Hundreds

Hundreds is a neat new game for iOS where you touch floating circles in an effort to bring their total up to 100. throughout the gameplay, random messages will appear on the screen. These messages are riddles and cyphers which you're expected to solve for the prize of achievements in Game Center. The first one is the only one that's immediately readable: "A mouse has one snout but a hand has five". After touching the screen with 5 fingers, the first riddle was solved. Easy enough. The rest of them, however, aren't even readable.

The second riddle mixed up the letters in each word, so each word had to be unscrambled. There were a few 9 letter words which took a while, but it was eventually solved. "Persistence without patience is a golden harp missing its chord". So these are probably going to require a bit of patience from here on out.

The third riddle (the furthest I've gotten so far) looked like a cypher. Letters looked grouped together alright, but the proper letters were not contained in each word. Being the programmer that I am, I set off  writing a script to help me.

I started off with two arrays of letters; one for the keys and one for the values. As I made a guess at a letter key pair, I would remove them from their respective lists, and then randomize the rest of the pairings every second, printing the potential sentence to the screen.

As you can see, this wasn't going anywhere very fast. But, subbing x for a, o for r, and l for o got me the first four words. Slowly over time, I kept making letter substitutions that seemed logical. The script started to become quite useful in seeing the currently deciphered letters, and possibilities for other letters. Eventually, I reached the end:

No idea what it means, but it works. Only when I went to input the letters into the game did I realize that the cypher was simply the current letter plus 3. So the script was kind of overkill. But it worked!

Below is the next riddle. I will make another post when I solve that one, but it might take me a bit longer...

Here's the ruby script I wrote quickly. Feel free to use it to make or break cyphers.


file = File.new("cypher.txt", "r")
cypher = file.gets
file.close

$key = {}

def randomizeKey()
  keyLetters = ["d","g","h","n","s","t""v","w","y"]
  letters = ["b","j","g","k","q","v","w","y","z"]
 
  $key["x"] = "a"
  $key["k"] = "n"
  $key["q"] = "t"
  $key["e"] = "h"
  $key["b"] = "e"
  $key["o"] = "r"
  $key["l"] = "o"
  $key["f"] = "i"
  $key["c"] = "f"
  $key["r"] = "u"
  $key["z"] = "c"
  $key["m"] = "p"
  $key["p"] = "s"
  $key["i"] = "l"
  $key["j"] = "m"
  $key["u"] = "x"
  $key["a"] = "d"
  $key[""] = ""
 
  while(letters.length > 0)
    keyIndex = rand(keyLetters.length)
    valueIndex = rand(letters.length)
    keyLetter = keyLetters[keyIndex]
    valueLetter = letters[valueIndex]

    $key[keyLetter] = valueLetter

    keyLetters.delete_at(keyIndex)
    letters.delete_at(valueIndex)
  end

end

randomizeKey()

while
  string = ""
  cypher.each_byte { |i|
    if(i.chr == " ")
      string = string + " "
    else
      string = string + $key[i.chr]
    end
  }
  puts string
  randomizeKey()
  sleep(1)
end