“Hello. Epiphany is upon you. Your pilgrimage has begun. Enlightenment awaits. Good luck. 3301.”
Epiphany, pilgrimage, enlightenment—those seem like the most important words. The first one has eight letters, the second has ten, and the third has thirteen. Eight, ten, thirteen. There must be a pattern there…
I was way off track, and the clue turned out to be a lot more complicated than I expected. This image, which was posted on Twitter Jan. 5, marks the reemergence of an international super puzzle, a convoluted behemoth that serves both as a code breaker’s wildest dream and worst nightmare.
The real clue lies in the image file itself. Insightful programmers ran the image through a program called Outguess to return an encoded message. The message contained a clue that led to a Ralph Waldo Emerson story and a cypher, which spelled out the URL to a second image when paired with the story.
The first image kick-started this year’s race, but the whole puzzle is three years running. The puzzle has been dubbed Cicada 3301 due to the motif of cicada images and messages signed with that signature prime number.
The search all started Jan. 5, 2012, when a mysterious message was posted to the Internet bulletin board 4chan. The plea read as follows:
“Hello. We are looking for highly intelligent individuals. To find them, we have devised a test. There is a message hidden in this image. Find it, and it will lead you on the road to finding us. We look forward to meeting the few that will make it all the way through. Good luck.”
Clues have involved ancient Mayan numerals, obscure cyphers, messages encoded in base 64 and the 2012 puzzle even led solvers away from their computers to physical clues in locations such as Warsaw, Seoul and Paris.
The catch? Nobody knows what happens at the end. Some people have solved the puzzle, but according to NPR, at the end of the month-long hunt the final website was released to the general public, but was already shut down and simply stated: “We want the leaders, not the followers.”
The same thing happened Jan. 5 the next year, and again the website shut down before it became known what lay at the finish line.
Now the race is on yet again. After several fake clues were released, the real Cicada 3301 clue pictured was confirmed January 5, 2014.
The Internet has been abuzz with the communal puzzle-solving effort for close to a month now. The puzzle-solving team of daring participants updates their progress and brainstorming regularly on a Wikia page, which also has a link to a simplified version of the results so far, which makes just a little bit more sense to me.
When I first looked quickly at the puzzle, I drowned in unknown puzzle solving terminology and arcane cyphers almost immediately, but if you think you have what it takes to delve into the darknet, as it’s known, go ahead and chase the cyber clues before it’s too late. But it still seems we may never know who is behind the puzzle or what lies at the end of this digital yellow brick road.
