Traveling Thoughts

My sister calls me from Vegas yesterday morning and tells me about this shirt that her husband got from this conference thing he’s at and that there’s a code on the back of it and how if he can decrypt it he’ll be entered for a chance to win a laptop.  She then proceeds to ask me if I’ll decrypt it and starts reading it off to me. *I rolled my eyes*  It was a bunch of numbers raised to some power.

I typed it all into word and made it all look pretty:

2¹8²8¹6³3¹3²7⁴5²

7⁴8²2²7⁴2³7³4³7¹8¹4³6³6²

2³8²7⁴8¹6³6¹3²7³7⁴ [space] 2¹7³3²

2¹4¹3²6²8¹7⁴ [space] 6³3³ [space] 2³4²2¹6²4¹3²

I hung up with her and took a look at the code, I had no primer or anything and so when I started to try to apply mathematical equations to it to get a letter I couldn’t.  I really had no clues other than the front of the shirt saying Autodesk Subscriber, and the back of the shirt saying “Get A Clue”…yes, I needed a clue alright.

After an hour or so of my mathematical equations, I decided to look at the encryption like a cryptogram but with numbers instead of the letters.  I looked at my two and three letter words to see what they could possibly be.  My first thoughts for the three letter word were “the” and  “and” it was neither of them, but I did get going in the right direction with both of them.  E is the most commonly used letter in the alphabet but I couldn’t think of a three letter word that started with E so I decided that my most common letter was A and my second most common was E and that made my three letter word start with an A and end with an E so it became ARE.  My first word began with an A and had an E in it and my second word had an R in it so I decided to do some counting of the letters, the first word had the same number of letters as AUTODESK and had the A and the E in the proper place so I decided that word 1 was AUTODESK, in the same fashion I compared the number of letters in word two to SUBSCRIPTION, and low and behold, the R was in the proper place.  It was fairly easy to figure things out from there and what I came up with was:

Autodesk Subscription Customers Are Agents of Change.

By the time I called my sister tonight, they had already figured it out, but at least we came up with the same thing :)