Yeah, strange.
There aren’t any letters either!
Could this be solved with some kind of book code? Like we need to go through a passage of a book with the HALOS FILE, count 179 letters for the first letter, 43 for the next, and so forth?
That’s actually not the worst idea I’ve heard - any suggestions for the book or passage of text, in-game or not?
You could try Dante’s Inferno which is the literature many of the clues thus far have pointed to.
EDIT:
Of course, this will likely not get very far when considering numbers like “0261510” which can be found in the sequence. I doubt even a man of Storm’s mental caliber has enough patience to count that high, and that’s assuming Inferno even has that many characters.
You know Word can count characters for you, right? Or any other word processor?
And anyway, these things are usually encoded, page, line, word anyway. So… Page 26, line 15 and word 10…
EDIT: or in the specific case of Inferno it would be canto 26, verse 15, word 10. Which is the word ‘that’.
True, Word and other word processors can count total characters, words, etc., but I don’t think they can locate specific characters based on number of characters in–the closest function to this would be the Find and Replace feature.
And you’re right, most of the time they use some variant on page, line, word, etc. But when we’re looking at integers like “022615777247923”, unless there is a split in there somewhere it seems unlikely that this is the monster we’re looking for.
I did a quick check on the Divine Comedy theory. I found this source of Canto 1 from Princeton, replaced all the garbarge (line numbers, tabs, newlines, etc), then used each Byte value from the halos code as a word count.
word 179 = perilous
word 43 = renews
word 0 = Midway
… and so on
Complete jibberish.
I was looking at a histogram of the data, and something hit me…
Could it be a waveform for audio? Audio processing is not my area… anyone else familiar with this?
I really like this idea. I ran the image through a program called AudioPaint which converts the image into a sound. All I received was a bunch of static.
Another idea is to convert the waveform into a spectrogram, which is a visual representation of the audio. Aphex Twin is notorious for doing this. I’ll see if there are any quick programs to try this out.
EDIT: Trying to use a program called Praat to figure out how to convert the image to a spectrogram. Also, the original waveform can be converted to different timings in AudioPaint, but no matter how much I slow it down it just sounds like a bunch of white noise.
EDIT 2: Actually, I just slowed it down dramatically, and it almost sounds as if it’s a song. I can hear bass-y undertones and the screeching part sounds as if it might possibly be a treble portion O_O This could be a fluke, but it definitely sounds like something. Could be that it was recorded and then sped up dramatically by shrinking the waveform graph, which is as simple as selecting it and morphing it like an image in most programs such as Goldwave. I used to do this when I wanted to create very strange sounds in my Flash video days. Hmmmmm . . . .
Slowing it down too much just creates a bunch of garbage again. I’m not sure what to think here.
Yah I tried messing around with the raw data in SoX and it’s just giving me white noise as well.
$ sox -r 300 -b 8 -c 1 -e unsigned halos.raw halos.wavI was hoping for some Morse like dit dahs.
halos.wav.txt (420 Bytes)
Same here. I tried running the .wav file through this website to see if it could identify a song, and nothing came out. It’s just so strange that there almost seem to be bass beats if you slow it down to around 40-50 BPM, with a treble range that repeats. Very strange, but probably a coincidence.
EDIT: After slowing it down to around 80 BPM and running it through that website, I got two hits:
Song: Dying For Religion
Artist: 4/3 De Trio
Song: Who Says
Artist: Fink
Perhaps that first one could be related to the whole Satan / Dante’s Inferno thing?
EDIT 2: Threw these into a bunch of different ciphers–nothing popped out. I don’t think the first song even has lyrics, but I could be wrong.
If I am setting up this cypher, I would probably treat the 752 hex code as pairs of hexademical.
