Scioly Assassination 52: Checkmate

[fmtiger124]

What I'm thinking is you move the knight around until it gets to the king and then use the letters it landed on to get there....of course there are probably many ways to get to the king so i may be wrong.

EDIT: perhaps since the king is a higher ranking piece than the knight you only use the white letters?

[RandomPerson]

What I'm thinking is you move the knight around until it gets to the king and then use the letters it landed on to get there....of course there are probably many ways to get to the king so i may be wrong

Yeah I was looking at it along the same line, there are going to be at least 25 ways, I don't think its the solution.

[SOninja]

the king could move to I, D, A, or W
the knight could move to T or R

if i made the knight keep moving, i could spell out "the" but after that there are many combos

[BeeVolturi]

I think it's a chess-board cypher, a grille!

[brobo]

What I'm thinking is you move the knight around until it gets to the king and then use the letters it landed on to get there....of course there are probably many ways to get to the king so i may be wrong

Of course! I've done brain teasers like this before! Its called "the knights journey" or something like that. Basically you have to move the knight to every spot on a chess board with out landing on the same spot twice. So my guess is that you take the letters and put them into that order based on where you land. The only problem is there are a LOT of solutions...

EDIT: Well, since it probably makes some sort of message, you might be able to eliminate some possibilities... you know, not moving from one blank to another, since I guess those are spaces...

[BeeVolturi]

From wikipedia:

Trellis ciphers
The Elizabethan spymaster Sir Francis Walsingham (1530-1590) is reported to have used a "trellis" to conceal the letters of a plaintext in communication with his agents. However, he generally preferred the combined code-cipher method known as a nomenclator. it was the practical state-of-the-art in his day. The trellis was described as a device with spaces that was reversible. It appears to have been a transposition tool that produced something much like the Rail fence cipher and resembled a chess board.

Cardano is not known to have proposed this variation, but he was a chess player who wrote a book on gaming, so the pattern would have been familiar to him. Whereas the ordinary Cardan grille has arbitrary perforations, if his method of cutting holes is applied to the white squares of a chess board a regular pattern results.

The encipherer begins with the board in the wrong position for chess. Each successive letter of the message is written in a single square. If the message is written vertically, it is taken off horizontally and vice versa.


A trellis or chessboard cipher.After filling in 32 letters, the board is turned through 90 degrees and another 32 letters written (note that flipping the board horizontally or vertically is the equivalent). Shorter messages are filled with null letters (ie, padding). Messages longer than 64 letters require another turn of the board and another sheet of paper. If the plaintext is too short, each square must be filled up entirely with nulls.

J M T H H D L I S I Y P S L U I A O W A E T I E E N W A P D E N E N E L G O O N N A I T E E F N K E R L O O N D D N T T E N R X

This transposition method produces an invariant pattern and is not satisfactorily secure for anything other than cursory notes.

33, 5, 41, 13, 49, 21, 57, 29, 1, 37, 9, 45, 17, 53, 25, 61, 34, 6, 42, 14, 50, 22, 58, 30, 2, 38, 10, 46, 18, 54, 26, 62, 35, 7, 43, 15, 51, 23, 59, 31, 3, 39, 11, 47, 19, 55, 27, 63, 36, 8, 44, 16, 52, 24, 60, 32, 4, 40, 12, 48, 20, 56, 28, 64

A second transposition is needed to obscure the letters. Following the chess analogy, the route taken might be the knight’s move. Or some other path can be agreed upon, such as a reverse spiral, together with a specific number of nulls to pad the start and end of a message.

[brobo]

Wow, that seems to be a little complicated... I don't know if thats going to be the solution, although its worth a try.

[cypressfalls Robert]

we might be over doing this

[new horizon]

It honestly could be as simple as IDing each letter as a chess piece and using the knight to checkmate the king.

[zyzzyva980]

Oh, man. I LOVE chess! I'm sorry I'm missing this one. Looks like this one is going to be much more entertaining. Good luck to all!