what

Thanks for the walkthrough, Farah. Did anyone get past the Bacon cipher? I must have transcribed wrong (red=A, blue=B, and using the classic cipher where I=J and U=V) because the Bacon cipher was giving me a lot of unmapped characters. It seems like Math Wolf was also not getting the right answer from his post earlier.

Aura Guardian got past the Bacon Cipher and found 'with caesar'. He then told me some nasties and didn't solve the step beyond that. I'll have to look up which Baconian alphabet I used, but you can actually deduce it by assuming you get no unmapped characters.

I will resist looking at the answer, until I solve it.

RIP never heard of a Bacon cipher couldn't even get past the first bit :(

Very nice puzzle though

Same.

I thought the hint refers to https://mrbacongcseenglish.wordpress.com/resources/poetry-anthology/the-charge-of-the-light-brigade-tennyson/

^^

Wow farah, you told me I was "almost there". Screw you.

Edited 2020-07-15 15:30:50

What are you studying, Aura Guardian? I studied computer science however I have never heard anything about a Bacon cipher there. IMO it would be nicer if you could also solve this riddle without having some special mathematical background.

The Bacon cipher has nothing to do with mathematics. The first person to solve this riddle was a psychology student

The Bacon cipher you can learn about by just googling "Bacon A's B's" (at least that's how I did it). And the cipher is simple enough (each letter maps to a binary sequence, e.g., AAAAB/00001 = B) to understand without even the slightest background.

I think the only special background that gives you an advantage would be familiarity with puzzles. E.g., giving away the name of the cipher in a riddle at the top is a puzzling norm that might not be obvious to someone not already acquainted with puzzling. Fwiw, I only thought to look more closely at the poem at the top after getting through Farah's easier puzzle on Discord where Farah's poem gives away the less obvious step of solving the puzzle. I think this is also a common practice on Puzzling StackExchange.

Edited 2020-07-15 18:54:27

it is as knyte says, puzzle solving is more about learning how to solve puzzles than anything else. Usually they drops hints in the title about what to do, and give hints along the way to finish it. It is about how you interpret the clues to get the answer.

I am an atmospheric science grad student.

Edited 2020-07-15 22:09:23

So you study the psychology of clouds. Sounds close enough.