Cracking the Adventure Time Cipher (2016) | Hacker News Reader

Cracking the Adventure Time Cipher (2016)

aaronrandall.com

206 pointstodsacerdoti28 comments

Once you have an ASCII transcription of the text (pigpen or not), you can drop it in a substitution cipher solver like https://www.guballa.de/substitution-solver .

In this case, the solver was able to immediately decrypt both ciphertexts, with a single mistake in the characters name ("Margeline").

It also makes a mistake saying 'Hey buys' instead of 'Hey guys'. Interestingly, https://www.quipqiup.com/ makes the same mistake.

Good catch. Weighting by common n-grams would probably fix this, at the cost of a much larger database.

I'm betting the words were ordered alphabetically?

I'm too lazy to look at the JS, do you happen to know what algorithm those tools use? Is it just naive maximum likelihood or something more interesting?

The one I linked uses no Javascript! It POSTs to an endpoint that returns the HTML of the page with the results.

Now I feel bad for sending extra traffic to them.

The writer of the comic in the article, Ryan North, also wrote The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl which is full of nerdy computer science puns. And many science-based solutions to problems our heroes encounter.

I highly recommend this series. You can read it on Marvel Unlimited, which has a free trial. I suggest reading on a tablet.

He's also the author of the incredibly long-running webcomic Dinosaur Comics.

https://www.qwantz.com/

He also got stuck in a hole once:

https://www.polygon.com/2015/8/18/9173621/ryan-north-stuck-h...

I remember following this twitter thread (North is a very worthwhile follow) as it happened and it was a real delight.

Holy smokes! I never read the comic that much, but I did read a book of short stories based around an idea from one of his comics: The Machine of Death. Highly recommended, it's rather good.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_of_Death

He studied Computational Linguistics, so the cipher figures.

I’m going to watch wizard city this weekend with my four year old, during the pandemic we watched the whole series together. It’s amazing that we can both love the same show, and it’s given him a freaky sense of humor.

The series finale never fails to make me cry like a baby. I love it so much.

The Simon & Marcy episode is one of the saddest episodes of television, I cannot be convinced otherwise, and it may have ruined the Cheers theme song forever for me. Arguably my favorite TV series ever.

Mathematical!

Adventure Time is funny because you have lighthearted stuff like "Mathematical!" or "Oh my Glob!" and then you have "fighting the physical manifestation of death, but the 'apocalyptic heat death' kind, not the 'grim reaper' kind, who also exists"

I'd suggest trying some sort of heuristic search (e.g. hill climbing, simulated annealing) with a quadgram-statistics-based fitness function to score the English-ness of each iteration. http://practicalcryptography.com/cryptanalysis/text-characte...

Adventure Time is an insanely excellent cartoon.

Felt like reading Poe’s “The Gold Bug” all over again. Or Conan Doyle’s “The Dancing Men,” which is a blatant rip-off of Poe.

The Artemis Fowl books did this too, though somewhat later.

Fun fact: Russian translation of Dancing men is legitimately solvable, with messages being _in Russian_! The translators had to butcher the characters' names and twist the deduction logic here and there — but it's still a marvel of localization work (especially given the languages, grammar and even alphabets being very different).

Can it be found online? If not, can you provide the translator’s name?

This was a weird ass show

What the dongbongles! No it wasn't!

I find this claim true with people who have never played Dungeons and Dragons which is clearly the inspiration for the show.

It was, and that helped make it so great.

I’ve never seen an ass-show that wasn’t weird.

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