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From Portal 2 ARG Wiki - Valve ARG Network

The Aperture Science puzzle is the puzzle posted on an Aperture Science page on 13.4 2011. The page contained a bunch of jpg images which seem to form a puzzle. The URL of the page was found on a computer screen in The Ball [1]. (See also: The Ball#Terminal)

The pictures have been put together but works continues to decipher it.

Note that there are two sets of pieces that appear duplicate of another piece save for a thin grey line over top of them; they actually are merged as two pieces to complete the grey curves. The grey curves form four sets of a Fibonacci curve.

Following the four curves from the inner point out, the filenames (without jpegs) are:

Curve 1: (top left) fscxg maffx dawqb juojb fgaxz aouhk scdfy

Curve 2: (top right) bncxa paexy ufdcb jfhgv xcgge urtfd rszxb

Curve 3: (bottom left) qewsp dwexm jsdxa cvhng nihjk xcern axclr

Curve 4: (bottom right) dcghr cxhjf kdfgy cfvcj awvuj ysdcv wyzxi

• Just a guess: Every string is 35 letters, indexing them from 0 to 34, first letter would be the first, last letter would be the 10th fibonacci number. So using only the letters, that match a fibonacci number one would get 4 new strings a 10 letters. I tried that here, can't see anything obvious in this new strings, though.
  • No simple shift cypher worked on either the original or the shortened fibonacci sequences.
  • The high frequency of letters late in the alphabet, however, imply it still may be a simple substitution cipher, but one that uses a keyword.
  • Letter frequency also seems consistent with standard english, but likely the ordering is going to be critical to solve this.
  • Tried all possible transposition cyphers on them, got nothing, it's not a transposition cypher.
  • Tried an Enigma cypher with the key RLW. This did nothing.

• The image in the background is the center of the Aztec sun stone representing the Aztec Calendar. The four large images represent (clockwise from top left) Quihatl Rain, Atl Water, Ollin Movement, and Miquitzli Death. The numbers for these days are 19, 9, 17, and 6, respectively.

• There is theory that names of images could be random to make it harder to join them.
  • Certainly possible, but in that case, what is the purpose of the puzzle?
  • The password FLOOD could definitely have been the sole purpose of the puzzle.