, I'm still missing one riddle...any hints for:
Many a lady in the land
Has grasp'd me in her lily hand;
I'm sometimes made a little bright,
And often us'd to make more light.

[Maximus]

I think I got this one, but it's not coming to mind.  Let me check my notes and get back to you.

[Josh]

Yeah, that one took me awhile too. Here's a hint...when it's used to make more light, it doesn't transfer light, like a match. Instead, it...hmm, is used to increase light in something else. Don't want to give too much away, but yeah. If you need more of a hint, just let me know.

By the way, I think I've tried every possible angle on the Vigenere possibility myself. I managed to find a couple programs that can break apart pretty much any Vigenere cipher without too much trouble, but don't have any luck with the A code. This convinces me that it at least is not periodic, if it is Vigenere. It could be one of the more complicated ciphers like a running key or autokey Vigenere that don't have periodicity, but I'm pretty sure it has to be a polyalphabetic cipher of some kind. It's incredibly frustrating to have the entire thing, the solution a mere code word away, yet not be able to crack it. Hope you have more luck than I've had so far.

[daveh]

Thanks for the hint!
I swear I had tried that answer before, but maybe I made a typo or something.

I am trying the autokey Vigeneres too, but so far, no luck.

If I don't get anything in the next day or two, I'll switch to another cipher.

Out of curiosity, what tool are you using?
I wrote mine myself, so it has some limitations...

[Josh]

It's called Inforenz, and it's helped to crack pretty much any other standard Vigenere I could find. It shows intervals betweens letters very nicely, just a basic graphic that lets you visually see what spacing is most likely the period. Believe it or not I actually tried that by hand before I found this program. But anyway after guessing at the period it then lets you guess each letter of the key word, and shows which letter is most probable by comparing how much it would look like standard English text. As far as I can figure anyway. And this is for keywords up to 20 letters, so anything more than that and you're basically almost working with an autokey, since there are only 150 letters in the code. But who knows, maybe I missed something simple.

Glad the hint helped! I know what you mean, half the answers to the riddles I was sure I had tried before, in some form or another. They're very picky about the exact answer most of the time.