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PEEL - The Futurama Message Board    General Futurama Forum Category    Re-Check/Weird Scenes    AL phrase translations archived anywhere? « previous next »
Author Topic: AL phrase translations archived anywhere?  (Read 1196 times)
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payn
Bending Unit
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« on: 06-01-2002 01:53 »

I haven't been here in forever, but I was searching the web for some kind of archive of the AL phrases from the episodes that people have translated so far, and I thought this would be a good place to ask.

By the way, in another thread, PainoMan asked if anyone remembered who cracked AL2. Well, I'm one of the people, but I can't remember who the other one was.

Here's the sequence of events, as I remember it:

For a long time, thanks to My Three Suns, people couldn't even agree what was and was not an example of AL3. But one guy was convinced that the chat room door was the key, and he turned out to be right. He came up with a very complicated and interesting theory for the cipher, but he couldn't get it to work out.

I looked at it and said, "Wouldn't you be able to get the same effect much more simply just by accumulating the results as you went along?" My goal was to be lazy--just suggest the idea and let someone else run with it. Unfortunately, explaining the idea turned out to be a lot of work (and I didn't do a very good job of it), so I ended up having to do it myself (with the help of some programs I slapped together and some other people's ideas of what the various AL2 samples should say).

It took less than a day to crack the code and write simple encoder/decoder programs (which I believe only one person downloaded--who knew nobody would be interested in C source or PowerPC linux binaries?); much longer to try to explain it to people.

Fortunately, one person finally managed to translate my explanation into a form understandable by people who aren't inside my brain, and someone else wrote a nice web-based translator. I don't remember who those people were, either.

From what I remember, there was some suspicion that someone on the inside was reading the message board when we cracked it, and that one of the more complicated theories people came up with for AL2 might end up being the basis for AL4 (we were reasonably sure that AL3 was already in use in My Three Suns). But again, I don't remember any details.

payn
Bending Unit
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« Reply #1 on: 06-01-2002 02:04 »

OK, going back and reading my old posts here, I now remember who the other guy was: Willie.
 
[-mArc-]

Administrator
Liquid Emperor
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« Reply #2 on: 06-01-2002 02:22 »
« Last Edit on: 06-01-2002 02:22 »

Best place at the moment seems to be this german site. Not much german needed to get the gist.

The online translators are on CGEF at http://www.gotfuturama.com/Interactive/AlienCodec/


And welcome back payn
payn
Bending Unit
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« Reply #3 on: 06-01-2002 03:32 »
« Last Edit on: 06-01-2002 03:32 »

Thanks! I probably wouldn't have come back for even longer, but sometimes there's a positive side to being sick and between jobs....

Anyway, since "not much" is exactly the amount of German I know ("Ich bin ein amerikanischer Dumbkopf, und diese Satz ist die einzige Deutsch die Ich kenne"), the archive on "Das Futurama Outlet" is perfect for me.

By the way, mArc, I believe you were the person who came up with the simple explanation for AL2; you just got it backwards (subtracting each letter from the next is much easier to understand than adding all the letters up to that point), so I reversed your explanation and posted it on the Outlet, which made everyone much happier.

Speaking of online translators, I found the original JavaScript ones I wrote lo these many months ago (and posted about on this board). Did anyone try to use these? Ick, what a pain--I'm glad someone redid it better later!
PainoMan

Delivery Boy
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« Reply #4 on: 06-07-2002 17:30 »

Heya Payn!

I remember the day that you two cracked AL2 and the flurry of posts.  I was sitting right where I am now and man, that was great!

Didn't you notice something about the double characters in the chatroom door and because of that came up with the idea that one of them would have to be zero, or "A", or something like that?
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