Sunday, June 28, 2009

To Be Or Not To Be


Explanation coming soon...

5 comments:

Derek said...

I probably haven't mentioned to you that I'm teaching a course on cryptography this summer. (It's a history + math course for our Master's in Liberal Arts & Science program.) I'm sure the last five weeks of making and breaking ciphers for this course probably helped me figure out this image a little faster!

Brad Pfranger said...

This seems to be the paths in which letters are formed in a particular text. Is this correct?

Brad Pfranger said...

Correction: This seems to be the particular path letters are assembled to form words and therefore a text. Is that correct?

Anonymous said...

It is titled “to be or not to be” I would expect that is has something to do with the quote from Shakespeare’s Hamlet. It appears to be a letter to letter combinations with the arrow representing directions to the next letter.

I believe it is the entire Soliloquy in Hamlet. There is only two words that start with Q so it would make sense that the representation from the words before end with e and s and them move to q. The Q then moves to the letter U. Another letter to look at is Z. Z comes from U, repeats and goes to L. Word is puzzles.

J and V are not used in the picture and are not in the Soliloquy.

Paul

Anonymous said...

Awesome Paul! I hadn’t had the opportunity to look up the Shakespeare reference since I am here at work but that is exactly what I was thinking. YOU ROCK!! I send you big KUDOS


Here is what I initially suggested:

I like the star wars reference! I definitely saw the boy’s toys when I initially looked at the puzzle.

Hmm… The alphabet key struck me because there are two letters missing (j and x) which leads to think that it probably a message and the arrows going to and from letters deal with some of the frequency used and potential next letters in the message (cipher or plain, I am not sure) (ie two arrows go into q but only one leaves). If that was the case, then maybe the circles represent double letters? Any other thoughts?

Crystal