So
b32b003a35badd66577c24c14fc919064346d131a7c54bb82ffe03e022615777247923dc21f62cd4182e91c3b267b545abcaedaf0261510d4eea1e87cd33c7c77131309cc4280eb4243d1154f044f9cf6296d9bff7397e4390987fe63203da0de40278b3…
converts to
179 43 0 58 53 186 221 102 87 124 36 193 79 201 25 6 67 70 209 49 167 197 75 184 47 254 3 224 34 97 87 119 36 121 35 220 33 246 44 212 24 46 145 195 178 103 181 69 171 202 237 175 2 97 81 13 78 234 30 135 205 51 199 199 113 49 48 156 196 40 14 180 36 61 17 84 240 68 249 207 98 150 217 191 247 57 126 67 144 152 127 230 50 3 218 13 228 2 120 179 165 79 93 220 105 117 250 4 247 73 132 158 26 98 89 90 159 99 11 7 149 145 61 224 21 62 58 172 56 140 69 251 157 133 12 254 145 53 65 214 192 131 152 242 200 131 50 168 47 223 0 40 29 98 252 220 79 231 228 106 233 12 81 197 200 6 180 17 100 227 58 185 44 150 134 46 6 139 12 22 192 153 144 184 56 26 0 218 121 21 182 127 228 162 15 89 155 15 27 109 72 25 19 199 185 83 140 238 99 145 68 244 21 97 186 146 228 254 117 29 30 36 44 216 143 81 214 149 81 152 135 19 106 124 21 170 189 123 64 4 73 34 1 65 48 169 31 23 15 102 204 179 193 57 70 58 126 144 154 55 170 134 63 178 120 5 252 151 49 192 156 140 121 6 126 121 147 10 64 101 70 178 76 154 98 155 38 194 206 42 75 228 143 88 154 55 95 235 115 31 196 171 34 92 17 132 140 248 158 41 31 178 113 51 151 12 6 54 24 71 74 137 40 1 237 214 143 84 105 140 94 91 80 103 70 246 118 90 111 127 18 37 222 164 218 17 64 254 182 15 101 7 69 36 28 105 54 149 136 61 203 33 230 251 254 251 184 90 41 145 148 128 54 165 43 93
Then the passage we need must be longer than the sum of all the numbers combine.
179+43+0+58+53+186+221+102+87+124+36+193+79+201+25+6+67+70+209+49+167+197+75+184+47+254+3+224+34+97+87+119+36+121+35+220+33+246+44+212+24+46+145+195+178+103+181+69+171+202+237+175+2+97+81+13+78+234+30…
= 43313
Therefore we need a passage at least 43313 letters or words long to find our 376 letters or words solution. We might be dealing with single digit hex instead, but I haven’t done the math for that possibility yet. Regardless, we’re dealing with something essay-length or book-length here. The source text itself would have to be (1) publicly or readily available, preferably online within public domain (2) hinted within the ARG itself (3) has a definitive revision (ie not the Bible).
The source text could very well be Dante’s Infernal, considering “Raphèl maí amèche zabí almi” was quoted in the tempus omnia revelant wiki page.
The general idea came from a spying case I read on wikipedia some time ago, where the spy was caught with a particularly rare edition of a textbook used in a similar manner.
Edit the article was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taman_Shud_Case#The_Rubaiyat_of_Omar_Khayyam
Edit2 Further googling point out this method is called Book cipher https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_cipher
I feel there’s been too much nonsense lately (well, don’t take lately too literally). So let me post this:
22 EB 7E CD D7 45 CF 93 F0 35 46 AA 18 2D EA 59
CE 09 06 47 3A 6C 91 4B D1 59 AD 5B 5A AD 12 64
54 8A 3A B5 13 45 C7 15 DA F0 8D 9E FF D5 EF 5F
39 CE 0C 62 36 E7 AE 5D 0E 44 44 B9 6F E3 9E BD
02 2C 07 3A EC A3 66 FF 22 5B 14 A1 60 73 BF 3B
A6 B7 88 74 98 D8 FD 60 38 54 BB 12 2C 31 31 21
A2 0E 00 0D CA AA 35 7D C5 83 EE 64 02 B6 C5 90
73 7F AF B8 A7 83 1E 19 45 B3 04 10 0E FF 36 A7
DE 1E 22 77 81 60 04 7C 7F 63 CF C1 AF 4E FA 63
1F F8 1D F4 79 A8 10 E1 76 74 D6 F2 FC 61 35 CB
0B 77 68 87 6F CC 32 36 A2 53 53 E9 FA D3 6E EF
52 7E E1 A6 F4 72 98 D4 CF 01 06 E4 F7 56 17 4F
C4 47 2D 69 34 45 0E 7B 1F 05 08 9F DB DA A2 C1
F1 2C 70 CE 7A C3 07 35 D0 7A 2C 85 E4 D6 92 C3
7C 9E B1 B3 C4 78 A5 04 87 5C A8 1E 43 34 AB 5F
6B 16 07 58 12 72 51 2C 36 2D 63 3A CF 64 5C F2
D3 25 FB 4F BC BB A3 67 29 4D 18 03 FE 6E 00 28
DF D2 C4 71 C4 81 8B E9 13 5D 23 29 F5 02 CB 53
B8 6A 88 BB 73 02 82 F4 7A 0D 04 1F 13 D8 A5 CC
90 CF C4 1F B2 7F FE 3D 95 9D 09 CB 12 41 AB 9C
93 E3 F2 B2 68 72 4F B5 07 48 16 A4 3C 4F 88 5E
C4 E1 4E FB 44 15 E4 91 77 51 05 E4 0B FE 61 91
CD 80 AF C4 0F 7A 01 C2 5E 6A 4C D8 DB 59 8F E0
B3 B8 4E 3D 95 D7 E1 D1
I just took this from random.org and it’s a good sanity check if you think you converted the file to an image or a sound file, … or if you think you’ve found some pattern in it, detected a cipher from it or a format of it.
