Feel free to post thoughts and comments to this thread. Collaboration is allowed, but I'm only going to mail the games to a single shipping address. That, of course, will be the shipping address supplied to me by the first user to PM me the correct answer to the puzzle.

Have fun.

Chances are I won't win, so I'm just wondering, what kind of puzzle is this even? I've never seen anything like this (I havn't even looked at any of the Tanga puzzles either).

I predict someone will solve this within one day.

First guess from nitromob -- but not the right answer.

Ah that was a complete and random obscure guess but i think i may see something in all these letters will try again once i get a probable answer.

If it helps here's the table of hex pairs in plain text. Below that I've also included the frequency each pair (assuming these are really hex pairs it's assumed the 8 is the pair 08). There are 67 unique pairs so it's probably safe to assume each pair simply represents a letter

Maybe you feed this data set into some finite state machine? Or it's a program in and of itself that is obfuscated (see http://www.answers.com/topic/obfuscator)?

Shave and a Haircut
6a b6 aa ee : ba ab aa d6 : a5 2a c6 a5
ae 9a d5 6c : 6d db 72 5c : b1 cd 94 a5
46 53 64 d5 : 8c 51 ae 55 : 36 55 95 54
d6 9c e5 30 : 65 49 4c d4 : ac c6 a3 66
5b 4c a5 6d : 4d 2b 56 64 : ca b3 55 29
6b 54 ad 95 : 93 53 5a d3 : 15 cd 19 2b
97 45 d5 b5 : 4c d9 6d 9d : 0a 11 24 84
c4 a4 89 2a : aa aa aa aa : aa aa 8

0a - 1
11 - 1
15 - 1
19 - 1
24 - 1
29 - 1
2a - 2
2b - 2
30 - 1
36 - 1
45 - 1
46 - 1
49 - 1
4c - 3
4d - 1
51 - 1
53 - 2
54 - 2
55 - 3
56 - 1
5a - 1
5b - 1
5c - 1
64 - 2
65 - 1
66 - 1
6a - 1
6b - 1
6c - 1
6d - 3
72 - 1
8 - 1
84 - 1
89 - 1
8c - 1
93 - 1
94 - 1
95 - 2
97 - 1
9a - 1
9c - 1
9d - 1
: - 16
a3 - 1
a4 - 1
a5 - 4
aa - 8
ab - 1
ac - 1
ad - 1
ae - 2
b1 - 1
b3 - 1
b5 - 1
b6 - 1
ba - 1
c4 - 1
c6 - 2
ca - 1
cd - 2
d3 - 1
d4 - 1
d5 - 3
d6 - 2
d9 - 1
db - 1
e5 - 1
ee - 1

I used a hex editor to make up an exe file with those hex pairs. (assuming the 8 at the end was 08)

No go, the .exe file didn't do anything when I ran it in a command prompt (so as not to miss any output).

Second Guess by Ninjabob -- but not the correct answer.

I doubt 8 is 08. 0a is included, so if it were 08, I would think it would be written that way. 67 letters? 62 would be the max, counting capital and lowercase separate and including 10 more for the digits.

I assume you ran it on an Intel processor?

Perhaps these hex codes are an executable to run on the old Western Electronics 29? 29W? Okay - I made that whole thing up. But the hex pairs (if they were an executable) would only run on certain machines.

Won't work, check the ascii table, the parts with letters are only the lower 128.

The pattern above is fairly evenly distributed throughout the entire 256



Yeah its on intel. I ran it in command prompt from windows XP. I've run dos .exe programs I've assembled before under a command prompt from XP. The simple stuff works fine that way. And this is pretty simple from the length. If it was an assembly program I'd expect it to output text or somethinig or similar.

And I can't imagine he'd require someone to boot from an actual dos prompt. I could if I have to, I have a number of dos versions around.