Ever wonder what those little symbols on the show Fringe means? If you're familiar with J.J. Abrams, you should know that the guy loves mysteries. Lost has been weaving easter eggs and puzzles into the show for years. A Fringe fan at Ars Techinca has recently cracked the code. Will it give us insight into The Pattern?
Ars Techinca's Julian Sanchez explained how he assigned each of the cryptic images to a letter in the alphabet. Although, his translation excludes the letters F, J, M, Q, W, X, Y or Z, he's been successful in spelling out words that are associated with the shoe. Ars Techinca reported that some of the words were "Observer," "Child," "Bishop," and "Olivia." Okay, BFD, but it's still sort of cool for those of us who are geeky enough to care.
So how did he do it?
On his personal blog, Sanchez writes that the actual solution ended up taking just a few minutes. "[I]t’s actually incredibly simple once you make one crucial assumption," Sanchez stated. That assumption was that the images from each show built up to that single word. "Alas, there’s no deep dark mysteries about the show’s arc concealed here," he added. "And the solution’s actually a bit anticlimactic..."
What Sanchez worked out was a simple monoalphabetic substitution cipher. Each picture shown was a combination of three things: one of eight images (including a butterfly, a seahorse, an apple, and so forth), its orientation (sometimes the image got flipped as if shown in a mirror) and the position of a small glowing yellow dot. Together these items defined one unique letter of the alphabet. Sanchez told Ars that the systematic organization of the reflections and dot positions simplified matters. "Once that's done, it solves itself when you get the wordbreaks right."
To aid amateur decoders who plan to watch the show's return to the air tonight, fan site FringeTelevision created a convenient key based on Sanchez's solution, included below.
(arstechnica.com)
This is the full list of solutions found on Sanchez's blog.
1: OBSERVER
2: CHILD
3: AEGER [Latin for "sick"]
4: ROGUE
5: SURGG [should be SURGE?]
6: CELLS
7: CODES
8: TAKEN
9: VOICE
10: TRADE
11: SAVED
12: BISHOP
13: AVIAN
14: OLIVIA
(juliansanchez.com)
PREVIOUSLY:
"Fringe" Returns: Mini-Observer Is Creepy, Helpful, Unilluminating (As Expected)
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