Just try the same method on this and if you get positive results, you were wrong. There’s absolutely no pattern in what I posted.
Adding to my previous post, this online copy of Dante’s Infernal has the poem arranged in 16 line pages:
https://www.divinecomedy.org/divine_comedy.html
About the audio waveform idea, consider this:
In order to convey something like speech, we will need a minimum sampling rate of 8000 Hz. If we assume that the data in the HALOS code consists of 8-bit audio samples, one channel, then the 376 bytes of data in the HALOS code will give us a mere 47 ms of audio, which is just a blip in our ears. Even if some compression scheme was used, that could compress the data down to 4-bits per sample, there is still to little data to convey anything meaningful, in terms of audio.
EDIT:
You guys are no fun. At the very least we’re trying new things and having a blast doing it while in reality we’re all mainly just sitting here waiting for the next breadcrumb.
I mean, if we’re being perfectly honest, it’s been nigh a year since we got this little tidbit of Hex code (if that’s even what it is :zip 
and there hasn’t been a single advancement in that time. Rampant theories persist (some zanier than others), but does it hurt to throw in a curve ball every once in a blue? It’s not as if it’s regressing our progress, considering we’ve all been sitting at the drawing board with our thumbs up our plums.
All that said, I do appreciate the reality checks every once in a while, if only because they bring us back to a common base from whence we can carry on our tangential ways.
Maybe there is no next breadcrumb.
Maybe there is no ARG.
Maybe it was all a cruel joke designed by Stormseeker to keep us occupied while we wait for Xen.
…Maybe it’s real.
I just started playing the game again, and something struck me during the opening chapters. Have we even bothered looking in these chapters for anything? Granted, the ARG took a web-based turn, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t something else floating around in the game.
When Storm posted the Handy Info at the beginning of this thread, he wrote:
Halos
BenallohPaillier
CongratulationsyouwonthePIZZA
BMRF.us (site down, due to unforseen circumstances)
Could it be that “unforeseen circumstances” may refer to the Unforeseen Consequences chapter? I’m looking in each nook and cranny as I play the game, and I’ll come back and no clip through everything when I get around to it. I’m curious if perhaps when he mentioned things like “go back to the story and put it together” perhaps he is trying to imply that we need to go back to the roots of the ARG–the game itself.
shrug Just a thought. Couldn’t hurt at this point.
Also, I sent Code_ a message a few weeks ago–he was very helpful with his IRC chat comments before, so I’m curious to get his opinion on this. He did mention he’d be extremely busy with work, however, so I don’t expect to hear from him anytime soon.
EDIT: The whiteboard in Unforeseen Consequences mentions Niobium 5, which is also know as niobium pentachloride–it is often used as a precursor to other compounds of niobium.
Niobium has a low thermal neutron cross-section, which means it tend to not interact or degrade in free neutrons environments. This makes Niobium alloys, specifically Zirconium-Niobium, ideal fabrication material as material containers where high corrosion and radiation resistance are valued.
Given this technical knowledge and how the metal was repeatedly featured in Black Mesa, the odds are good that Niobium alloy was employed heavily in Black Mesa’s test equipment construction, including the one that triggered the resonance cascade.
i tryed looking at the elemetal table overview that you see in some rooms in the bio labs, to see if i saw a reference to Niobuim 5 or anything missing there, but i am not mcuh of a sientist so it it “seemed” ok to me 